Episode 178 | Building Good Business Habits

hey everyone and welcome to the custom apparel startups podcast my name is mark stevenson and this is mark villa and today we're here to talk about building good business habits it's an exciting time it's an exciting topic really i was going to say it was sounds boring people are saying you know maybe um double your income by doing these five things every morning okay that's the new name double your new name by doing these five things but um in all seriousness i think that this is a pretty cool episode there's it's it's gonna be um very informative and you are 100 gonna get something out of this and if you're the type of business owner or or help to run a business and you don't get something out of this episode then um you've already won why are you listening exactly you're probably not listening to the podcast because everybody here wants to improve right and yeah the one of the inspirations was this is you know like mark mila and i are both big self-improvers right i think it's part of the the marketing and entrepreneurial mindset that you're always looking for a way to to be better to be healthier to do better with our money to do better with our business to do better serving you guys you know getting you better information and you know thinking about that i was on my walk this morning which um is part of my fitness program is that i walk four times a week and um it just started me thinking about how these are the things that there's this set of things that you do every day um that work over time versus things that you do like at the last minute yep so like if you're if your goal is to lose 20 pounds you know in the next 90 days you can't wait 85 days and lose all that weight right it just it doesn't work unless you decide to go to the hospital um you know those are things that you do you know you do a little bit every day there are things that there's it's a habit that you develop that will lead you there yeah that's great and just talking about the weight loss and and um and health um i think i've mentioned on the podcast at least that a good friend of mine is a trainer and and really into all of that and that's you know that's always his mindset is kind of this episode is his mindset is these are the things i do every day these are the things i tell my clients to do every day and he said he's we make a list and you just do this stuff every day because if you do it every day you're definitely going to reach your goal one way or the other you're going to reach it because you're doing these things every single day and and uh you know not everybody hits their goal as quick as they want every single body is different some people he'll say just the weight just drops off them and they get it way stronger super fast other people it's like slow going and you can't see results um quickly but a year later you know before and after pictures are crazy and you said but it's only the people who do it every day right and i mean the the same thing pretty much goes for financing too for finance your personal finances and your business finances if you've got a goal of you know you want to stay up save up 20 grand for a down payment on a house or to write a check for a pool or a car you know i mean you are welcome to play the lottery um you know the day before you need that money and try to see if you can win but that's not a great strategy for most people you know you've gotta you've gotta take the financial steps you know you've gotta um save your money you've got to invest your money you have to do these you have to learn more about investments you have to do these things on a regular basis in order to improve your financial situation and both of those you know personal fitness and financial fitness um the way you treat those things to be successful is the same exact way you have to treat your business to be successful yeah that's it that's a good point and and i think that as we dive into these you know we'll get we'll cut we've broken these up into things you should do daily weekly and monthly and annually and as we get into them a lot of it is is a bit of common sense and you probably should have some aha moments as you listen to this and you take some notes and write things down and say you know what i i don't do that i don't keep up on that and but what you should visualize in your head listening to this and going forward would be you know two things if if i did this every day or every week what would be better what are some problems that i would have avoided in the past if i would have been doing this right and then you your you know your future self would thank you you know if you if you've done that um and then uh the other you could pat yourself in the back some too say you know what i do this every day already and then make yourself feel good that you are doing that stuff every day and then consider what what would happen if you if you wouldn't have done that in the beginning yeah and um i love that yeah so maybe should we start with uh with every day or do we have any other summary stuff you know you know i've got a couple more things that i want to i want to point out and that is um you know we're going to give you the stuff that uh we think works has worked for people that we know and and works for us and in you know some of the things work for us every day but just like a fitness program or a financial program um they might not be for you these aren't your steps these are steps that we strongly recommend some of them stronger than others but you know the way you work might be different you know just like you know one of the ways i stay healthy is i'm a vegetarian one of the ways that you stay healthy might be that you're on an atkins diet or you do keto or you know you may work out every day if you're into finance one of you may do real estate and another one might just invest in mutual funds or stock trading or something like that you're gonna you're gonna use your own methodology here to a great extent but we're going to give you some of the ideas some of the frameworks that we think are going to help you at least if not to follow them exactly to to plan your business out to be more successful is to use them as a basis to develop your own hardcore i do this every day kind of happens that's really good that i want to talk about is i'm reading this book called atomic habits oh you know what my friend that i was just speaking about moments ago just told me that he's reading that book for the second time that's cool like that was like i think on uh sunday this past week like just told me about that that's a sign that's a sign from the universe i should read that one one of the things that that i like got immediately at it is um the the author starts out by you know the because here's what i imagine you're hearing us talk about this and you're hearing habits and we're going to give you stuff you have to do every day and