Tying Up Loose Ends

0:00It's about midway through January and I'm feeling slightly overwhelmed and it is certainly due to my own making, which I do every single January and February. I usually do way too much shit at the beginning of the year and burn out by February and February and I just want to call it out. I have a list that I just wrote down of all of my loose ends that I'm thinking about that need to be tied up in order for me to feel ahead of the game because right now I don't feel ahead. Now, when I was talking with Steph, she was saying that, well, one of the reasons you don't feel ahead is because a lot of the circling back that happened in December happened in the first week of January. We have a lot of the things that we were planning on in December, a lot of the meetings that

1:00we had. We said, well, why don't we schedule them for next year? Of course, we scheduled them all in the first week. The first full week back to work in January, I ended up having a ton of meetings for just personal stuff. I had to go to the doctor. I had to go to the financial planner. I had to go get, we're getting our will done. There's just, we got a new car and we had to go fill out paperwork. There's like all of these things that are happening all at once that are causing issues. But on top of that, I did a partnership with Swimpley. They circled back first week of January, hey, let's get this in the books sort of thing. We do our end of the year financial planning for the business, we look at the budget, look at the budget for next year and we say, okay, what can we cut, what are we working on, how are we going to make more money this year? We're starting to put those things into action and because of that, things are overwhelming

2:08because there's a lot going on. There's a lot of loose ends tied up, so I want to give all six loose ends some time and I got to make a decision in real time on this show, what I'm going to do about it. So the first loose end or the first fire that I got to put out, it's not really a fire, but I talked about it, this Swimpley partnership, now we are, we have decided to partner doing a live webinar once a month. Now I've only committed to like one or two webinars at this point because we don't know what's going to happen, but my idea here was, hey, let's, instead of having a lead magnitude be our free cheat sheet, which works well, what if we collected leads by doing a free webinar once a month? Now that's something that Steph and I had already planned, hey, maybe we can do that. The problem is is like hosting a webinar is kind of difficult. You need more than one person to do it and it kind of has to be done in the evening and

3:12I don't know, I just don't feel like Steph and I are going to want to work together in that kind of way to do that thing. And so Swimpley came to me and said, hey, would you want to do this? And I'm like, well, hell, if you guys run the whole damn thing, then yeah, because I need help in running it. And so they're like, yeah, so they're basically running this webinar for me. And I'm just sort of the, the host. And you know, on top of that, I have to come up with the landing page. So I have to create a landing page and I have to put these promotional engines in place. Now in my head, I'm like, I want to make this nice looking landing page, et cetera, et cetera. Honestly, that's probably going to take me an hour or two to put together and I'm already kind of through with it. And the promotion stuff can be done at a later date. So it's like, that's, that's just something I have to do before we said it before January

4:1616th. It's the 12th of them recording this. So like four days, like it's got to get done this week. And that's like, all right. So that's one thing on my plate that yes, an hour, two hours, I knock it out. Once I do it, and that's sort of the beauty of a lot of these loose ends, is once I do it, it's done. None of these are ongoing things. It's a one time I need to do it, but in which order do I accomplish them? Because right now they just feel like I have to do all of them at the same time or I have to do them all this week, and that's not really true. But this one, kind of true. One, brew cabin course shut down. This has been something I've been kicking down the road for about a year. So last year, like a full 12 months ago, I decided, you know, for actually for a long

5:18time, I used to have a course with brew cabin that I would sell. I haven't sold that course in years, all right. Now I still pay for hosting that course, and it's like a hundred bucks a month, which is like, we don't need to pay that anymore. Now is that a huge savings, no, still money, it's still unnecessary payment, and it's just like one less thing I have to like, I get the bill every month and I'm like, fuck, I gotta do that, fuck, I gotta do that. What does that require? Well, I have to take all of my course material, put it into a shareable folder on Google Drive, email everybody that bought the course, which I can only do through podium, and say, hey, you know, but the end of the month, we're moving the course, you know, it's over, all the videos are here, you can feel free to download them, they're totally yours. And you know, you could have them for life, this, this folder will always be here for you.

