Greg's Right FIT #428

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Making Progress
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Making Progress

• Is it that you're not doing anything - or is it that you're not doing anything new? Momentum is doing a lot of the same things on repeat. Don't confuse novelty with necessity.
• Progress can be hard to see with the naked eye, making it important to stop and take measurements. Knowing this, before you start a journey, take note of where you are. 
• Activity for activity's sake sounds bad, but part of momentum, I would say the key to momentum, is action. Getting in motion leads to good things happening. Get moving. 
• I you have a dog, you know what I mean when I say dogs are tuned into their owners. When I sit and concentrate without moving from my chair for an hour, my canine companion reminds me to get up and move. He knows best. 

Being Human - Examples

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." – Mark Twain

I'm helping a friend with her new business idea, and we're spending time talking about the best way to get the most from vendors. When you're on your own and stretching a budget, preparation goes a long way toward finding the right logo or website design or more. Not just any preparation. Preparing examples. 

When you give an expert great examples coupled with specific input on what it is about that example that's working for you, you get better results from your vendor, at a fraction of the cost. For example:

• For her logo: find five logos she likes, give a separate reason for why she picks each one. Not just. "I like how it looks," but something specific like, the curves remind me of the ocean.
• For her website: break the site into page types (home page, category page, product page, about us, blog post, etc) and find examples for each one. A specific, "I like how they use this big banner thing on the home page" is better than saying you like the home page. 
• For lead generation using Google Ads: I like/don't like these phrases because they indicate X, versus "these are bad."

The power is in the because. The word "because." It's a trigger for people to pay attention to what comes next. In this case, what will come next are the details the expert needs to do great work. 

Try it. Getting used to offering more detail to a vendor seems like a waste. They know everything, right? Not quite. They know a lot. They tend to be process experts, where you are the content expert in your business or idea. Explain it using as much detail as you can. They'll do the rest. 

Random Stuff

“The great art of learning is to understand but little at a time."
– John Locke

It’s a favorite time of year. March. The college basketball tournament season. March Madness. It's my marker that winter is ending, and sunnier days are ahead. When my lovely bride and I were first married, she noticed that I spent a lot of time watching basketball. This is her version of this story. 

One weekend, she noticed me watching a college basketball game between two teams from colleges I didn’t attend. She said, “Is there a tournament or something?” 

“Yes, I said, "it’s the season ending college basketball tournament. They call it March Madness.” “Oh,” she said. 

The next weekend, she sees me watching more games between other teams. Again, none of them are colleges we attended. “More basketball? Is it another tournament?” She said. “No,” I said, “same tournament.” 

The next weekend, I am again investing my precious time watching games between random teams. “Is this another tournament?” She said. “No, same tournament,” I said. “Really," she said. "The same tournament? Just how long does this go on?”

This is where you have to imagine my lovely bride telling the story, because she imitates me using a tone of voice I simply can’t imagine using with the love of my life. 

“March, Laura," I say condescendingly. "All of March. The tournament is called March Madness, and it lasts through March.” 

Again, I can’t imagine toning the mother of my children, but I do kind of remember the general line of questioning. 

This weekend my lovely bride and I are in NYC to see the basketball team (from the college we went to) play their conference tournament. (She's come a long way since those early days.) Oh, we’ll see our youngest child, the one living in Brooklyn, too. That may have more to do with her enthusiasm for a road trip. 

Wish us luck. Go Jays!