you're saying to yourself i'm not the kind of person that does that like i don't wake up early and and do things on purpose i don't you know um i don't exercise in the mornings i don't save my money that way or i i don't track my spending you know you're you're dealing with you're you're identifying yourself as that person and one of the things the atomic habits guy talks about is if you identify yourself as athletic up front and then figure out what you have to do to be athletic you know so like if you hear something you say hey the first thing you have to do we're gonna say this over and over again when you go in in the morning is do machine maintenance you know like well i'm not the one that does maintenance my husband does maintenance my wife does the maintenance and he's only available every other thursday or something like that you know you may want to like stop any time you start to say i'm not like i don't do things that way or i'm not the kind of person that does things that way and be prepared to change it you know because if you change it in a positive way you'll be more successful in the long run yeah yeah that's good that's good i mean definitely um the way you define yourself is a really interesting thing that's discussed across uh any book that you read about sales or entrepreneurship or parenting or anything that's a goal-oriented book they will tell you that the way you define yourself the words you use about yourself determine your future you know it's like you you create self-fulfilling prophecies in a way where um and i watched something the other day on a video the other day and it was about um this is a little side note but i find it interesting and i've got a microphone okay so podcasters are all very important no but um it's true though that it has to do with this is the gentleman said um stop saying that you're bad at remembering names because as soon as you say that you've given yourself an excuse to forget the person's name that you're about to hear yeah and you're going to forget it because you've said you've told the person hey i'm gonna forget your name and it's okay so then you you just put no priority on remember they're remembering their name so you'll never get better you'll never get better at it and you will always be better remembering names and guess what there and the other thing is is there's no such thing as people who are bad at remembering names necessarily versus people who are good at remembering names okay no there are people who have a really good memory and they just recall things much faster right and they and they may seem like they remember names better but the average person who remembers names they remember names because they just focus on who the name is they maybe repeat it back to the person they oh is that kathy with a c or a k you know and they say things like that um so anyway i think that it goes right with what you said if you're the type person who said oh i don't operate like that in the morning i can't you know do this well why are you defining yourself that you can't yeah why don't you say well what can i do yeah so anyway let's maybe let's go into some of these things so so let's um let's jump into some of the um like habits for your business life that mark vela recommends that you do every day i don't recommend any of these okay um i recommend them all and the mark stevenson you have to get credit for this one because i really think i know i'm guilty of this type of behavior myself but you know uh first we'll for one i'll back up a second we're going to talk about things you should do every day things you should do every week things you should do every month right and we're going to start on daily and move our way up as we wrap them up so the first thing you should do every day that you're working is machine maintenance yeah and i just thought it was so yeah i thought but i and i thought it was i was like of course but then when i really thought about it i said you had said you're gonna get an email or a phone call that's going to suck you into something yeah and then you don't do your machine maintenance yeah i mean this is really like the the best example of your priorities making a difference because it's probably not going to matter if you wake up and you start dealing with customers on facebook or on your phone through email and things like that and then it's noon and you're already into your job and you never did the machine maintenance like that has serious consequences over time right because if the habit is and this is going to be different for every machine by the way everything we name is different for every business you've got to be cognizant of what your business is what your equipment is and what you do and not and and that's i think why mark predos did the um predecess i don't have a word for that right now i said i said in the beginning you said in the beginning don't don't set yourself up with i don't do that i'm not i'm not that type of person don't allow these excuses to rule over the fact that that you get to make individual choices but if you have a direct-to-garment printer your daily maintenance schedule is going to be significantly different in what you're needing to do than if you have um a digital heat effects white toner printer yeah vastly different right and the consequences are different and the consequences are different but um but just because you have a you know quote-unquote maintenance free printer doesn't mean that you shouldn't make sure it's free of dust you know make sure that you know like other make sure that there's paper inside of it you know whatever whatever things you might do check toner levels you know things like that so um but if you allow yourself to not adhere to a daily maintenance schedule schedule whatever that might be then it's so easy for you to get into a habit of getting sucked into other things every day and then it builds up over time especially if you have something like a dtg printer or an embroidery machine that you're forgetting to um oil every other day you know and then next thing you know you have a big job there's a bunch of thread breaks happening you don't understand why because you didn't do anything wrong but the thing was was for the past two months you were supposed to be cleaning uh you know cleaning out your uh your rotary hook and bobbin bobbin case and checking the attention of your bobbin case and all these things and you weren't doing it and slowly things are building up in there next thing you know you've got a big chunk of lint in the back in the back of your rotary hook where your bobbin goes yeah and you go to replace that and you just jam the machine up and next thing and you've ruined a jacket and i'll tell you that if you've got any kind of a liquid ink machine you know if it's a uv printer or a dtg printer or one of our high volume direct to film printers now um let me tell you if the machine breaks for some