Choosing Your Top Priorities

This week we answer a follow-up listener question about choosing a theme to guide your year (we discussed themes as another way to think about strategy in Episode 261).

Jonathan and I address:

Is it a good idea to have multiple themes or strategies in a single year?

Why running your business—prospecting, closing deals, delivery—always has to be a top priority (hint: nothing good happens when you don’t have cash flow).

The natural progression from starting a business to defining your value proposition to earning serious revenue—and how a single focus will move you faster.

How to think about monetizing your expertise as you grow.

Quotables

“You still have to do all of the care and feeding of your business. You have to have money coming in. You have to be closing deals… you have to be doing delivery.”—JS

“Prospecting never stops. Ideally on the road to authority, you do a lot of prospecting in the beginning and then it tapers off.”—RM

“I get nervous when people are splitting their time between two themes.”—JS

“I focus a lot better if I’ve got one lode star that I’m shooting for.”—RM

“Of all of the things that people have been paying me for, what is the thing I really want to show up and do?”—JS

“How are you going to make money out of this?”—RM

“Clients are happy to pay your exorbitant fees and your growth looks like getting bigger and bigger clients for whom you’ll deliver more and more value and therefore can charge higher and higher.”—JS

You really have to marshal all of your energy into one thing to push to that next level.”—RM