KICK OFF 2024 WITH A BANG 💥

Want to learn how the Tradies Success Academy can help you optimise your trade or construction business for profit, growth, and time freedom?

In this week's episode Greg spells out the three areas of your life and business to focus on to make 2024 your best year yet!

Before you get caught up in the day-to-day grind of the business, evaluate where you're at in your

• Finance

• Operations

• Personal Performance

and put systems in place to really maximise these areas so you can reach your goals this year!

Need help mapping out your journey to success? Click the link above, fill out the form and you can book in a free strategy session with one of our experienced coaches. But hurry! Limited spaces available and they're filling up fast...

Podcast Transcript

Greg Allan

Hey guys, really excited about this podcast where we're gonna dive into three core areas of your life and business that you can optimise and why it's so important to reflect on these things from 2023 and set a plan for 2024 to make sure that you are living your best life and getting the most growth you can in your trade business in 2024.

I'd finish the year completely run down.

We were so busy in December had no energy left.

I'd just go straight into holiday mode and then when we came back to work in the new year, straight into it, just back to what I was doing before checking emails that would lead to one thing led to the next.

Then I was just getting out to a few jobs and I was invoicing again and I was quoting and invoicing and doing jobs and all of a sudden back into the old routine I was stuck in at the end of last year.

So the power of reflection is enormous, like the more you can do that even weekly, the better it is.

But when it comes to a start of a new year and you've had a break.

It's a great opportunity for you to really reflect on those feelings that came up for you on the previous year in terms of your life, not just business but your life.

So I really wanna speak today about the importance of why you need to consider.

What does life need to look like for you in the future?

And how is your business gonna be a vehicle for you to achieve that?

When you do have the right plan and you're moving towards the goals now, don't get stuck in a loop.

Like so many people get stuck in the loop where they'll just continue doing the same thing they've always done and they get the same result.

If you continue to do the same thing every single day, every single week, every single month and expecting a different result, you're not really, you know, gonna get one.

So you need to focus on things that are really gonna shift gears in the business.

Those things are getting new clients, you are really pushing the envelope to try and get new clients, new business, new business that's gonna bring a lot of new work, which creates a certain type of stress on the business that forces you to need a hire.

Otherwise you reach capacity really quick, hiring staff is another big move that you can make where it CRE it forces you to have to go and get the work, so it creates capacity and it creates a stressor on the business.

Now, stress isn't necessarily a bad thing.

It's just the force applied in a certain area within the business.

And we talk about this and we teach this in the academy a lot because when you can proactively create a certain type of stress in a certain area of the business, it will generate growth in that area of the business.

If you continue to just do what you've done reactively reacting to situations that happen all the time, you're gonna find yourself hitting an equilibrium, which is, you're stressed here for a bit and then you're stressed here for a bit, then you catch up on your invoices, then you do the jobs that you fell behind on, you know, and that sort of will find an equilibrium.

You'll go up, you'll have a good month, you'll get some good profit.

And then all of a sudden you're really quiet, you've got no work, you got no jobs and then it would hit an equilibrium where it's going up and it's going down and it's going up and it's going down.

But you can pretty much draw a line through that and it's flat, you know, so the reason is you're reactively reacting to certain situations that happen in business.

When you proactively apply the right stress in the right area of the business, you can simulate stress in that area, which then results in growth, whether that's client growth, employee growth, whatever it is, I think it's really important when you do your reflection from last year in 2023 start reflecting on when are the times when I got busy and when are the times that I got quiet, you know, and how can I proactively apply the right type of stress into the business at the right time to fabricate growth in the right direction.

So that's how you need to reflect in terms of your operations.

So you can start to understand and have an awareness around the ups and downs that you're going to experience in your business.

The next thing you need to take your time reflecting on from 2023 is your finances.

If you haven't been closing off the month, every single month, your finances and your profit and loss are gonna be extremely confusing to understand and you won't be able to trust them.

It's really important that you can trust your profit and loss and your balance sheet.