reason because you didn't maintain it if you lose a head you know you're down and it's expensive so you know that daily maintenance is going to be extremely important um even if you've got a you know one of the white toner printers or you've got a sublimation printer or you've got an embroidery machine if you go to do a job for that day and you're having problems with the machine or it just doesn't work for any reason at all you're closed so you know that that's why the daily maintenance or you know just making sure everything is working properly is number one that's great get a cup of coffee check your machines yeah it's it's really good and and i it can even be because all other types of weird things happen too that aren't that don't necessarily have to do with the machine um for example um if you wake up pour your coffee read emails get sucked into a phone call and meanwhile at at one at one it's it's 8 a.m by 1 p.m you need to start a production job so you're just doing your other stuff and you haven't looked at your equipment you go to turn the machine on it doesn't turn on right you realize that uh the breaker in your office is it won't stay on yeah it just broke like the the the breaker broke right and so now you're either going to lowe's and buying a new little breaker switch or you're calling an electrician yeah and but it's 12 o'clock and you're gonna start at one versus if you would have just checked everything at 8am you could have realized the problem then and he either gone and fixed it or called somebody to come fix it way early so it's not necessarily and and so that's kind of um just goes does is everything turning on does everything look clean does everything look right there are all my levels fine you know it's just really good and it's so fast for the most part for most equipment yeah you go in check your equipment turn your heat press on you know do do the whole thing make sure everything is working and that will pay off this is the one daily daily task one of the daily tasks that like i think you and i are both on board with like i don't i don't i don't really care what your pattern is you know you should really be if my if i wake up in the morning and my internet is not working i'm closed right so you know make sure that you're you're on top of that stuff okay yeah i agree i mean it's really it's just it's just really important and it's so simple so don't give don't give up on that one and don't brush it off um so the next thing on our list if we're ready to move on um is uh check your job schedule check your calendar you know go through what do you have going on today yeah you should that should be a daily thing you know right after you um do your maintenance you should just pick up your phone pick up your computer and say what's on deck yeah i i envision like you know you um you do all your maintenance checks and everything and then you turn on your computer and you open up your calendar which has your to-do list in it and the first thing you do is you check off that you did your machine maintenance that morning and the second thing you do is you take a look at all the other pre-planned activities that you've got right you know what are the jobs that are due today is there a checklist for each job that i need to go through etc yep so i've got today i've um today i've got to do my maintenance i've got to make 20 hats i've got to make 15 t-shirts we're making a sign uh and then i've got a phone call at 2 p.m with a potential buyer i've got a follow-up phone call at 4 p.m with a previous

customer who wants to discuss you know next year's plans and then i've you know and then i've got to get to the bank and do you know what if you're i'm just going to say this if you're uh an unpopular opinion if you're doing all this on a legal pad you're not doing it right yeah you know i mean like i understand that maybe your preference to just write things down on uh on a piece of paper um but there's no reminders built into a piece of paper you can't move a task automatically from one place to another you can't communicate your with your clients from that piece of paper you can't add notes if you've done a one through ten to-do list of your day you can't add notes if things change or other things that you want to remember if you're running any kind of a business that relies on you doing things properly on a regular basis you know i mean google comes free with a calendar it's not it's not tough yeah so something electronic is good uh and it does allow you to easily take it portable right so you can do something on your desktop it's immediately gonna be updated on your phone or on your tablet too um and you can also share that calendar with uh your spouse or your co-workers or your clients even potentially um and ad people um so it's a great thing but having a having a calendar slash sk task list is really important and you should just check that early in the day and i know that every day that i forget to check my calendar or chat or check my list is a day that i get surprised that i have an 11 a.m meeting and i'm just into doing something and i'm just staring and typing away and going and then i get a pop-up on my computer that says you have a meeting in 15 minutes i'm like i dang and now i got to stop what i'm doing check that and it's only on the days where i don't just quickly you know and it takes seconds i go into my you know i get my phone out and i just go and i'm walking to my office and i just pull out my calendar and i say 2 p.m today 11 a.m perfect yeah you know if you're and if you're if you're not somebody that already uses one of these calendars then the there's a couple reasons it's worth it and one of them is what mark felix said because that happens to me normally when i'm writing articles for one of the websites or a site client or something like that is i'm in the middle of writing and i forget that time is passing even if i know that i've got that 11 o'clock meeting the automated pop-up that i can set for 5 minutes 15 minutes 30 minutes before a day before it really doesn't matter you can set it you know saves me from missing that meeting or being late 100 of the time if you didn't know this if you've got an appointment with uh with a customer if you send them a calendar invitation you can also set their reminders like it doesn't just remind you that you've you're supposed to talk to somebody on the phone in 10 minutes it reminds them too so it's a much more efficient and they could be in the same situation now they're they're expecting your call you know and you can use these reminders for um for hey you need to start this job at one o'clock it's noon it's a reminder to make sure everything is ready you know this is this is a it's a big deal and i promise if you make it a habit um it'll be super useful yeah that's great it's great and it's a simple thing so um keep on it get the apps if you get an app you don't like or you get a user