The following is a transcript of Episode 32 of Return on Podcast, the show where we help e-commerce sellers improve their ROI in business and in life. For more episodes, subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.
All right. Welcome to a special from the Return On Podcast show. I’m Tyler Jefcoat, and normally we’re interviewing the biggest names in e-commerce to understand what makes them tick, what their habits and obsessions are. But for this final kind of stage of 2022, I wanna do something different. I wanna drop some shorter videos, these are probably gonna be five to 10 minutes each, that are going to be rooted in really crucial content to help you get the most outta 2023.
And so for this first video, we’re gonna talk about vision and planning. I’m gonna give you five hacks in five minutes to supercharge your annual planning. And then the remaining videos, there may be seven or eight videos total, are gonna be really getting into the nitty gritty of how you use your finances, your bookkeeping, your profitability management, your cash management to actually drive performance and make 2023 the best year ever. We can’t even think about making it the best year ever until we know what you want.
And so let’s go. Five minutes, five hacks starting right now. The first one is, seems like the simplest, but it’s the one that’s the most important, and I just wanna encourage you, please don’t, don’t fail to do this. You need to get off grid at some point for at least a full day during Q4 of 2022. This means not at home. This means not at the office. This means probably paying for a hotel room somewhere or going to a state park or national park. I’m gonna be flying for a conference. I’m gonna fly out two days early and just go to a national park and be alone outside. That’s where I like to do it.
I just wanna encourage you, don’t not do this. Make sure that you do the hard thing of getting off grid so that you can actually think, actually plan, actually pray, actually journal, actually do the things that you have to do to answer the following questions. And so again, five hacks. The first one was just do the right thing and get off grid. It’s harder than you think it is, but make yourself do it. Plan it today. Please do it right now. And beyond that, I’m gonna have the four questions that are gonna drive your time alone so that you get maximum value out of it.
That first question is called what do I really want? What is it that I really want in my life? For me, I tend to break this down into five categories. What do I really want personally? What do I really want spiritually? What do I really want relationally, professionally, and financially? And I take it even a step further. I force myself to pick a date in the future and literally talk to myself as if it’s present tense.
So for me, right now, I’m thinking about, it is literally today is what I’m thinking, December 31st, 2025. And personally, my health looks like this. I have achieved this weight. And so as I process this, I have to come to the conclusion that I have done these habits, I have accomplished these things in order to have the body that I have. Or maybe I look at my marriage, and I’m like, here’s what I want that relationship to actually look like. And in order to do that at the end of 2025, I will have had to have chosen to take my wife on dates. Like right? Think about what you want financially, what you want your company to look like, and then reverse engineer what would have to happen over the next two or three years to get you there. That’s the first question to wrestle with is what do I actually want?
The second question is also super important, and it is what has 2022 taught me? This is when we have to kind of get real and get critical about what is our current results, what are, what is the current market? What are our current habits yielding for us? Was this a successful year? Was it less than successful? How did we respond to the headwinds that everyone had here in 2022? And let’s reflect on it. Okay, what if I, now that I know what I want, how did this year actually go? And what might I need to adjust? That’s the second question. So first question is, what do I want? Second question is, what did this year teach me?
The third question is, now that I know what I want, and now that I’ve thought about what this year has taught me, what are the biggest opportunities, the biggest challenges, that if I were to overcome them or take advantage of them, would get me the farthest, the fastest towards my goals? And so this is again, gonna take some critical thinking to say. What is it that if I were to move the needle on it would really unlock my potential, would really get me where I want to go? And so this is worth wrestling with, right? For each of those categories, what is my biggest opportunity personally?
You know, for me, I tend to do pretty good working out. I stink at dieting. What would I actually have to solve? Okay. It would have to be actually implementing macros or something else related to intermittent fasting or something that might impact my goals personally. You have similar things for your finances, for your relationships, for your business. This is when you gotta think about what are those things that I believe if I took advantage of them, would get me the farthest the fastest.
And then the final question that you need to wrestle with, now that we’ve gone through, I know what I want, I know what I’ve learned this year, I know what my biggest opportunities for growth are. Now I have to really put on paper, what am I going to do about it? What am I actually going to commit to taking action on that I believe will move the needle as much as possible in the next year?
And so if you guys happen to be watching this on YouTube, here are these questions. So again, hack number one, get off grid. And then the other hacks are actually just these questions, and they need to be handled in this order. What do I really want personally, spiritually, relationally, professionally, financially? What did this past year actually teach me? What am I currently getting? What are my current habits yielding?
The next question is, what are my biggest opportunities, my biggest challenges? The things that if I were to move the needle on them would get me the farthest, the fastest? And then finally, what am I actually going to do about it? What am I gonna commit and what am I gonna go public to somebody, my spouse, my friends, my accountability group, and commit to taking action on in the next year so that I can get what I want in my life?
Friends, I hope this is helpful. This is the vision coaching kind of video. The rest of the videos are gonna be very technically cool. Gonna, in fact, next week we’re gonna look at accounting, how to build your books. Hope you’ll hang with us for the series. Thanks a lot. Take care.