Tag: passive income

Hi there,

What an odd title for a Blog. Or is it?

All business owners get the business equivalent of ‘writers block’ from time to time. Your list of things to do stretches into the future with no end in sight. To make matters worse, you don’t have the information to hand to actually complete any of them either.

What you need really is not more things to do, but an injection of inspiration and surprisingly, this can come from just having a chat with another business owner. As you discuss how you are getting on etc and listen to their conversation, you pick up ideas from what they are doing right and then can apply this to what you are doing. Sometimes you will even get a terrific new idea of how to get more customers or sell in a different way – and all this just by having a coffee with a friend. In my experience, I have never come away from a meeting/chat like this without some new angle and one that I am keen to get on with – something that gets me up in the morning.

That’s not to say that all you do is pump people for information and then just copy their business using their inside knowledge – you would soon run out of friends that way. What I mean here is just listening to what is happening in their business, mulling it over and then applying the idea to your own, non-competitive business. In fact, if you then go back to your source and tell them that you have implemented and idea you got from them, tweaked it and applied it to your business, they are likely to take that as a compliment.

Remember, they may do the same for ideas you have too. In fact, what I try and do during these chats is to see what I know that I can give away to the other person without any expectation of a return favour. By doing it this way, usually something does come your way, but not from where you might expect. I know that sounds a bit woolly, but just try it for a few weeks and see what happens.

Let me know how you get on and what idea got you inspired again.

Have a great weekend. All the best. Roy Lewis

Hi there again,

Came across the famous ‘List 5 things to do tomorrow’ idea a couple of weeks ago. I used to do this all the time but ended up giving it up as the 5 things I choose turned out to be actions that took more than a day each so were never done. Bad plan.

This time round, I have restricted the list to 5 things that I can actually do during a day where the phones ring constantly and emails pile in. The results? Well I am getting through more of the big stuff that is important than just reacting to the latest call or message. Having help is good too, as at least you can look at what you do and decide if you really need to be the one to do it.

The way I have been looking at this is to decide what actions are the ones that only I can do – all the rest can be delegated. If not, why not? Writing this Blog needs me to do it – so far.

What is worth doing when writing your list, is to do it at the end of the working day – and write it down. Just by doing this, you will end up pondering some of the issues and hurdles involved in actually completing these tasks by the time you get to them the next day. It’s a classic case of sleeping on it and seeing what happens. Since I started doing my own list, I have managed to sort out some fairly complex issues, mostly by not thinking about them too much but at least having them there and mulling them over until some solutions present themselves.

The extra advantage of making your list in this way, is that if you don’t get all 5 items done, all you do is carry them over to the next day and then you have more time to come up with solutions.

It’s worth giving this a go – what have you got to lose?

All the best, Roy Lewis