program you don't like just pick a different another one you know get a different one it's fine to change it you know it might be a pain in the butt when to switch through a few but eventually you find something you're really into and and you use all the time and you don't mind and you get used to everything too um when we first started using um asana as a task manager that we use often um you know i was used to other ones and i just didn't like the workflow as much and and but other folks on the team did so i said hey if you guys like it i'll learn it and then uh now i know it now it's easy to me now you know and it just it took some time but at first at first i i wasn't into it but i did know that if i just stuck with it then um it would make things easier and now it's great to be able to just pop in there make a task assign it to somebody or share it with somebody else and and everybody's on board and all the communications right there yeah and if you if you don't know like a project management software is kind of it's almost like a next level calendar but for but for jobs and longer term projects like we use it at cold sea when you see one of the when we publish a video there's about um i think it's nine individual tasks that are set up in advance so we can do that video and it includes the same things you have which is order the blanks make sure the blanks are in get the artwork done um make sure that we've got all the supplies necessary to do this particular job shoot the video edit the video publish the video on youtube publish the video on on facebook like all those things are set one right after the other and so if you're if you want to get that complex you know we can go into more asana when applications like that later but the the baby step version of that is running your calendar for your business yeah it's great that's great and then so right after that so um right after you've kind of checked what you've got going on today and make sure that that's up to date um uh you made a note in here which is similar as kind of um just check and enter in any new orders that need that have come in right so if you haven't put something on the calendar yet if you haven't put it into your production if you have a way of managing production either through software or or something like that make sure that any new orders are kind of getting entered into that system right and i do want to like um point out that one of the important things that you need to to make a part of your job schedule or checklist is to um and what reminded me is is because we do our videos on wednesday and when we come in on wednesdays we expect the blanks that we ordered to be there ready and about 25 of the time they're not um and you know we get a little a little angry about that because it's not all ready to go so we have to make make um last minute changes and moves and stuff but you know it's because we didn't check that they were going to be shipped we didn't check that they were shipped so if your schedule looks like i've got a um a 16 piece jacket order that i need to do today now is not the time to check to see whether you have them in stock right so every day you should look at your you know when you look at your calendar you've got your production schedule there are the blanks have the blanks shipped yet they were supposed to ship um how about supply status do i am i gonna have the supplies that i need for the following day or the following job yep yeah no that makes that makes good sense and i like uh that it's a bit of um checking on orders that are happening today checking other orders that are happening on the future and making sure that all of the individual checklists for those things are on deck um including you know our supplies ordered in stock you know things of that nature and i think that's something that what it's actually i think that it's a scale in the beginning it's very easy because you don't have a lot of orders right right and then and then you get to a breaking point where now you kind of have to think of here's all my orders and here's all the ink i'm going to use and is this enough do i have enough to last this period of time because it's no longer just do i have enough ink for 50 shirts it's do i have enough for 50 and then 150 and then 250 as each day of production moves along but but now that we've gone through and we've checked kind of our orders our production and everything that goes along with those from supplies to blanks um next is communications that's your next on your list that you're gonna do so uh answer emails schedule calls um chat you know whatever to live chat with folks whatever you're gonna do create appointments schedule tasks whatever they they are but you should be focusing uh towards the beginning of your day of responding to things yeah i i like that so you know let's say you and you know please notice where this is in the order of things right because what you're going to do is you're going to open up your email and there's going to be 57 emails in there and 45 of them are going to be spam but the rest of them you know you're going to have okay i've got somebody emailed in an order or placed an order with me let me get that entered in okay this vendor said they've got a new deal let me respond and find out what that is you know um let me i've got um i've got somebody that asked for a quote and for the for the ask for a quote in the new order you should stop after you read that email and create the associated appointments and tasks that go with it right so i got a new order in what's my new order procedure i order the blanks i put it in the production schedule i do all these things i've got um you know something else going on i've got a um i've got to call this person back on tuesday it's going to be out of town this week okay so i'm going to set up a task to call on tuesday you know right there while you're in that email before you move on to the next one yeah it is tricky because um emails and calls and and communication like that can turn into little mini rabbit holes so you get sucked into and eat up a lot of time and sometimes it's good and it turns out to be something good other times it's uh it is good but it's not productive and other times it's just bad that you did that right it's just you just wasted time and it's hard to discern that stuff and sometimes you don't know what it's going to be and i try to personally what what i do with uh on my daily stuff since i don't i don't do production on a daily basis right but answering emails is not the first thing that i do right um i will uh you know sometimes i will look at my task list and then i will look at my emails personally that's what i do yeah i look at my emails to see if there's a new task i'm gonna add today so i saw one here which is um about called essie graphics that i saw this morning and i knew it was something and i knew it was gonna take me an hour now the easy