6:18There's no need to log in, but only you guys have the URL for it, et cetera, et cetera. This is a two-step process, or I should say a three-step process. The first process is taking all of the videos and getting them into a single folder, which sounds easy, but I mean, it is easy, but it's just kind of a pain in the ass to do, all right? You have to craft an email, and I have to sign up for podium's email system, which is cost even more money, but I only got to do it for one month. So it's like 19 bucks or whatever. Send out that initial email saying, hey, here's what you can get the course, it's going to shut down, schedule a few more emails, reminding people of where that's going to go. There's not that many people who took the course anyway. And then officially shutting it down, so that's step three. It's really not urgent, except for the fact that I'm bleeding money, and I'm using

7:23air quotes, because yeah, $100 ain't nothing, okay? But what's another month at this point? So what I did was I switched podium from a yearly subscription to a monthly subscription, so I could just, so my head, I thought, well, if I'm switched to a monthly subscription, I won't lose that. I'll know those months where I have to shut it down early, plus I'll see that bill every month, and it's going to give me, you know, instead of, you know, start a fire under my ass to get it done, well, it hasn't done that. It's on my list. I want to do it in January, you know, yeah, it's a three step process, but a lot of it's scheduling. So, you know, not that much work. So those first two things, not a ton of work, but like need to get them off my plate. Third thing, I've been, I've promised before the holidays that I was going to improve

8:26our email marketing system, and I did, I made a lot of those improvements, but I haven't made all of them yet, and I haven't documented them in the email SOP. So this is something that my, so right now, we're caught up for all of January with emails, and in order to accomplish this task, I would have to, again, we're talking maybe another hour or two, so, so far, the first three things that I mentioned, I could probably do in a single day, truthfully, I could do it in a single day. It's a longer day than I'm what I normally used to, but I could get it done. So the email marketing SOP, it's not super urgent because we have things planned. It could get tabled until next month, because there's really no urgency except that Steph

9:32has to write emails, and there's a new formatting process, which I just need to update the AI to help us write those first drafts, and then document all of this in the Google Doc, which, you know, really is just for me. So like, again, it's a, it's a small task. The fourth thing, and this is the big one. The first video editing. So Steph, at the beginning of this year, and this is one of those, there's no rush, but there is a rush kind of thing. So here's, this is the big, I think this is the big one that's sort of causing me all of this pile, this dog pile, if you will. So yeah, it's just thinking about it overwhelms me. So this is clearly the one piece, but let me just explain it and we can come out with something.

10:38We decided, Steph and I, that we were going to update the pool course first this year, and then the hot tub course. I told Steph that there is no limit to how many videos I'm willing to record in a single day to get this course done, meaning if you can get, if you can get me a script, I have no problem recording it. I have one day a week that I set aside for recording. If I have to do four to six videos, I can do it, not a big deal. The problem is, is that this is a new style of video. So it requires, like, I'm doing different filming techniques, I'm, there's a, it's got a different script, there's a different type of editing done and technically I could hand this to my brother, who's our video editor and just say, come up with something.

11:40But he needs some guidance, he's not that type of employee to kind of like, I mean, I'm sure he could come up with something, but I feel like I, there needs to be some art direction because there's, you know, there's, there's no style set yet because we want to make these videos feel different than our YouTube videos. So I said that I would do the first edit and kind of set the tone and then be able to say, hey, brother, this is my, this is how the video should be, you know, now you can work on it. Now, the reason why this feels so urgent is because I'm trying to get my brother work this month, extra work because we normally don't do long form videos in the off season and this is a way to get some extra work doing, you know, for extra money for on seat or for off season work. So I'm trying to get him these videos so he can start editing them.

12:42Now technically it like he's in a new position now because he's not, it's not a per week thing. It's just like a per job thing. So he's, you know, if he wants to do a bunch of work in one week and make a ton of money, he can do that. So it's not just like, oh, you know, I only do one video a week. He can do as many videos as he wants and the more videos he does, the more money he makes that month. So I'm trying to get this to him and I'm, and I'm feeling crunched because this is not something that I can just sit down and knock out. I don't, I don't know what the steps are. I have to build this whole thing. It requires my creative brain and I don't have a day dedicated to just like, okay, my whole day or the next week or so, I have plenty of space and my job is to just figure out this edit because I need that creative space to do that and I don't have that yet.

13:47So by finishing the other three things above it, that would create space for the editing. All right, there's two more. And as I'm looking at them, I already know the answers, but all right, the fifth thing on my list is social story posting. So something we decided to do at the in December, something I decided to do was because the videos that we put out on social media sometimes include, you know, a link or a call to action to our book or something, I heard somebody say that, you know, your videos to have the widest reach to grow the biggest audience should be fairly generic or should, should reach a wide audience and shouldn't really have a strong CTA because that kills reach and I totally

14:47get that, that makes sense to me. But what you can do is you can use stories to promote your products. So every day, you just put up a new story because in stories, you can add links, you can include shopping links, you can include texts and people can respond. There's many things you can do in stories and stories are only for people who subscribe. So your goal with your short form videos, for example, is to get people to subscribe to your social media profiles. And then the stories are what are what you can use to get leads or to get sales. Now this only works apparently if you have a huge audience. And this is not something we do on YouTube, but YouTube, we have long form. This would be something we can only do on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. And truthfully, I've been doing this for about a month, of course, in our off-season month.

