I used to never, ever set yearly goals. I didn’t set them for myself, for the company, for anything. I just always worked as hard as I could and figured if I did everything I could, things would turn out okay. And for the most part, for many years they did.

It wasn’t until about four years ago that I actually started setting goals for myself. I follow what is probably a very different goal-setting practice than most people. Here are a few things that will give you insight into how I have evolved to set my own goals.

1. Never try to have them ready on the first day of the year. In most businesses, especially ours, you’re doing so many things right up until the very end of the year that you don’t really have time to think much about the next year. I always give myself through the 10th or 15th of January to have my goals laid out on paper.
2. Try not to make them too complicated. Keep them simple. Each year, I write down five to seven specific goals that I want to achieve. None are super simple, but none are also over-the-top hard, but they make me have things I have to push and strive for to achieve.
3. Keep them short. Each one of my goals is no more than one sentence. In fact, most of the sentences can fit on one line on a piece of paper so that I don’t have to have long, lengthy things to read.
4. Put them on a piece of paper. I keep mine on a small card in my briefcase, and I look at them at least three to four times per week. It’s a great way to reflect while traveling, to look at first thing in the morning, to remind you what you are trying to accomplish for the year.
5. Tell other people. I find others who can help me stay accountable for my goals so that I have a realistic way to achieve them.

That is how I’ve set goals and become successful each year ever since I began this process.

As I think more and more about the day-to-day decisions I have to make, I go back to something an old friend and someone who helped me greatly in business named Jack Griffis sent me this summer. It was sent via text message and his quote was, “This mission statement reeks of you!” Now, while I won’t take the credit for the following mission statement, it was taken from a company that started from scratch in the 1970s and became one of the leading global brands today. This was their original mission statement, and you can find the name after you read all the way through the 10 points. This is the best way that I can define my mindset at the current time.

1. Our business is change.
2. We’re on offense. All the time.
3. Perfect results count – not a perfect process.
4. This is as much about battle as it is business.
5. Assume nothing. Make sure people keep their promises. Push yourselves. Push others. Stretch the possible.
6. Live off the land.
7. Your job isn’t done until the job is done.
8. Dangers:
   1. Bureaucracy
   2. Personal ambition
   3. Energy takers vs. energy givers
   4. Knowing our weaknesses
   5. Don’t get too many things on the platter

9. It won’t be pretty.
10. If we do the right things we’ll make money damn near automatic.

The company that wrote these was Nike.

It really doesn’t even feel like work at all. I find myself saying this to myself a couple of times a day. While the demands of my job and stress can sometimes be overwhelming, those are simply moments in time and it soon passes.

But on days like today where I am getting to meet with clients that I truly enjoy, and work alongside with people who are looking out for your best interest, and get to do it while traveling across the country getting to go to places all over – it really doesn’t even feel like a job or work.

I have heard people use the saying that “if you love what you do, then you will never work a day in your life.” And while I have never used this saying, I believe it to be very true.  

Flying around from place to place, staying in nice hotels, and eating out for just about every meal may be a lifestyle some people dread. But for me, it is more of a way of life. I certainly miss time at home and with my family, but you learn so much about your clients’ business while traveling to see them. And you learn so much about yourself when you have time alone. For me, it makes me a better and happier person.

Every day can be a vacation if you let it.

Years ago, I read a book called “The Energy Bus.” It was given to me by a good friend and client, Pat McGrath.  Pat was always great at giving little nuggets of motivational advice, and I always simply felt better when I was in his presence. After reading this book, things were no different. Even though I read it years ago, the most important lesson of the book came back to me this week.

Monday started like any normal Monday for me. Moving fast, a slight bit of tension about all that was about to happen in the week in front of me and several important things that I needed to get accomplished early.

That is when the glass broke. Like someone through a brick through my window. I got hit with some very disturbing news about several people who I have the utmost respect for and have devoted quite a bit of time to helping them develop their careers. The news wasn’t what one may deem as catastrophic like ill health or having a severe accident, but it was the kind of blow that just hits you in the stomach when you realize not only were people not sticking to their core values but also they were acting in a true sense of undermining me and my mission.

This ate at me for about 12 hours. Then, while flying from one city to another, I looked out the window and noticed how beautiful the mountains looked going up and down the East Coast and thought about a key topic from the book “The Energy Bus,” which was called Energy Vampires.  Meaning you let all the problems suck out all your energy rather than focus on things and people that you can actually do something productive to make better.

I cracked a smile and thought back to what the book talked about and how you have to devise a plan to make it out of energy-sucking circumstances and focus your time and energy on things that you can actually do something about.