thing is as i need to handle this i'm going to jump in and handle it right but that doesn't fit into the production of my day so um and i also see some emails that need a quick reply and i know that they're only going to take a minute to reply to but again there were some important things that i knew i needed to happen which are my machine maintenance maybe and my scheduling some things that were first and then come you know uh nine or ten o'clock then i was ready to respond to these emails because i knew nothing was on fire right i knew there was anything on fire there wasn't any emergencies there was no difference on this person saying that a vendor was delaying sending us a product there's gonna be no change if i responded to him thanks now or at or tomorrow you know yeah um but it is important to um manage communications every day and uh part of it is you just shouldn't allow more than 24 hours to go without responding to somebody so i i like that a lot because my day is um and i think it's good to talk about this because we've both got different procedures um the first thing i do is my version of machine maintenance is i check our incoming leads and inquiries so you know i i'm responsible for making sure that if any of you inquire about equipment that it gets into the system properly and we track the number of people that inquire every day and how many people got reached out to and things like that so one of the first things i'll do is i'll look in our crm and i'll make sure that everything is okay you know um the next thing that i'll do is i will go to um check my box i will go to youtube and see if there are any comments that i need to answer i will go into social media and see if there are any urgent requests or any things that i need to change make sure everything is operating properly and that's before i do my emails you know so and at that point if i determine that everything is working properly you know and it's these are priorities if i look and the number of inquiries we got coming in yesterday was 50 of what they were the day before then i have a completely different set of stuff that i prioritize right just like if you come in one day and you go to do maintenance on your um sublimation printer and it doesn't turn on like mark villa says well you've got some more important stuff to do in the next 20 minutes to get them handled right so this is the way my day starts and then and that machine and for example that machine maintenance and this is just something to kind of tie it together is making sure that machine is going to be up and running for production that you have to do over the next couple days takes precedent over a customer inquiring about an order that they want to place for the fall yeah it even though it may not it doesn't always feel that way right because it's like listen if i respond to this customer they're going to know i'm very attentive and i'm going to get that order which i'm going to get that money and if i don't get that money i'm not in business you know which is a true piece of work that logic is all true yeah however if your machine is not working you're not going to fulfill the orders that you have promised to fulfill today which is going to make you look way worse than if you responded to an email at 11 a.m instead of nine yeah because nobody noticed that you responded it at nine a.m or 11. you know

i'm trying to go back to those two examples with the with the fitness and financial health kind of thing and it's kind of like you know if you're you're on the track where you're investing in mutual funds in your 401k and you're doing that and that's how you're gonna gonna end up um end up incredibly wealthy then um then you know buying those lotto tickets you know spending spending that initial cash in um you know someplace else like on dinner or a new car or something like that that that that takes you right off track and it's a little negative but even getting spun up or involved with a customer right right in the beginning even though it may eventually be a good thing you know gets you off track and it breaks that pattern makes it less likely you're going to do the right thing tomorrow yeah yeah that's it's it's it i just love this whole concept of the day it's just it's so simple and it actually works and this isn't something that i feel like i invented or anything like that but this is something that i've read consistently over the years in reading books about organization and things like that and they talk about i mean all the way from um you know when you what are the habits that you do in the morning why do you do that first why are you brushing your teeth and washing your face and drinking water at this first thing in the morning because these are like basic human health things that you should do first you should wake up and drink a glass of water and hydrate yourself and then brush your teeth and clean up because cleaning up is going to prevent infection and brushing your teeth is going to keep your teeth clean and everything else in life will get messed up if your health goes down man now see now you threw me for a loop because what i usually do is i just reach over and i turn on the caffeine iv yeah okay i have that i sleep with in my arm at least you didn't say gin so no that's at night um speaking of wrapping things up um there there is there is like there's a daily wrap-up procedure so it's not just what happens in the morning um that starts your day and and you know cements your habits for success it's what you do at the end of the day in in um you know in in a lot of the business books they'll they'll talk about this in terms of making sure you get to sleep properly what do you have to do the hour before you get to sleep turn off all your screens you drink drink water you eat something like this or you meditate or you stretch or you do you do something you know to put you in this position there are things that you do in your customization business to wrap up a day that will also contribute maybe not the same but really close to the same um contribute the same amount to your success as what you do first thing in the morning right and so those last things include believe it or not there's maintenance that you do at the end of the day on a lot of equipment right so like for example um if you have one of our direct-to-film printers the the high volume stuff then there is a morning turn on procedure that takes a little time and there's definitely an uh an end of shift or end of day procedure that you've got to follow where the machine does not work right for the startup procedure the next the next morning so you know the every machine or a lot of some of some equipment has a a shutdown procedure that you need to follow that's great and and if your equipment doesn't have like any big type of stuff to do you know again there's a really simple things you could do if you have an embroidery machine maybe at the end of