The Secret to Entrepreneurial Success Focus on Activity, Not Just Sales Goals

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3:01Based on average annual single line of payment of AT &T, Verizon, and T-Mobile customers compared to 12 months on the Boost Mobile unlimited wireless plan as of January, 2026. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com. So this is something that's very important for people that's in business because it all comes down to sales. I know you're going to talk about sales, right? No matter what you're doing as an entrepreneur, you're selling something. You're either, if you're in a restaurant, you're selling food. If you are in clothing, you're selling clothes, items, right? If you are a hairstylist, you're selling your services, which is you're doing people's hair, right?

3:35Everything is sales. Everything is sales in business. That's the key component. Now, I do think this is something that I learned because I come from a sales background. When I was in insurance and financial services, I was commission-based. So I made a living by selling products and I got a commission from that product. So if you're in sales, you know that that's a difficult thing to do because your income fluctuates, right? You have a good month, you have a terrible month, but if you don't sell something, you're not going to get paid. But it's important because it teaches you things that entrepreneurs need to learn.

4:10So I used to say my goal was to make$100 ,000 in a year, right? And I used to get frustrated because I wasn't hitting that goal. 24, 25 years old, I wasn't, I was not hitting that goal. Right. And there's a book called the 12 week year, which I recommend everybody read. Right. And when I really started to think about it differently, I changed the way I look at the perspective. And you spoke about this before where people, I think go about it the wrong way by saying that how much money they want to make. Right. So they, so they have a goal of making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Right. And then you just broke it down, that's like$8 ,000 a month,$8 ,900 a month, something like that.

4:56And then, so let's say that's like$2 ,000,$2 ,200 a week, something like that. So the goal is like, okay, I want to make$2 ,200 a week. The first mistake that they make is that they're saying that their goal is too big. Now, you just explained why you should break that goal down because it's more attainable. $2 ,200 a week is more attainable than$100 ,000 a year. But I think that that's still where people go wrong because they're chasing a number. What I realized is that you can't chase a number, you could chase the activity. Activity leads to the number. So in my case, when I was selling life insurance, you get a commission from the life insurance that you sell.

5:38So I can't control know how much money I make just going off of numbers because I might get a big policy and I make a lot of money or I might get a small policy and I make a little bit of money, right? What I realized is that I did the average of what my average case size was. So let's say my average case size was$1 ,000 commission, right? Then I realized what am I doing to actually get a client? So there's a few ways how you can get clients. You can cold call. You can canvas. Canvas is like go to different businesses and just pop up. Here's my business card talk. I wasn't good at cold calling and I wasn't good at canvassing, but I was good at getting referrals.

6:18That was my pipeline to get business. I was good at getting referrals. Then I realized that in my system, for every three people that I contacted, one person I would close. Right? So I realized that the numbers worked in my favor based on activity, not just a number. So what I'm saying is that I realized that in order for me to hit the financial goal, it was based on activity. I needed to get, let's say, 10 referrals every week. Every week I needed to get, let's say, 15 referrals. I needed to get 15 referrals every single week because I knew if I got 15 referrals, then I would close five people.

6:57If I close five people, that's$5 ,000. But that's still not good enough because it's like, well, how are you going to get 15 referrals? So then I have to have a system in place. How am I actually even meeting people? I had a few ways to meet people. I would go to like events and I would try to meet people from there. I would call existing clients, right? I would have my circle of influence. So you put together a project 100 of people that you know, you take them out to lunch. So now I'm breaking it down. I'm saying, okay, I need to get, my goal in this situation is to get 15 referrals. But in order for me to get 15 referrals, I have to reach out to a hundred people, right?

7:42So now the a hundred people, I have to get in contact with 100 people every single week for me to hit my goal. Now I break that down. Let's say I'm working five days, Monday through Friday. I have to, I have to get in front of 20 people, right? I don't physically have to get in front of 20 people, but I got to talk to 20 people. So now I have Tuesday through Wednesday. I'm just calling. That's my call days. So in that day, I'm going to talk to 40 people on the calls. You could talk to 40 people in three days. That's very realistic, right? Thursday is carved out for in-person. I'm going to go to as many, I'm gonna go to like two different networking events if I can.

8:21In New York, I'm gonna go anywhere, Chamber of Commerce, because I got to meet people on that. And then Friday was my coffee day where I'm getting in front of old clients, new clients, people that I just went to college with. So what I'm saying is that that idea of just making the money wasn't working out for me. But when I realized that the money was a byproduct of the action and the activity, See, I can control the activity. I can't control the outcome, right? I can't control if I'm going to sell you what you're going to buy. But I know if I do enough activity, the odds are in my favor to reach that goal.

9:03Now it's like, how much money do I want to make? Because now if I double my activity, I'm going to double my income. It's just a mathematical game at that point right now. With doubling the activity comes with me working twice as many hours. So now you have to say, okay, well, is it worth me? Or you can say, how can I do this more efficiently? Can I bring it? Can I work with another partner, right? Well, he can canvas, and then we split 50 50, but your volume of activity dictates your volume of income. That's something that I think is vitally important. You have to track this too. So the 12 week year, the reason why the book is called 12 week year is because they break the year down into 12 weeks, right so it's much easier to look at it from that standpoint as opposed to just canvassing the whole thing and then we had systems in place so every sunday i track my activity so you can't just leave it up to hope you can you can't you have to take hope and guess what that is right so it's an activity that i'm tracking so i'm tracking by hand at that time i got i got one referral i closed one app i did so i got a i got a whole list and every sunday i'm looking at it if i fell short on one of these three things, I'm like, okay, this week I got to make up for it.

10:19Or why did I fall short this week? You can't let more than a week go by with you having bad habits and not being disciplined to actually meeting that quota. You got to meet that quota and you have to be diligent and answer to yourself. If you don't have an accountability partner, which is good, but if you don't have an accountability partner, you got to be your own accountability partner. so that book is a very good read because it teaches you how to be extremely disciplined and like i said i'm using the example of of the life insurance but you can use that example for anything right any any form of business is sales but never worry about the money worry about the activity and the activity will be get you to the actual money earners what's up look building wealth isn't just about making money it's about knowing where your money is working for you that's why we partner with Empower.

11:13Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. Their free Empower personal dashboard gives you a complete view of your financial life in one place. Track your net worth, monitor your budget, analyze your investments, set retirement goals, and more. You've worked hard for your money. Now make sure it's working hard for you. Download the Empower personal dashboard or visit Empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored. Hi, it's Karen in Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around L.A. in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

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13:34This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.