#AskSimon 9

Let’s get this started!

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“Hi Simon, this is Oliver from Melbourne. I’m the owner of my agency and I am doing too many things every week. There’s so many avenues I could go down to help my business, what are the most important things I should do this week to run the business? You’ve talked about systems before, what kind of systems do you mean?” 

THE 3 KEY ELEMENTS (0:31)

You need three elements to run a company and they are: strategy, structure, and people.

In the middle you have culture. Basically how you do what you do. 

STRATEGY (0:48)

Let’s start with strategy. To run a company you need knowledge. You also need...

Need to Know

Most websites don't convert readers into clients. Most emails don't engage. This is probably the case for many of your marketing pieces as well. But you can change it. And you will change it, with the three-hour brand sprint.

When Steve Jobs published the 1984 campaign in the NYT it was nine pages of technical details: features, features, features. The campaign tanked. Then Jobs went to Pixar, where he learned storytelling. Back to Apple, he launched a completely different campaign: one face and two words: "think different". A huge success. Why? He used the 5 elements of a relevant and repeatable message, here they are.

What to Do

Pick one of your marketing pieces (your website, a sales page, or similar) and apply these six steps to improve it:

#AskSimon 11

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“Create a system that fulfills.” – Simon Severino

Hi Simon this is Fred from Atlanta. We are blessed, having 7 kids. It is so much love… and affection…. But I only have 3 hours a day for my work. Growing my business in such a short time is too darn hard. When talking about focus, what is the best way to identify the most important stuff? 

The Parts of a Business (0:40)

• Attract 
• Nurture 
• Close
• Deliver 
• Retain 

The Attract phase is where people usually see your offering for the first time. It’s an introduction to you and your business. (0:46)

The Nurture phase is how you create trust and a relationship with them and...

Create clarity and aligned action instead.

Clarity and focus are often missed when you ask business owners “What do you create, and who is it for?”. It gets blurrier if you dig deeper asking which the current top projects are. Their teams struggle even more to explain why their daily activities matter, and what builds on what – in this current quarter. They’ll tell you great stories, until you both forget what the question was. During the last fifteen years I’ve been validating processes and tools to deliver a better way to strategize: real, simple and true.

Being an entrepreneur myself, I also constantly struggle to find clear and compelling words to shed a light on both what we do and why it matters. Just last week a sprinter from our tech department...

Measure What Counts

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“Hi Simon, this is Alex from Oakland. We try to measure the team progress every week, as you say, but it’s a mess. Guess we have way too many KPIs that we track, and maybe not even the most relevant ones. In an ideal world, which KPIs should we track? (as simply as possible, please!)” 

“It’s much easier now to set up a program and compete.” – Simon Severino

“How much does it cost to acquire the customer, how much does it cost to fulfill, and what is the lifetime value of the customer?” – Simon Severino

Start managing what counts. 

Measuring what counts. 

I was talking to a brilliant team last week,...

Working on the right things at the right time is 80% of the game. Nevertheless, most people do not prioritize enough. This article should help you train your prioritization muscle. Because prioritization is only hard if you don’t train your decision muscles. Is it worth the effort? Yes, because for every CEO, Entrepreneur, and Creative, prioritization is always a high-leverage intervention. 

This is an area that I’ve personally focused on for 16 years now, and here’s the 4 steps I found to be most helpful:

1. Start with Strategy
2. Define project sequence [Opportunity Costs]
3. Define project importance [Leverage]
4. Let go of all other distractions

Start with Strategy

Before we even get to prioritization, there is a prerequisite —...

ARE YOU WELCOMING?

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“The conscious mind thinks it’s the Oval Office, when in reality it’s the press office.” Jonathan Haidt

“Hi Simon, this is Duncan from Dublin, I‘d love to hear you take on websites. There are so many around, and many look the same… How can I improve the way my website looks and feels?”

You will get a short version (3 steps) and a long version (5 steps) on how to improve your website. 

Imagine you are a restaurant, and from the outside it looks like you are closed.
Maybe the lights are low, or the jackets of your guests hang in the wrong place, or something else you didn’t notice. The signal you send is: “I am not welcome...

With two little kids, a wonderful wife, a global business to run, and many ideas I’d love to realize, time for me is always too short. If I don’t prioritize my day in advance, I will quickly be swallowed by the urgent and lose control about the important. In the evening, I will feel frustrated because I worked a lot, served everybody, but feel depleted… To get out of the victim zone and regain my freedom, I use this simple prioritization method:

The Primary Task Method

If your to-do list overwhelms you, here’s a simple way to prioritize things:

Use the primary task method.

It saves my life once a day.

HOW IT WORKS

Ask your partners and main collaborators: „If there is just ONE thing that I should do today to move our business forward – what...

Our #1 marketing secret is revealed…

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BECOME A CREATOR

From Consumer to Creator
The Content Creation Flow.

Our #1 marketing secret revealed… (long article)

BECOME A CREATOR
Many brilliant minds are still consumers. I see friends and clients, people with such big hearts and sharp minds, who do not create and ship every week. And it was never as easy and affordable as now!

OBSTACLES
The inner struggle goes something like this: “I cannot ship this week because my website is not ready”, “I cannot ship this week because it is not finished”, “I cannot ship this week because our kids are sick”. I strongly resonate with the kids one:-) Everyone can relate, but we are still talking about...