Now that my plane is starting to descend, I find myself eagerly ready to turn on my phone and call anyone but one of these energy vampires and get them off my mind and out of my life.

Years ago, when I was first getting my career going, my father gave me a profound piece of advice. He said, “If you’re going to do great things, you’ve got to get ready to take a lot of criticism. Because people who go try and do a lot of great things are always going to get criticized more than anybody else around.”

Over the past couple of weeks, in talking with a few very close friends, I’ve heard a lot of this and now know exactly what my father meant.

When I talk about big-picture ideas, I think there’s only a general percent of the people around me who probably believe they are capable. But, there are those who want to be naysayers, yet there are those who flourish in the success and the ideas that come out of big-picture thinking.

If you’re going to do great things, you’re going to fail. You’re going to try, try, try again. And you’re not always going to be successful. But if you try enough things for a long enough period of time, you’re going to find things that work well. And I think that’s what makes some people so furious and enjoy talking about other people so much. And as for people who chase after success, the general public just wants to see them fail. They’ll talk about them until they’re blue in the face because they’re not trying to do anything on their own. So, as I reflect back over the last few weeks and a time when I’m trying more new things than I’ve ever done in my career, it is both humbling and very reminding of that great quote: “If you’re going to try to do great things, you will receive an enormous amount of criticism for it.”

Maybe the longest title of any blog I’ve written, but this thought has been on my mind a lot lately as the schedule of meetings has picked back up and we are seeing more new prospects than we have all year. The great thing about what I get to do for my career is that everyone has an opinion. When you think about an ad you see or something that stimulates interest, you either have a favorable liking to it or you don’t like it at all. That is what makes everybody an expert in the field I’m in – they think that their opinions matter.

Not to sound like I have too much of an ego, but I have been working in the same area for 18 years and have a pretty damn good idea of what will work and what will not work. But you never get a new account or win that many friends if you go around all the time when someone second-guesses you or questions you by blatantly calling them out. You have to develop a subtle art for letting people be wrong and still getting the outcome that you want.

If it sounds easy, let me correct you in the most eloquent and amazing way (see what I just did there). But, you have to be able to use your distinct knowledge of the topic at hand to get your point across and get your way, even if it takes more of your time to work on a person. In my experience, nobody likes to be wrong about something, but very few people are confident enough in what they do to do it with such conviction that it will be successful.

There is an art to being able to be subtle enough to tell people that they are wrong and confident enough to do what you do and know that it will be successful. Part of the art is having the diligence to make so many attempts to prove your point or get your way that you eventually tire the other party out completely and boom…. you’ve won.

Many things in business are a battle.  A battle against competition, against naysayers, against people who don’t believe or are just envious. But to win the battle, you have to be relentless in your ability to let people think they may be getting their way even when they are not.

Running a sales-oriented business, I will always reflect on the era before Covid-19 and the era after Covid-19 as when I really changed my outlook on how I sold and communicated to others.

And no, it has nothing to do with one’s health and safety concerns, but purely about how valuable I’ve realized it is to have time in front of clients and potential clients. For the better part of this year, it all had to be done through Zoom calls.

First, let’s talk about my style of selling before Covid-19. I rarely used a hard close and mostly sold what we offered our clients based on results, case studies, and a formulated needs assessment. It was very much relationship selling at its finest, and I don’t want to bash it because my sales/closing/growth of annual sales increases were all pretty spectacular for a long period of time.

Most of this was done in person, and if someone told me “let me think about it,” I generally said, “okay, I will check back with you in a couple of days and see where we go from here.” It never was too aggressive and was more on the side of being as much a friend to someone as it was being a salesman. In fact, it took someone a long time to convince me that I actually was a salesperson and not more of a practitioner.

Then, Covid-19 happened and I got to watch from one month to the next a revenue drop of 55% with very little that I could do about it.

So now let’s talk about my approach to selling since we have been living with the virus. It is truly a take-no-prisoners approach, and don’t worry about saying something if you mean it, even if it costs you not to make the sale. I sell with even more conviction because I see what we do works and know how effective it would be for the other party.

I still wouldn’t classify my selling as a hard-sell, but it’s a lot more cutting to the chase of “if I can only tell this person one more thing for as long as I live, what is it going to be?”. And if they happen to tell me no, then that is just the starting point. I read a series of quotes recently from Nike in the early days that said their mission was to “be on offense all the time,” and I instantly adopted that mindset. It is with this new approach that I go into every situation thinking, what do I need to do to make this happen.

And I am absolutely amazed at how well it is working.

