If you take some time to do the 6 steps I suggest below, I honestly believe you’ll add an extra 10k to your business within the next 12 months. And yes, it involves beer.
The underlying idea is that we all have unleveraged assets in our businesses. These assets are extremely valuable; however, we aren’t using them to generate additional income. All you’ll need is a notebook, pen, and a cup of coffee cold beer. Really, booze is actually helpful for this exercise. Studies have shown alcohol produces better ideas! Drink beer when brainstorming and coffee when executing.
Here is are the steps to take:
1. Make a list of all of the assets you own, control, or can use to your advantage. I suggest blocking an hour for this step and you should really force yourself to just keep listing assets for the entire hour. More than likely, you’ll run out of assets to list within the first 10 to 15 minutes. Just hang in there and stick with it. I promise you’ll have more assets and it might take some extra time thinking to identify them. (As an example, a few assets you have are your database, your past clients, your current clients, your advertisements, your testimonials, and your sales presentations. These are just high level assets. You have many more.)
2. On a blank page, write the first asset you identified on your list across the top. Now start to list every idea you can think of to extract income from this ONE asset. (In my example, I would start with my database and list every idea I could think of to generate additional income from my existing database.)
3. Repeat step number 2 with every asset you’ve listed in step 1. When you finish listing ideas to extract income from all of the assets you’ve identified, you’ll have dozens of ideas that you can implement to generate additional income from assets you already control.
4. Review all of the ideas you’ve identified in step 3 to generate income from your assets and select the top 3 income generation ideas. By the top 3, I mean the ideas with the potential to generate the MOST income.
5. Setup a plan to implement just the top 3 ideas. Don’t go crazy trying to implement every idea. You will be overwhelmed and it will only slow you down because you’ll be distracted away from the best ideas. 80% of additional income will come from just 20% of your ideas. Stay focused on the 20%.
6. Block time in your calendar 3 months down the road to do this same exercise again. You’ll want to repeat this exercise 3 or 4 times a year because your assets change constantly. You’ll see opportunities faster and can accelerate the additional income generated.
This exercise helps us to “see” income opportunities we already have available to us. The best part is most of the ideas you identify will not require a significant financial investment and can typically be turned into income very quickly.
So go grab an ice cold beer and get started!
