Today at a Glance:
- I have less than 8 summers with all my kids at home. While every part of me wants to build an empire, this humbling fact helps me reconsider and drastically shifts my goals
- We’ve scaled to >4 streams of income. The goal for now is to stabilize and build upon the foundations we’ve established. We’re focused on building our motes.
- We’ve hired an operator for StockNSnack. With this hire, we’re able to start expanding services relatively quickly. I’m excited about chasing a few new opportunities here.
One of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur is figuring out what to spend your time on.
If you had asked me 12 months ago what I’d be doing today, there’s no way in hell I’d tell you I’d be running 4 different businesses including a vending route and microchip distribution company.
That said, setting annual goals right now doesn’t feel right.
I’ve wrestled with it for weeks.
Ultimately, I’ve realized we need to focus in on 1 quarter at a time.
Just focus on executing on what’s right in front of us.
As I dove into my annual planning sessions, I found myself torn between this aspirational journey of building an empire and the grounding thought of the time & energy that will take.
I think it’s easy to lose sight of my why and fall into the trap of more, more more…
It’s caused me to reflect on why I decided to not go back to corporate world in the first place.
As I laid in bed the other night, my wife and I talked about the upcoming birthdays of our 4 kids.
they all seemed to be stacked in the first 3 months of the year.
As if someone planned those pregnancies.
My oldest son will turn 10.
Last week my wife took him on a 1:1 date. As they talked, the topic of phones & social media came up. He committed to not having a smartphone with social media until he was 16.
If he did, she agreed we would buy him a car.
“Any car? Like I get to choose”…
“well, no. Just a normal car”, she replied.
The car of his dreams at 16?
A Lamborghini.
The thought of that day only being 6 years away hit me like a ton of bricks.
6 years was nothing. Such a small amount of time.
6 summers, that’s it.
Then I spiraled into the realization that when he turns 16, my youngest will be 12.
Then, within a blink of an eye… they will all be gone. Off living their own lives.
This realization has heavily influenced how I spend my time and what I focus on.
I feel so lucky to even have the option to choose what I focus on everyday.
It’s the constant bombardment of the facade that “more” will help me be happier.
Or that ‘more now’ will help me be a better dad later because I won’t have to worry about money later.
Instead, I’m choosing to go against my instincts and say ‘we have enough’. ‘We don’t need more’.
Now, you might read these goals below and think they are contrary to all this…
But I’ll assure you that these are simply targets.
What matters most will be the personal and familial goals outlined.
Personal / Family goals
I need my physical and mental health to improve.
It’s so easy for me to wake up at 4:30, work for 3 hours, spend an hour getting kids breakfast and off to school, then immediately back into work for the rest of the day.
In reality, it’s un-necessary.
Do I get a lot of shit done, sure.
But how would my life be different if I actually spent 1 hour working, 1 hour at the gym and 2 hours with the family. Then a normal working day through 3 or 3:30pm.
My goal is to have more focused, more intentional work.
This leads me to my personal goals:
- Workout every day (30 minutes of movement). I’m not looking to be a bodybuilder, I’m looking to break a sweat and improve my health. I must beat my kids in a sprinting race for at least the next 10 years. I want to be part of the blue zone people.
- Plan everyday - this will be the game changer for how I spend my time. If I plan each day, I’ll reflect on my goals and plan around these goals. Not let my stress of ‘working more’ feel like I’m solving my problems. More focused, more intentional work.
- Offline by 6pm - I will be 100% done by 6pm each day. Phone and computers away and in quiet mode. If you try to reach me, it won’t happen. 100% focus on family.
- Stretch for 10 minutes daily - I’ve been lifting for >15 years and have a terrible habit of NEVER stretching. My body is feeling it. This is the year I become limber
- Write for 10 minutes every day - I enjoy writing. It’s extremely therapeutic for me. It’s helped me build connections, relieve stress and work through all my challenges as a business owner. I learn faster and enjoy the journey. Enough positives to make it a daily habit.
