On Friday I made a video that asked the simple question, Is “The 4-Hour Workweek” bullshit? Like I thought would happen, there was a lot of mixed opinions. Some felt it was possible to earn a full-time income while only working a few hours a week. Others think it’s a bunch of nonsense.
In the video I made a simple point. You can’t indefinitely work a few hours a week unless you plan for “growth activities.” These include anything that helps expand the reach of your business. Like a commentator said, ‘if you’re not growing, you’re shrinking.’ By not making plans for expanding your business, it’ll ultimately wither and die away.
Thinking to Grow your Reach
I’ve been traveling through Europe for over four months with another five to go. The one thing that worries me the most is I’ll run out of money because I’m not focusing on growth activities. Yes, my income has been pretty steady for over a year. But I know I’m not doing a thing to expand the reach of my affiliate marketing business and information product. No growth = Money goes bye-bye.
That’s the reason I’m busting my hump to build up traffic to this blog. The way I figure things is you can write your own ticket if you have a large enough following.
How are YOU Growing your Business?
To all the people who have “The 4-Hour Workweek” mindset, I want ask a simple question, ‘What are you doing to grow your business?’ Sure it’s fun to travel the world and do cool stuff. But I imagine it’s not much fun to see an empty bank account after gallivanting across the planet.
It doesn’t matter what type of business you run. To enjoy this type of lifestyle, you must put in place certain mechanisms to ensure the growth of your business. For instance you should concentrate on increasing:
- Web traffic to your online business
- The number of prospects in your marketing funnel
- Contact with affiliates or individual stores
- Advertising for your business
- Networking with people in your field of expertise
The great thing about a growth activity is you don’t have to do all the effort yourself. We live in a world where it’s easy to hire an outsource worker to do pretty much anything. For instance, I’m currently outsourcing a bunch of small projects which will hopefully increase the traffic to this blog. They do all the hard work and I get to play.
Get Busy Growing or Get Busy Dying
I have nothing against anyone who wants to spend their life doing fun things. But I do think it’s pretty irresponsible to not think about how to expand your business. In my opinion, you have two simple choices: Get busy growing your business or get busy dying.
What is YOUR choice?
Take Action. Get Results.
Oh No. “Get busy growing or get busy dying”. You pulled the “Shawshank” card.
I’ve been planning potential ebooks in my head for the last couple years and they’ve yet to go any further than that. I barely even update my own websites because most of my “work time” is spent updating sites for other people. Believe me, I’m not complaining about that!– work is work and work is money– but I have to physically sit down and take the time to do something in order to earn income. I want to get to the point that I can earn money without much effort.
Melissa,
You are such a good writer I am sure you would have some great eBooks if you just set that little bit of time aside!
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the great insight. I hope your trip throughout Europe works out. It’s such a beautiful continent. Haven’t been there myself, but I will do something similar soon.
I’ve been reading some Richard Branson’s work lately – every time his Virgin company has had to face some adversity, they didn’t fight the fire like most companies do, they expanded out of the problem. A great example was his first mail order record business. When the postal system in Britain shut down, he had to open a record store, otherwise his business would’ve had to close its doors.
Have a great day,
Wayne
Wayne.
Richard Branson is the man. Growth is very important to a business and once a company does get to the point where it is mature and making money you need to be investing energy in growth and expansion or grow and expand other businesses. Even some of the most stable “single product” companies like “Coca cola” has done this, they tried new coke, coke classic, expanded to many different brands that people do not know are owned by coke. They try new advertisements. Basically they are doing everything they can to try to grow so they don’t die. Branson is great at understanding this and branching our on his own.
Hi Steve,
This is all so true and all too common – that people focus on running their business and not growing their business. Consciously setting time aside each week and sticking to growth activity will help ensure that you focus on the growth of the business, even if it’s just for an hour or two.
Yup,
It s all part of a growth cycle of business if it isn’t growing it is dieing. IT may take time, but you always need to be forging forward an/or creating new opportunities
I actually have a timeline carefully plotted out which indicates milestones and goals of varying sorts that I should reach. I always keep it in mind so I know I’m progressing in a way that I think is logical instead of just flat-lining like one would at a desk job he or she doesn’t like.
But, right now, though, I’m focusing on improving the quality of each post I make, cranking them out as efficiently as possible, and, above, all, growing my traffic in one way or another.
Having a time-line with achievable milestones. That is awesome Noel. That is certainly the way to attack blogging and grow your site in a reasonable manner. It is much better to plot things out rather than “spray and pray”. Having done both I can certainly tell you which one ended up being more effective.
Wherever I recommend that book to anyone (and I do think it’s a good book) I always tell them to ignore the title. Tim Ferriss went for the title that would sell him the most copies, I believe!
I did enjoy the book, and this book, along with others, has changed my mindset.
This year I am going to set time aside to work on the business rather than just work! I’m going to release more free and paid-for ebooks and I’m going to outsource more. That’s the plan anyway!