And don't just rely on your accountant to tell you if you've, you've done well every year that doesn't allow you to get the information that you need to make decisions that are gonna result in you fixing problems within the business.

You might spend the whole year.

And I remember spending a whole year, one year, absolutely flat out 16 hours a day, most days of the week, working on weekends for the whole year.

And when I checked my PNL, after that whole year of solid work, I made something like $2000 net profit.

It was absolutely shattering.

You know, when I, when I experienced that it worked out for less than a dollar an hour I was working for, for that year and it was something that drove me to understand my finances.

And when I actually applied a practice to checking finances and really cleaning up my finances and understanding that, learning it and then applying it that helped me make micro improvements on the business that then led to extreme growth and time, you know, effectively, I could trade the profit.

I made to hire people to free up the time to keep focusing on the high level tasks, which then resulted in getting to a point where you have enough profit, you can hire an ops manager, you can hire admin and you get the support holistically in the whole business in all of the operations that need to happen.

And that allows you to have what we call operational time freedom.

So you need to get on top of your finances.

It's such an important part of the business and it's not something you can just rely on someone else doing and telling you if you did, ok or not, if you really wanna run your business well, and you wanna understand why you're working so hard every week, why things aren't working if your quotes, you know, are not converting and being profitable.

If your invoices are not profitable, you need to understand these metrics.

It's a really big core part of what we teach in our incubator phase of a freedom fighter.

And you know why?

Because we need to be able to make this analysis every single month to make those micro changes and feel confident around decisions that you're making rather than confused or worried about.

What if I do this and then something else happens, you can actually forecast.

Well, if I hire someone, it's gonna be this much to my bottom line.

but they're going to enable us to be able to put this much extra revenue and I get this much more time back which then I can apply that into these different types of tasks which generate work.

That's the sort of reflection that you can do to really understand systematically how you can apply a better methodology to your 2024.

The final thing that I'd love for you guys to reflect on from 2023 is your personal performance.

I'm a massive advocate of living your best life today, not waiting until your business is a certain size or your, you know, you've got a certain amount of vans or certain amount of staff in your company to live a better life.

You should prioritise that and put yourself first.

Now, it doesn't have to be a lot, but it has to be enough that you're performing well at work.

There's no point showing up not being at your best.

So focus and reflect on sleep, nutrition, exercise mindset and relationships.

In 2024.

If you really wanna crush it this year, you need to prioritise you and those five things so that you are fulfilled first and come to work, energised, enthusiastic and bringing a good energy.

So your team, your clients and the community can see that you're a driving force behind the business.

And that will also give you more confidence to make those decisions, like hiring a new employee or getting a big client where you might be feeling like I don't know if I can handle this.

I don't know if I can do it.

I know that my myself in the past, I've been lacking confidence to make big decisions at work.

I know I need to optimise my personal performance to feel better and more confident to make those moves.

So there are three core things that you could reflect on your operations, for your business, your finances, for your business and your personal performance, which includes your family.

If you've got a family, make sure you're looking at the time you're spending with your partner, the time you're spending with your kids and prioritising that as well.

So you don't miss out on that.

You know, sometimes business is gonna take a lot longer than you think to grow to the point that you think you need to be at to live that life with them.

So don't wait for that start, even if it's, you know, 30 minutes every day where it's uninterrupted time with your family, your partner and yourself, you need to prioritise those things so that you're not missing out on that cos you don't know what's gonna happen down the line.

You know, you might work your arse off for 15 years to grow your business to a certain size and then have a heart attack could be the end of your day.

So just keep that in mind that you need to prioritise those things.

There's no point working your guts out to this end point.

If you won't have those people and your health to lean on after you've achieved those goals.

So good luck guys in 2024 we're here at the Academy to support you and we love for you to guys to just jump into a free strategy session.

If you get a chance, head over to the homepage, Tradie Success Academy and book in a free strategy session and let's go deep on your strategies for 2024 until then have a successful 2024.

And thanks for listening to the Tradie Success Podcast.