the day there's really not that much to do right but the simple stuff you do is just you make sure it's dust free you blow some air in spots where where dust and fibers can connect with a little can of air and you make sure it's turned off yeah and that's it you know literally 30 seconds you know of of work and um but that's your shutdown procedure is i make sure the machine's put away i make sure i blow out some dust from a couple of these spots i make sure i wipe this down i turn it off and i unplug the machine you know whatever whatever your procedure is for your day for where you are that's what you do and uh and then the same is going to be true even outside of the equipment maintenance side something that i do as my daily wrap-up is i check my calendar and my task list and i'm just like did i do everything okay i did everything i wanted to get done um i didn't do this why i mean the million excuses why you didn't do it like you literally couldn't you were waiting on somebody else an emergency came up and now you just chose that that's a task and you just you have to move it to the next day but i make sure that all that's done um and then i'll go through um and then i'll usually do like an email wrap up again and i'll just go through the emails and just is there anyone else i should respond to no i'm not gonna get sucked into a rabbit hole because the day is ending right i see something anything new yeah i see something that's a little bit of a concern will it make any difference if i handle it now or tomorrow no you know why because you know uh the person that i'm emailing is on vacation yeah this video what do you do you you you go through it and you you set up a task for when the person gets back from vacation if you if there's something you didn't accomplish and you're using a digital calendar that you're supposed to do today then you just click on it and you drag it to your next available slot to make sure you accomplish it yep so that's good and and so then now after you've done that your daily um your your daily wrap-up it's time to move on to weekly stuff hey i do have one um piece of equipment thing that you really have to do at the end of the day okay turn off your heat press okay that's a good turn turn off your heat press and your electric bill will thank you and also if you have a if you have a coffee machine in a bigger office how many times have we come into cold essie and just there's there's just a ruined coffee carafe because it's it's been baking overnight you know just just even if you don't have any even if you've got an embroidery machine in the back your house just like just walk through and make sure everything's good a nighttime checklist for your personal self is a great thing for your office and your business as well right nighttime checklist would be you know turn this off turn that off check this make sure this is good maybe it's not turn it off make sure it's make sure it's on yeah like your sublimation printer you want to have it on overnight because it's going to do maintain itself so so make sure the coffee pots on make sure the sublimation make sure the coffee pots off make sure the sublimation printer is on right so make your list good i like that okay uh so weekly the what's great is as um daily is like the busiest thing because if you're doing stuff every day your weekly list is nice and short you're right should be sure so um for weekly stuff uh you know mark you put here which i think is great is marketing basics yeah i mean we've got whole episodes on making sure on doing marketing checkups and you know going through i mean i would every week make sure your contact forms are working on your website make sure somebody can actually place an order on your shopify store um dial your phone number and make make sure that that's working and the answering and the answering is working now when i talk about like the marketing basics you know uh that's my maintenance is you know like like i mentioned i do that stuff every day you know i check with on our incoming inquiries every day um if there's any error at all i'll check i'll go through with the websites and make sure all the forms are working mm-hmm yep that's good it's just uh kind of a weekly checkup to make sure that everything is is up and running just similar to equipment um i don't think you should be checking your website and forms and phone numbers every day because the chances are it's it's almost never going to be broken or go down but it's you shouldn't you shouldn't go weeks and weeks without just checking to make sure some things work because it takes only a couple minutes there's also um this may be a time where you do your social updates um depending on your business you know you may be in social media every single day and that's your task list um you might not um but if you're on linkedin and you want to keep your linkedin profile up or your google profile or your facebook page then once a week you should have scheduled to do that yep share something share the work you did share an article you you write if you do you know if you do writing or if you do vlogging up make sure that your youtube video is uploaded and your page is uh is is up to par for for your standards you know this is all just so dependent on the business yeah like like for example i mean you know we have people posting on facebook and instagram all the time um i post in um linkedin about weekly that's one of my sunday morning tasks when i do reports and things like that on a weekly basis i'll usually do a post for cold essie i'm talking about a particular product or you know a new video that we've done i think that that's pretty good um i don't know how often we're posting on tick tock markfield weekly weekly so that's at least at least once a week there you go so you know you should have something similar you know if you're not on any social media profile maybe part of your marketing basics is to do that yeah exactly and and uh and there's just a little note in here in regards to all of these things right the marketing basis checklist it's extremely important to understand that your business is unique yeah it just is unique it is its own thing it's different than a hundred percent of every other business out there so if you have if you read some posts about well you should be posting a tick tock three times a day somebody will say that i'm not even going to argue that that's a wrong statement but um why right koldesi he doesn't get our goal is not to and we don't get most of our business from tick tock and from social media right we get more business from people going on to google and saying how do i how do i sublimate something or how do i prop what's the best machine to buy for this right and that's how we're answering questions and providing education just like this podcast and that's more important more important to our business and how we treat our customers and our philosophy than it