Why the secret to making more money is NOT working harder

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Now I know what you're thinking. How on earth can you earn more while working less? How does that make sense? Well it’s true and it's all to do with focus. Before we get to the details, I would like you to do me one quick favor. And that is click the subscribe button below. I'd love to be able to share new content with you every week. And that's the best way to find out about new videos.

If you've not met me before, let me say a quick hello. My name is Paul. I'm an accountant. I'm an entrepreneur, I've been in business three times myself and I've also got over 25 years of experience helping other businesses to grow profitably. So I know what you're going through. 

Now, today, I wanted to cover this subject by making things a little bit more personal, by telling you about my first business, which I'm very proud and fond of, even though it was quite a long time ago. So a few years ago, I was a baby accountant. I’d been through my professional exams, I’d worked for several firms and I’d actually just finished a quite a big role at Gillette, which was an amazing company and I had a really great time there. But I decided I wanted to go out on my own and I wanted to start my own business. And so I opened a store on the south coast of the UK, in a place called Brighton. 

In Brighton there's an area called The Lanes, which is just how it sounds. It's a network of tiny pedestrian streets with individual shops on each side. It's really quirky and sweet and it's one of the great attractions that the town of Brighton has to offer.

So I opened a shop there called Poisson Rouge and sold homewares: homemade accessories, china, glass, candles, barware, basically stylish stuff that you’d probably want to buy as a gift. If you don't know me, as you probably don't, you won't know this, but I'm actually a bit of a planner. I don't do anything by halves, particularly if it's something I'm going to put a chunk of money into. I did months and months of planning, whether it was kind of researching the location, who the customers were likely to be, what the products were going to be, etc. 

I ran focus groups with friends. We looked at pricing, and by the time I’d finished I had pages and pages of research and believed, rather cockily, that I couldn’t fail. Well, I tell you, did I have a baptism of fire…..!

It turns out that, despite all my hard work and research, the location was just wrong for my kind of shop. Now I know what you’re thinking - you just told us that you did research on location. How on earth did you get it so wrong? Well, quite interestingly, the area that we chose did have a ton of people coming past it most of the time. It was a very busy area of Brighton. But what I’d failed to realize is that whilst those people matched my target demographic, they were mostly tourists and they weren't really up for buying stuff for the home, particularly as some of it was quite heavy and bulky. If you’re on a day trip you’re not going to buy something heavy and lug it round all day. 

It was a huge, costly mistake, which I tried so hard to overcome. And in fact, I found myself working harder and harder, for longer hours, trying different things. I never saw my family and I just couldn't see the wood for the trees, but I kept on, plodding away, thinking to myself “ Maybe I'll try selling this, or try selling that. Maybe I'll drop the prices, maybe I’ll run more promotions. Maybe we'll give everyone a free glass of wine when they come in.”

We tried so many things which didn’t work and, for me, it was a real shock because this was the first thing that I'd done that I couldn't make it better through hard work. I've always been somebody who works very hard at things. Academically, I started off being fairly average, or maybe a little bit above average, but through hard work I’d always managed to rise to the top of the class. And that was purely hard work. That same approach also saw me through the early stages in my career but here, in business, the harder I worked, it didn't make any difference at all. And I couldn't understand it. It was such a bitter pill to swallow, to be honest. Everything we tried had a minor impact, but it was nowhere near enough to overcome the poor location and make the difference in terms of making a profit or not.

Have you ever had an experience like this? If so, leave me a comment below because I’d love to know your thoughts.

And so, back to the shop. Eventually we did manage to get out of this ‘hole’ by taking some drastic action and afterwards, when I’d had time to reflect on things, I came away with some key learnings that I want to share with you, because they really helped me and, hopefully you'll find them useful too.

So I've got five things I want to share with you so here goes. Number one - sometimes all you need to do is just stop, okay? Just stop and take stock. You need to get your head out of the day-to-day, take a step back to look at where you are, strategically, and work out what's working and what isn't working. Any time you’re able to  step out of the muck and bullets, you can make a huge difference strategically to the success of your business.

