Gratitude for My Team and Tribe
This year, 2020, has been a hell of a unique year that’s been embedded with lessons. Lessons that have pushed me to grow in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
I am super proud of this community because we have grown like crazy this year. I’m also proud of my core team and Steve’s production team, who edits this podcast. I also want to thank my sales team, whom I hired in April and was barely around to train them because I was so busy. They really stepped up to the plate and have come up with some very cool ideas for this community that has helped us grow so much.
I also want to express gratitude for my mentors this year, mentors as Michael Burt, Rachel Rogers, David Nagel. I mean, y’all really came through for me this year. Thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart! You deserve a round of applause!
My 2020 Takeaway
One of the exciting things that I’ve learned is always to pay attention to your intuition. I started getting a sense about four years ago that I needed to make considerable changes to my business.
I had been a freelancer for a long time writing financial content for companies when I started getting the sense that one good economic crisis would screw me over. I’d moved out of my condo and wondered where I was going to go. Something told me to go home to be with my family, where there’s plenty of space, and I could turn one of the rooms into my office so I could be really focused.
Then I had a feeling, a thought, I had an intuition that came to me during a meditation that said, something big is going down, and this is where you’re going to want to be when shit goes down. I didn’t know it was a pandemic – I thought it would be an economic crisis. We’ve got that too due to the pandemic, but I literally had that intuitive thought a year before everything shut down, which is why I packed up my apartment.
I packed up my office, and I moved back home to be with my family. Thank God I did that because that is precisely where you want to be in the middle of a pandemic. Additionally, this was a smart financial move because I focused, saved a lot of money, and invested in my company, which equates to business progress.
When I hired Zenya, and she can attest to this, I hired her in November 2018. We dove right into building systems and processes and getting organized with the business and the company. Since I hired her, I’ve been going on about the future economic crash. I was worried that we didn’t have a lot of time to accomplish the company’s scaling. Then, 22 weeks before this damn shut down and all the chaos, I had just finished building out the last portion of the significant-tech system we needed to create. Thank God we spent when we did because when that shutdown came, Amanda got really busy.
The Challenge of Selling in a Year of Uncertainty
This year was the best training ground for sales because it was so damn hard. People were damn scared. Remember, with sales, you have to learn how to do it the right way. This is a skill set that will help you make enough money in your business, and the one thing they don’t want to do in their business is sales. Also, you need to keep pushing, even when things get hard. This isn’t time to contract and cringe, but to look for the opportunity to expand.
Knowing How to Pivot
If anything, these past few months have taught us the importance of being nimble and have shown us the importance of keeping our wits together. We have learned the importance of being able to make decisions on a dime. And in terms of pivoting, make sure you aren’t holding on to a process or idea too damn long when they aren’t working.
The Importance of Systems
Our entire landscape changed, but fortunately, our stuff was already online, and my team understood how to telecommute. We had most of our systems in place. Therefore, we were able to pivot pretty quickly. As a result, we were able to seize new business opportunities.
There’s been a lot of opportunities in 2020, along with trauma and fucked up distractions. Although our process and our year weren’t pretty or comfortable, when we can look past all that stuff, there’s a lot of opportunity and innovation that we have taken advantage of.
Making the World a Better Place
I do honestly believe that at the end, when everything is said and done, the world is going to be a better place. To capitalize on this belief, you must put yourself in a better position. Expand your mind and look for what’s out there for you to grab and take hold of in the business world.