is to posting interesting and cool things on tick tock right uh but we still think it's important to do it so we're we're choosing well we're just going to post once a week for people who want to follow us and who enjoy it and they can see what we're working on because that's how that's how they want to keep up with us and that's how we do it so your business might be the same way somebody might tell you oh you're not on tick tock you're missing out on so much stuff okay well you can stop and look at that as a marketing task and say do you want this to be part of your marketing is it important why um if you're complaining i have no business i've got nothing to do okay then maybe maybe consider that as something to try but if you're already busy and you're doing a lot of things then it's like okay well listen i get a lot of business from here i still want to post on linkedin though because i'd like to let my customers know what's up though but i'm not going to do tick-tock maybe maybe another day when i have more time right um not another day but another uh point in time of many days where you make a decision to do it for a long period of time um so anyway that so this this weekly marketing basics are your marketing basis basics and only yours um so uh like you said you know check to make sure things are working do your social updates do your linkedin updates do your google updates check your reviews respond to them figure out all the marketing basics that you're gonna do and then do those make sure that those are updated at least once a week yep i like that a lot and the other thing that you want to do is you want to check in with your your business finances every week and by that i mean like on a small scale like so if you were owed money this past week if you had invoices come due this past week did you pay all your bills you know maybe once a week one afternoon or evening or morning every week you sit down and you open up your accounting software and your bank account and you make sure that that that no one owes you money and you don't owe anybody else money and i made money this week and i didn't make money this week you know where am i on that business progress like like um like for an exercise program maybe you do a weekly weigh-in you know or weekly blood pressure check or you know what you see how your stocks or investments or your home rentals have done for the prior week yeah good business check is is pretty good though what's happened this and this doesn't have to be um i don't think it necessarily has to be a formal written down thing necessarily this could just be just like a progress check look at some things how are things looking this week what did you what did you do bad what did you do good you know stuff like that um and you mentioned finances in here um checking on your financial life for your business is important too so if you use uh software like um or fresh books or quickbooks or anything that you're doing to manage inco incoming and outgoing money you should make sure that that's reconciled to a degree so um in software like quickbooks and freshbooks when you go in there uh you're going to have uh if it's synced to your bank account and stuff automatically there's going to be a list of charges in going and outgoing that aren't connected to anything yet and they'll just let you know and sometimes it's literally 10 minutes of you just you drag drop note check it and then you say okay like clean i remember the first time that i did jumped into a software like that for me i'd been like two months i'd done none of it or three months maybe um and then i had like this list and it wasn't crazy like it was only an hour or two maybe um but still like it you it's preferably and not that stuff pile up because you don't want to be that movie character like the classic movie character maybe not nowadays but from like 80s and 90s where they show up to their accountant and they have a box and they open it up like receipts are pouring out you know like you you never want that to be you um you want to be the person that um if at any point in time you could easily go into your software where you check your money and just have an idea of what's happening yeah let's it doesn't have to be perfect but it should be pretty good and i i would say that you know for for cold essie and and our businesses you know every week i take a look at um you know what are what are sales how many inquiries did we get in you know how much did we spend on advertising you know um and we communicate that with our partners you know with the management team if it's if it's personal my wife and i talk about it you know so the that whatever your financial check looks like you know do it every week and you'll just feel more comfortable about what's going on in your business i definitely feel more comfortable about um the like you know i run the online store for cool for cold ecommerce store and i feel much better when um every day or every week i do my various checks you know i just go in there i see if there's anything that looks like there's an error you know we go into our various feeds and look at different stuff and it just i feel really comfortable and then at any point in time if somebody just says um hey how's this doing hey what's the update on this like i've got a pretty good idea and sometimes i know it right off the bat i could tell you exactly other times i say give me two seconds i'll find out because i'm just used to going there i'm used to knowing where things are and how to do it and then make it a habit to go in there consistently so you should be doing something like that with your business as well especially on the finance side or have somebody doing it for you if you don't do it personally right i think that um it's an important thing to distinct that we've made an assumption in some of the words we're using that you are the jack of all trades and you wear all the hats so maybe you don't do any of the maintenance personally that's your business partner or your husband or wife or kid um so in that case you still need you should still either you need to make sure it's checked off or or you need to have somebody in charge of making sure it's checked off and then you make sure that they made sure i think that there's uh yeah i mean there's this balance that you build between trust of people and your business over time right um and you've got to figure out what that balance is for you cool all right so some of those things i think it's a good transition because some of those things that we talked about you may decide to move to monthly or quarterly you know like if you want to do your i am super anal retentive about finances and numbers so there's no way i would let our ad spend go for 30 days without checking it you know it's just not going to happen but maybe if you've got a program set up you know for advertising for your business and you've got somebody take care taking