At the beginning of this year, I made 2 vows to myself with my work:

1. Lose the ego and practice humility
2. Relentlessly track inputs and daily behaviours

I believe that I will achieve everything I’m aiming for with my business if I exclusively practice these two vows alone.

Why focus on these two?

Most of the time in business, you lose because you become cynical over time.

You start doing things because “that’s the way it’s always been done”.

Innovation becomes stagnant as you lose the desire to change and become entrenched in your ways.

And why wouldn’t you? You’re a wily old fox who’s been around the block, and you’ve seen it all before.

… except you haven’t.

Especially at a time when technology is accelerating at breakneck speed and disrupting every facet of what we do.

There has never been a more important time to reject old ways, commit to change, and reapproach old lines of thinking with an open mind.

Some of the ways I’m committed to doing this are by treating every facet of my business as a blank slate, from top to bottom.

• I’m speaking to younger agency owners frequently (they’re less rigid in their thinking and more motivated to disrupt)
• Prioritising hiring people obsessed with AI
• Simply asking “Why?” to everything we do, drilling down as far as possible across sales, marketing, ops & fulfillment to see if it could be better

It’s simply about having an appetite for curiosity and a desire to learn everything possible, rejecting pre-existing beliefs if a better way forward has been proven. It’s harder as you get older and more conservative, but it’s necessary if you want to stay alive.

The second vow is self-explanatory.

Most of the time, we fall behind simply because we never get ahead of ourselves.

There have been too many times over the last 2 years when I wandered off course aimlessly, only to run into a dead end.

I’ve got relentless focus this year. One mission, one priority: to grow this business by executing the daily, weekly and monthly critical tasks that need to be done to move the needle.

For those interested, these are a few of the things I’m currently working on as part of the broader business goals:

• Overhauling our website and design: due to chopping & changing over the last few years (rather than redesigning from scratch each time), we’ve ended up with a Frankenstein monster that’s not congruent and has a poor UX. We’ve strayed way too far off course. That will all change soon.
• Sales deck & audit process: we’ve already moved away from the more generic “Klaviyo audits” and more towards fully fledged retention systems, going deeper across each facet of the brand’s business to provide a truly objective and practical overview of what we can improve in the first 90 days. This wasn’t something that was poor by any means, but it can always be improved, and we need to win more deals and convey our value more effectively.
• Launching new case studies: over the last 18 months, we have stopped posting them since we already have over 30 and lost motivation and the habit of shouting about our wins. To rectify this, we now have a fresh batch in development, showcasing some stunning work our team has recently achieved.
• Putting more effort into our weekly newsletter: subscribe here if you haven’t already - there’s a ton of value and deep long-form videos covering retention marketing and scaling agencies
• Hiring: As we scale back up, we are determined to find the best possible talent. We already have some ridiculously talented people in our team, with many having been with us for years, but I think bringing in some fresh blood who are hungry is necessary to give us new ideas and energy across client fulfilment

There’s a ton of other things I’m working on across marketing and operations, but those need to stay under wraps for now as they’ll be surprises when they’re released 😜

Time to wrap things up before bed. My son will be awake in a few hours, and then job number 2 will start!