Week 2023#30: accountability
What I learned from the "12 Week Year"
Our unexpectedly large group of people who watched the Barbie movie together at Kino Sõprus. What was special about this group:
half of the people didn’t know each other,
nobody had any expectations toward the movie.
We had a blast after the movie and conversations flowed naturally in ever-changing subgroups.
Eventually, F-Hoone kicked us out because they were closing 😄
Scoring the week
Since I finished working through “The 12 Week Year”, I’ve decided to use this space for holding myself accountable (in public, yay!).
My 12 Week Plan, scheduled to end on the 16th of October, has a singular goal: reach a turnover of 5000 EUR for Decode Estonian.
This goal is derived from my larger vision (“have a business that generates enough income so that I don’t need a job in 3 years”) - the book does a reasonably good job at helping you with finding your vision.
Currently, I’m sitting at €1,553.45, out of which €8.1 was earned in Week 30 🥲.
The 12 Week Plans you are setting for yourself are built around what the book calls “keystone actions” – things that bring you closer to your goal.
For every keystone action, you define the frequency (e.g. weekly or daily, or whatever makes sense for the activity).
Given my goal, there are two levers I can pull at the moment to have more turnover:
give more workshops and sell tickets,
get more paid subscribers on the website (paid subscribers get access to exclusive content: small grammar lessons)
Secondary actions I identified:
make sales calls (one per working day, haha) to business: this would generate more opportunities for workshops, which in turn yields more opportunities for increasing turnover,
write more grammar lessons to convince people to pay for the content I produce
I’ve started tracking my execution (= what I’m actually doing) and the outcome (= turnover) in a spreadsheet here.
Outcome
Staring at the numbers every day actually pushed me to do something.
In one week I wrote more grammar articles than in the last 6 months combined.
Because now I know why this is important.
That was the good news!
Where I failed completely was making sales calls.
I didn’t even make a single call.
Thinking about why this happened: I didn’t know who to call and was too lazy to figure it out.
The uncertainty around the process (“how would I even find the right person to call?”) caused enough friction for me to not take action.
My plan to address this is to get a LinkedIn Sales Navigator and reach out to as many people as possible given the limits of my subscription. Cold outreach via InMail will count as a sales call for keeping score next week.