care of it you really don't want to look at it that often you just want to do that maybe it's the same way with your you know your accounting and meeting with them about your expenses and your income maybe you want to just you don't want to do that weekly you move it to monthly if you're comfortable with that i mean that's how we work mark i mean i don't check i don't check the numbers than the ads spend personally every day because you are yeah so i i pro i will check the ad spend and the numbers uh twice a month with something like that because we kind of get together for our monthly report and like take a look at all the all the financial numbers for the companies and and talk about those then yeah because why and and the same is with your business why do you need to check the maintenance every day if you're uh if your business partner is yeah but maybe maybe once every couple weeks you are peeking at the equipment room looking at it or you talk to them about it and i think that's how mark and i have gone to do it i know that he is in there every day checking the numbers and every week he's checking him again and then he sends a report out and i check the numbers from his report and then every once in a while every probably twice a month i go into the systems myself and i just look for myself and then every once in a while i message mark and i'll ask him a question hey what about this what's going on here did you notice that this isn't performing as well and then we have a conversation about it together um so you should just be thinking about that with all the stuff in your business too what is more of a monthly task and a checkup for you i agree um but next for monthly would be um just i think it's important that every month you should just review what your goals are quarterly your annual goals are you on pace do they need to change why do they need to change yeah so i mean think about this this is your this is your monthly weigh-in or this is your personal financial report for the month did you hit your savings goals did you hit your weight loss goals did you hit your number of push-ups goals you know i mean where are you in this journey that you've decided to take i opened up my own business and i invested in equipment and i'm doing marketing and i'm you know people are trusting me with their money to deliver shirts how's all that going mm-hmm yeah that's really good and then while we're kind of talking about those goals and stuff that this is the time every month you do your next business check-in let's see how we're saying i've gotta like just jump ahead here because something really disturbing okay on this list under cleanup mark villa has written delete that downloads folder [Laughter] and if i did that i wouldn't know where any of my work was i literally keep everything in my downloads folder that's all i have to say we'll get to that okay um but uh kind of the next business check-in stuff is just for the month is how are sales what problems did you have what success did you have what do you wish you did better this doesn't have to be a formal report that you're doing this could be a mental check-in you know just look look at some numbers look at some problems think about some problems you know um what were you really happy about said and this is a monthly check-in you should be doing for your business all the time and and we'll do that and because we're in marketing ours can be pretty analytical and it could be a lot about numbers and 100 things to dive into but when you're dealing with customers and customer service that you might be dealing with some of this stuff is just going to be [Music] it's uh just thinking about conversations thinking about interactions you know gosh we had this one customer who was really upset why because of this and this how could we have done it better we should have done this and that yeah and next is the really happy customer how can we replicate that and that reminds me maybe you want to check to see if you got any reviews and you know if that's one of your goals is to get you know a review a good review every week or you know five every month or something like that maybe that's that's some there's something like that that you want to check on yeah that's good so um then we have cleanup okay so you should have them uh you have your daily maintenance and clean up stuff but you should also have a monthly where you're going through and you're kind of making sure that your shop your shop is in like tip top shape so um you do everything every day but there is is there a corner that's piling up with some stuff is there a reason that you have to call up um a uh maybe maybe you have uh wastes that you need to get picked up and you need to schedule that to be picked up because the trash company doesn't pick it up or something like that um you know so these are things that you just want to make sure that you're not having things pile up and then i did write or you know delete that downloads folder in your computer electronically you should be cleaning some things up too uh so um if you have uh for example i got a notification a while back that my gmail was almost full that i needed to buy more space and i was like gosh i was like probably this entire year i haven't looked in my draw my google drive or any of that stuff how much in there is junk and i went in there and i deleted probably about 20 of the stuff that was just like i shared a video with somebody that was from my phone but it was really long so i couldn't text it to him so i just put it in google drive and gave him the link well that's done you know uh there's a bunch of pictures from a trip um we had already done things with those pictures some you know so like why do i have them in here again um and and there was a bunch of emails in there uh that that could just be deleted you know so you should just be checking kind of your computer and that downloads folder is one where um where like you mentioned i mean things can just pile up in there and it's like do you have a bunch of files from customers that you downloaded that you have no use for anymore because you've already put them into tasks you've already put them into your file manager you've already done all these things but they're still you still have a copy hanging in your downloads folder that's junk in there that piles up and what you don't want to do is is every six months hit you know control a to select all and hit delete because you may be deleting things that are important so if you're checking that stuff every month or whatever it might be um on your electronic uh uh your computer phone you know things like that as well then you're more than likely to not have a big mess to have to handle just like with anything else okay now that you've explained it i do support that i do okay good very good probably not gonna do it but i do so y

2022-07-21 09:26

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