It’s for going for a ‘simple more’ and working steadily toward your desired future goals
You can’t help but trip over every post on social media that wants you to “crush your goals’, can you?
I don’t have to tell you the dumpster fire that was 2020 for businesses. Even if your business was well positioned to thrive, it was a rough year emotionally and personally for most people.
If you had all this going for you:
- You had an existing ecommerce website already humming
- You had a great email list and you loved them 4x a month
- You had a social strategy and connected regularly with your customers on your perfect social channels
- Your clientele kept their jobs and could keep buying from you
…You probably still feel weary. Your kids might be in school, whatever that means right now. Your spouse might be home working. Everyone’s underfoot, schedules are messed up. You’ve spent too much time with your fridge. Pretty much unless you were the family dog, 2020 was a rough year. If you were the family dog, 2020 was the BEST. YEAR. EVER!
And on top of it, everyone wants you to crush your goals in 2021.
Nope.
Go for a simple more.
What’s that? Every year, you’re asked to set your resolutions, bullet journal them, achieve more and more and more. You’re expected to lose weight, lose the alcohol, spend less time on social media, and spend less money. With all that deprivation, no wonder we fall off the wagon by Groundhog Day!
Enter Simple More. On a personal side, it’s more vegetables, more walks for your dog, more board games with your kids, more time at home enjoying the fruits of your labor.
On your business side, it’s more time creating that big project
- More time revamping your e-commerce store,
- More time designing new products,
- More time managing your customer list,
- Starting that e-mail list, at last! and…
- Actually sending email to customers. Regularly.
- More time connecting with personal notes to clients (dropping them in boxes and in in-boxes).
- More time asking your customers what THEY want and need in the new year.
But it’s not crushing it. 2020 crushed our souls, it crushed many businesses. It destroyed the hard work of many families who were just hanging on. Give up crushing it. It’s crushing us, and our planet. Our acquisition of stuff, of things to check off, of expectations that are too high, is killing us.
Focus on a simple more. If there were ONE thing that you wanted to accomplish in 2021, write it down. Maybe it’s not even a thing. Maybe it’s just that you want to thank your customers for sticking with you. Whatever it is, ONE thing, make that a focus for more attention in 2021.
I ran across an article I’d saved from January of 2020. It was the 2020s decade fashion trends. And in it, there were no mentions of soft pants, of work sweatpants of Zoom shirts and sweater hoodies and certainly no mention of a pandemic that would send all of us home to work, homeschool and wait this thing out. And 12 months later, we’re still in joggers, we’re still looking for calm amidst the global chaos; there’s an end clearly on the horizon, but it’s a long way off. None of us are in control of the economy or the pandemic.
Fortunately you ARE in control of a whole lot. And that’s where the simple more comes in. You are empowered to take control of the things you CAN do for your business.
If there is something more you want this year, it’s time to embrace it. Make a list of the simple more things you can do and how they fit into your overall business strategy. Just focus on the things you can do, and not the overwhelm of a year that puts pressure on you to crush your goals when you don’t even know if there will be normal again the way it was, ever.
This is a year for a simple more. Take a deep breath, exhale. You’ve got this. Here are a few related articles and an opportunity to get started with some of that “simple more” planning, below.
Simple planning exercises: using Pinterest as a vision board and visual planner
Coming in February 2021: Mini course on email marketing planning and tracking. This isn’t a content creation tool, it’s a spreadsheet planning tool to show you how much your business can make if you start or expand email marketing (using your own business metrics). It’s a mini course, twenty minutes of your time, with an easy-to-use spreadsheet, at a perfectly easy price (and it’s deductible as a business expense under professional development.) Hey, get me in on this! (fill out this form and we’ll let you in with a super special deal!)