Sometimes it is refreshing to stop and look back at where you have come from to realize where you are going. I spent the last two days at Prospect Vision, a data mining and direct mail printing company that I bought at the beginning of 2018. Having never had a dream or even thought about being in the mail/printing business, it was one of those opportunities that just got served up on a plate in front of me and was too good not to take a shot at.

It was a different kind of place when I walked in before ever buying it. The facility was run down, printing machines looked old and tired and the carpet was dirty. I can always tell the attention to detail that has gone into a place by simply looking at the carpet. But the power in this organization wasn’t the old equipment or the tired carpet, it was the people. The people were so eager to do great work and so thrilled at the possibility to up their game that it just felt like the right thing to do. So, I embarked on my first intro into printing/production as an owner and went for it not knowing anything about how this industry worked.

Like anything, I soon found that the more volume you did the better off things looked. It was apparent that volume could solve a lot of problems and give us the ability to grow faster and get things like new equipment that was bigger and faster and even allow us to make enough of a profit to replace the carpet.

Now, after seeing the low of beginning and printing 50,000 pieces of mail a month to the high of printing over 500,000 pieces of mail a month, and being able to survive a downturn like Covid-19, I walked out of the building today on my way back home with a real feeling of accomplishment.

In 34 months, we have printed 10,766,372 pieces of direct mail out of a small unit in an industrial office park. Some people (and very high up ones at that) told me when I started that this business was a joke and “good luck with this one,” as a sign that they wanted nothing to do with it. Other people wished me luck and cheered me and the team on the entire way, trying to give every ounce of support possible. But the main thing I have learned thus far is you never know just how much you can do until you try. Now all I want to do is try a little harder.

One thing that continues to amaze me is how when trying to make decisions and look at things that could be viewed as risky, you still get those butterflies in your stomach.

All the risks I’ve taken in my life, in business, day-to-day, they all seem so big. They seem so monumental. But when you look back on them, a lot of them that you’ve made and that you’ve succeeded with, there was really no risk at all. Meaning, things that you lost sleep over, things that you worried about, things that you wondered if you were going to be able to survive financially really just fall to pieces in the rearview mirror because they weren’t that big of a risk if you have confidence both in yourself and in what you do.

Now, there are a lot of different kinds of risks. I’m not talking about risking your life climbing up a mountain. But risks in business or a personal relationship where you might be risking a friendship or a future family member because you’re caring for them or worried about them is really what you have to just not let worry you in life.

Taking risks for some people is natural. People might think for me it’s natural, but I always look at them in some regards with a little bit of fear. But once you get through them, once you take them, once you accomplish whatever it is you set out to accomplish, you realize it wasn’t really that much of a risk at all.

Got back out on the road today after a very light last two months of travel, which followed a 3-month span of virtually no travel. I have to admit that I was hesitant to get back out on the road doing my thing, not necessarily for Covid-19 concerns but because this had just been possibly the nicest time in my career where I wasn’t always moving from place to place, week after week and coming to the verge of pure exhaustion by the end of every week.

Not that I didn’t want to be back out on the road selling my company and telling our story of how we have made our clients successful, but because I didn’t feel the market was there for people to buy what I was selling. It seemed like from the conversations and Zoom meetings I was having that people weren’t just going to buy from me because I had gone to see them. With clients buying more things (some in record number) than before, it was a time when I could spend a couple of months working mostly from my office.

But after a meeting this morning where a long-time dealer who has become a good friend of mine was walking me to my car, he said, “I know you don’t have to come down here, but you do. And you do it because you are passionate about my store and passionate about seeing me be successful, and I want you to know how much I appreciate that.” After hearing these words and exchanging “elbow bump,” which are now the modern-day handshake, the switch has just flipped to where I am recommitting myself to a life back on the road, doing what I do best.

Not to say it will ever be back to some of the travel days like before, but “It’s Time.” Covid-19 and 2020 have changed me for the better in so many ways, it is like counting my blessings. I am more attentive to my own self-awareness than before. There is so much more appreciation and happiness for all the people in my organization than ever before. It has heightened my appreciation for the finer details in my work environment and driven me to create new things and take more chances on potential opportunities. It has taught me to be a better closer in that you might as well ask for the business until they tell you to never talk to them again. Last, but maybe most important, this has given me a deeper appreciation for my family and taught me to stop, put the phone down, quit looking at social media, and simply enjoy the moments.

Everything in my life is about TIME. And while I joked that Covid-19 and 2020 were simply a Time Out in my life, it is now time to get back out, and more aggressively than ever before with a whole new set of skills.