- Start & attend therapy consistently - I’ve only tried therapy once and I loved it. It’s like stretching for me, I know I should be doing it but it’s always been de-prioritized. Not anymore. I’m gonna work on my shit.
I’ll be using my Habits app and tracking these daily.
Now, let’s talk business goals.
Routine Holdings (sneak peek, we decided on a Holding Name)
End of FQ1 goal: $100,000 monthly gross
Net Margin goal: 45% ($45,000/month)
How this breaks down
Now, these numbers don’t ‘add’ up to $100k. I gave myself a ~20% buffer.
These are some aggressive growth targets.
Here’s what growth would look like based off Decembers actuals:
I’m all in on these targets, but I’m honestly focused on managing to my inputs and what I can control.
Right now, the least repeatable one for me is Appleton. We had a great December but January is going to be slow.
I’m working to figure out how to build a more repeatable sales motion here but it’s a beast and will take a while. I’m giving myself some grace on it.
It’s frustrating not knowing what levers to pull on a business to grow revenue.
With saas, I at least know of 10 levers to pull and where we should be going.
When you’re selling electronic components to contract manufacturers (and have never done anything like it), it’s no easy task figuring out signals that drive purchases.
Here’s the inputs I’ll be driving towards to hit these targets. There were all backed into based off some data I have from each business:
StockNSnack Vending
We’re so lucky (haven’t even announced this yet) to have hired an operator. She’s absolutely incredible and we’re so lucky to have her.
She’s getting ramped quickly on filling machines and it’s allowed us to start to focus on the next stages of growth.
We’re so excited for her to grow with us and be able to take on more as we scale.
The main focus for vending is:
- Get our 2 contracted micro-markets live
- This is proving to be a HEAVY lift. Anyone that says ‘cool, I’ll start vending and then do micro-markets’ better have a lot of time to get it off the ground.
It’s a lot of work. But we’re bullish on increasing revenue at some already proven locations - Added services
- Break-room Services: with our operator in seat, we’re going to start testing break-room services. We’ll stock your break-room with snacks, drinks and fresh food weekly and take the burden off of founders / owners or admins to do this. The best part of this is there’s zero additional cost to StockNSnack to grow.
- If you know anyone that could benefit from a service like this, I’d love to meet them. You can reply to this email or email blake@stocknsnack.com
- Subscription snack boxes: Saas. Snacks as a service. It’s beautiful. With Appleton Electronics and vending, we’ve gotten pretty good at simple warehouse logistics and distribution. With that infrastructure in place, it’s makes perfect sense to test a subscription snack box that just shows up to your office 1x a month (or however often). This gives is infinite scale across the US and doesn’t come with limitations of geo-based growth like vending or break-room services. For small teams or remote teams that want to deliver small snack boxes to employees, we can provide the variety and consistency of keeping the break-room stocked.
- If you know anyone that could benefit from this, please shoot me a note. I’m looking for early testers.
Sponsors / Affiliates
I’ve lumped in partners here which is a majority of the revenue.
I’m new to affiliate stuff, but I noticed late in the year that I had 1 affiliate that I had put a link somewhere and made over $1,500. I hadn’t checked it all year because I forgot about it.
When I did, I was blown away.
My #1 focus here is this weekly blog post. Same time, same day. Just building the consistent habit.
This is not an easy task but I’ve re-structured my content calendar so I can produce content weekly without having to shift my focus on everything else going on.
I’m most excited about this one as it’s a completely new skill for me.
I have no idea what to expect and have never done it before.
As always, if you have experience with Sponsors for blogs or events please shoot me a note. If you know someone that would consider advertising here to 5,000 entrepreneurs & sales people, I’d appreciate an intro.
Thank you so much for following a long, I’m blown away at the kindness of many of you as you reach out to share what you’re building or looking to buy.
It’s not easy sharing all the details of this stuff but I like how it puts me in a vulnerable position. It’s a forcing function to get uncomfortable and learn faster.
If you know anyone interested in buying or building SMBs, please share this with them!
Build your Side Hustle Now
I decided to go all in on consulting exactly 13 months ago.
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Might as well start by selling your experience online.
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