The second thing is that you should never confuse activity with progress or results. That's the main thing I got wrong when I was running my business. I was working so many hours, working harder and harder. In fact I couldn't have been busier. But actually I was making very little progress and wasn't really getting any results at all. But I kept thinking it's going to change. It's going to change because I'm just working so hard. So that for me is probably the biggest takeaway. At the time it's comforting to make yourself think that the two are the same, but I'm afraid they're not.

The third point I want to talk about is the power of focus - actually identifying your specific goal. A goal that is something along the lines of  “I want to make more money” is just too vague. You need to have a specific goal which will really enable you to focus your energy. If only I had focused more on a specific goal of, say, getting to a certain level of profitability or getting a certain number of customers through the door every day, I would have done very different things. 

Instead, ask yourself ‘what's the one or two things I can do over the next two months that might make a difference’ That's how I now think about things. I'm not talking about goals that last for a year or three years. Those types of goals may be useful if your business is more established, but actually when you're starting out particularly, you need to be much scrappier and agile and actually just having a very specific short term goal that you can focus your efforts on will generate much better results than just trying a little bit of everything. 

Okay. So we’ve just talked about focus, which brings me on quite nicely to the fourth point, which is you need to have the courage to stop doing things that aren't contributing to your goal. The whole point of this talk is really about how you can work less and achieve more and actually to do that, you've got to be ruthless. You need to have the guts to drop tasks that you're doing that aren't contributing to your goals. I'm not saying you won't come back to them later, but particularly if you've got limited resources, as we pretty much all have, you've got to be bold.

Okay, So we’ve talked about stopping and taking stock, we've talked about not confusing activity with progress, we've talked about identifying a specific goal that you can achieve in the next 2 to 3 months, and then we've talked about being ruthless about what you're doing and having the courage to drop things that that don't contribute to that goal. So those four points wrap nicely into number five, which is, of course, once you've done that, you're going to make some changes, but then you need to review those changes every 2 to 3 months.

If you've got a goal which is something you want to achieve in 2 to 3 months, then the ideal time to then take stock is when you get to that point. Have I got there? What's working? What's not working? What do I need to change?  Just having a shorter term focus, particularly for younger businesses, is really helpful in my experience. And once you’ve reviewed your progress you need to rinse and repeat, as they say in the shampoo ads, and set a new goal for the next three months.

Remember, this is only going to happen if you make that time to step back. And a good place to start is by diarising those reviews right now so you don't forget them.  So that's the fifth point and, in a way, it’s almost the most powerful because if you don't review what you're doing, working out what's, what's working and what's not working, you can't build the business. 

So what happened to Poisson Rouge I hear you say? Well when we took this approach, we made quite a few changes to the business. We became much smarter in running promotions and really focused on repeat customers. Those people would come down to the shop, see us once, and we gave them a mail order catalog (Yes, it was those days, when the internet was in its infancy). We tried a few things, but eventually we decided to close the store and move  the business online. And when we did that, it really enabled us to build a business with far better prospects. At the time, it felt like a real failure to be closing the physical shop, but actually it wasn't, it was a blessing in disguise. 

So, there we have it. Those are the things I learned over my time running my first business and I've gone on to use those tips in the other two businesses that I've run plus in many other businesses I've worked with over the last 25 years.

And, as usual I've taken those five points and I've put them into a free fact sheet, which you can download below and work through them in your own time.

And also before I go, I also have another free factsheet, which I’d really like you to download, and it's all about turbocharging your cash flow in your business and doing so without selling a penny more.

So if that's interesting as well, click the link below and download it. And if you've not done so as yet, as I mentioned earlier, please subscribe because I'm posting new content every week and I'd love to be able to share that with you. Well, thanks very much for listening. I appreciate your time and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.