The more offense you play for your business, the more successful you will become. All of the top entrepreneurs dedicate a portion of their time each day to play offense.
Playing offense does not mean writing the next blog post. It doesn’t mean engaging with your audience, creating videos, or doing anything else associated with being in your business.
Playing more offense involves you taking an aerial view of your entire business and asking yourself important questions. Is this working? What should I be focusing on? What small changes can I make that would yield dramatic results? How do I grow this?
This offense results in more directed action with a clearer path to victory. Instead of constantly creating content and marketing yourself, you now have more specific aims that you believe will create the most impact.
You may feel like you’re already on the right path, but taking 30 minutes to conduct that aerial view every day will open the door to old opportunities and platforms that can still lead to great results.
Write Down Everything That Constitutes Your Business
This is a one-time, time extensive task. You’ll occasionally go through this list as your business continues to grow. However, you need to take this step before you can truly play offense. Here are just some of the parts of my business:
- Virtual Summits
- Blog Posts
- Guest Posts
- Training Courses
- Free Videos
- Books
- Public Speaking
- Breakthrough Success Podcast
- Coaching
- Redistribution
Sometimes I focus so much of my time, attention, and energy on my virtual summits that I forget about other areas. When I took the aerial view, I rediscovered that I needed to pump out more content for my readers (plus, I LOVE writing content, and realized that I’d separated myself from my biggest passion for too long).
I also rediscovered my podcast outros need major updates. I didn’t see any traction from my previous outros because I mainly promoted my Udemy courses, but now I’m promoting more stuff on my site and a few tools which I use and am an affiliate for.
I also rediscovered that I could get more exposure by writing more guest posts and getting interviewed on more podcasts.
Discovering and doing are two different things, and if your schedule is constantly filled with in-business work, you never find the time to take that aerial view and ask yourself, “What should I really be doing?”
Then you need to rediscover and start implementing instead of letting these important tasks continue to remain unattended.
Writing down all of this information is so important because with tens of thousands of thoughts running through out minds every day, it’s easy to forget.
Start Delegating More Of Your Tasks
Delegating your tasks to others will open up hours of extra time. My freelancers are critical to my success because they subtract various tasks from my day. Over the long-term, I can easily see having a team of hundreds of freelancers, but I’m not there yet.
Some people may be interested in delegation but haven’t started yet. If that’s you, my friend Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation has some great advice for you.
The two main ingredients you need to get started delegating are a log of where you’re spending your time and a well-documented process.
The time log will tell you where the biggest opportunities for outsourcing lie. What’s sucking up the most of your day? Is that something you HAVE to do, or could someone else reasonably handle it with a little training?
Next, you’ll want to have clear process documentation and instructions. This is like your recipe for completing the task, and the more detailed the better. Don’t leave anything to chance here, even though you probably take for granted some of the steps, especially if you’ve been doing the task yourself for any length of time.
How I normally create the process documentation is I take a screen capture video of myself doing the job and talking through the steps. Then I write out the steps in a Google Doc so I can share both a visual and written version with my assistant.
Delegating more of your tasks will also give you more time to play offense. Take some time to think about some of the important parts of your business, how you can take action, and then just do it.
Checking on your freelancers is part of playing offense because you want to make sure they have work, and more importantly, that your freelancers are effectively getting their jobs done. You should have more 10-15 minute meetings fill up your schedule to ensure that you and your freelancers are both on the same page. These meetings do take up some time, but they work like a charm for keeping everyone on track.
In Conclusion
I thought of ways that I could extend this blog post beyond my usual 1,000 word marker, but I decided against it. Playing offense for your business simply comes down to…
- Taking the aerial view of your brand
- Discovering/rediscovering what you need to do for the optimal impact
- Start taking action
I could have said it in several different ways, but that’s the premise to working on offense. Taking action just comes down to putting the tasks on your schedule. If a task isn’t on the schedule, it doesn’t get done. If it’s on the schedule, it has a much higher probability of getting done.
What are your thoughts on playing offense for your business? Do you have any tips for us? Have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.
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