15:47And I haven't really seen a great response. However, I believe that the response will be much better in the summer. So this is something I'd like to start doing now to get better at and to see what's working, what's not working. And that way we can improve between now and the summer and by summertime we're cranking out stories every single day and we're getting leads and we're getting sales. This process is something I'm already doing. I'm the one doing it. It doesn't take that much time. The time is giving it to somebody else. I'm planning on giving it to my brother to do because he has a company phone and it's just something he would have to do every day. We'd obviously pay him to do that. So it's really just having one conversation with him. I'm probably going to end up doing that Friday because I have a meeting with him on every Friday. And the sixth thing that I have on my list is responding to comments on social media,

16:53which I had talked about removing. But then in another episode I went, no, I was talking about customer service and how the bar has never been lower. And I'm like, well, yeah, I believe in answering and responding to people who talk to us. The problem that I ran into when I was trying to create this system last year was it, you know, we use buffer and buffer is a great area for responding to comments on Instagram and Facebook. In fact, the meta business suite is perfect for this because you can respond to DMs and you can respond to comments on both Facebook and Instagram. It's perfect. But we get a lot of comments through TikTok and the problem with that is there's really no online system for responding to comments there, same with Pinterest. So I'm having a hard time figuring out how to do that.

18:00And so that's just going to require, unfortunately, some more time to figure out. Where is the story posting? I've already figured it out. It does require more time, but I'm out of the gate running with that one. So it sounds like, as I recited all these loose ends, that the first three I can kind of knock, like tomorrow is an example, I only have one thing on my schedule and I do have some time tonight if I wanted to knock out one of them. I could do that or at least start the process of one of them. If I knock those three out, social story posting, I can save until Friday. So I'm recording this on Monday because I have a meeting with my brother and I can save that to Friday. Comment responding system, I could save that till Thursday because I have a meeting with

19:04Kayla, our customer service rep, who maybe we can come up with some type of system or at least get again, get that going. And then the question is, is when do I start the edit? And I have more videos to record as well. So I think what I'll do for the videos is I will postpone all of my video recording until Friday because I don't need to do those tomorrow. I'll push those till Friday and then I will work on the top three and then I'll save the bottom two for my Thursday Friday meeting. And then the edit, I can do, you know, depending on how fast I can do the first three, I can

20:08do the course edit between Thursday, or sorry, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the middle of this week. And once I get that done, again, these are all one time things. And I can offload that. What's nice about that is that I can focus mainly on recording, which is, which I could just do Friday and be like, okay, by Friday, I'm officially caught up and everything is moving. And everything is locked in. And then I'm basically done. Now, unfortunately, I've kind of made a plan to go snowboarding on Friday. However, we have just been having an awful winter here in Colorado. We are, we don't really have a snow pack. It's like 50% of what it should be. So, and it's been warm. Like we're still in the 60s, man.

21:10And it's middle of January. It's been pretty much warm for the last, like, two months. And it's not looking good for snow this year. I don't know how often I'm going to be able to go snowboarding. I have a trip plan in February. I was planning on going on Friday thinking there was going to be snow, but it turns out there isn't going to be. So, I don't know, I don't know. If we can't record on Friday, it's not the worst thing because I am very much caught up in filming. So, yeah. All right. That's what I'm going to do. So, to recap, I'm going to knock out the first three. I'm going to build my webinar landing page and I'm going to add the promotion stuff. That'll take me an hour to brew cap and course shut down. That's not going to take me that long. That's going to take me an hour. Email marketing SOP. I'm going to just wrap that all up. Put a bow on it, call it done.

22:10I'll do all of that tomorrow. Then I'll push the social story posting to Friday when I talk to my brother, assuming I'm not going snowboarding, and then the social commenting, I will save till Thursday when I have my meeting, which is just one meeting that's on an all day thing, and that gives me pretty much all day Wednesday, despite the fact that I have to go to Denver. Monday, or Wednesday morning for our will, sign paperwork, which Denver is a 40-minute drive for me, so it's not like, yeah, it's a couple hours, you know, so, yeah, that's just what I'm going to have to do. And I may even have to push back video recording until the following week, but once I get through these loose ends, then I'm basically at all I have to worry about is filming, so

23:14that'll be good. All right, well, hopefully that's, I don't know if that's helpful to hear me talk and process that out loud, but you can, you know, I was worried about this of putting too much shit in my plate, and, you know, thankfully, the things that I've put in my plate are all one and done, so it's not like these are ongoing things that I can burn out on. It's like, just get it done, and then you don't have to think about it anymore. It's done, and they're all going to improve the business somehow, or save it money. Anyway, or make it money, that's it. If you liked this show, please subscribe to my newsletter, where you'll see videos about all this stuff, jivinesi.com, GIO, v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com, and I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time. I'll talk to you next time.