How to get quick results in business and in life

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Today’s post is a transcript of a podcast I created that shares how you can get quick results in business or in life.

See, I recently started selling physical goods on Shopify. I was able to make my first $5k in gross profits within 8 days and $8800 in 14 days (7 of which I was on vacation).

In this episode, I share how I was able to get such quick results.

You can use the same 7 step process I used for anything that you want to accomplish in business or life.

Here’s the (cleaned up) transcript:

Hello, this is Rachel Rofe.

Today’s show is all about how to get quick results in business or life, and it’s by request.

As always, if you have any requests for a podcast episode, head to rachelrofe.com/questions and ask.

To get started, I should share some back story.

See, I’ve been sharing results with my email list lately about my Shopify store. Shopify is a service you can use to easily sell all kinds of things like physical items, like stickers, mugs, necklaces, or digital goods.

I’ve personally been using it to sell physical goods and have been LOVING my results. I opened up my first store on July 27th and made my first $5k in 8 days.

In about 2 weeks, I made over $8,800. One of those weeks I barely touched my computer as I was on vacation.

(I’m of course not saying this is typical – it’s just been my experience.)

As I’ve been playing around with Shopify, I’ve been emailing my list and sharing what’s going on and how things are going. I actually have 2 Shopify stores now (more on that in a moment) and have shared results from both stores.

Tim Castleman read my emails and suggested that I share a post about how I can get get such fast results with the different things that I teach.  I thought this was a great idea, so here we are.As I explain this to you, I’m going to share how  I was able to get such good results with Shopify first. It’s going to sound a little business-focused, but you can really apply my method to all kinds of things in life.

There are 7 steps to getting fast results:

1. Only buy or take time to listen to things you’ll actually use.

So many of us talk about how we have hard drives or book shelves full of things that we never look at.

If you’re not going to use it, don’t buy it. You’re wasting your money, psychic energy, and you start to train your subconscious that you don’t use what you buy.

If you’re going to buy something, make sure it works with your long-term plans. This applies to ALL kinds of products – business, weight loss, relationship advice, whatever you’d like to work on.

2. Have a strong study:action ratio.

If you spend a lot of time researching, it’s taking away from time you could be spending taking action.

I like to do a minimum of 3 hours of action to 1 hour of studying.

I was recently invited to speak at an event in Las Vegas. As I was leaving, a woman followed me out and asked me for advice. She shared how she’d been studying marketing for a year now, bought all kinds of courses, spent all kinds of money, but hadn’t started anything of her own yet. She wanted to know what advice I could give her.

I immediately told her that she needed to up her study:action ratio – at least to 2 hours of action for every 1 hour of study – so that she could finally see some results.

This ratio is important for all kinds of things. Take weight loss for example: you could spend tons of time reading about vegan diets, paleo, raw food, etc… and get so consumed with reading that you never take action.

Conversely, if you read about paleo and decide it might be good for you, you could immediately get into taking action of making shopping lists, cooking, and then measuring how it’s going for you (which we’ll talk about more shortly).

3: Create something work-able/make a minimum viable product.

As I’ve shared, I actually have 2 Shopify stores.

I started my first one on July 2nd.

Here’s how it went down:

10amish: I open up a Shopify training product that has about 30 videos. I decide to go through the first 3 or 4.

11amish: I decide what type of store I’d like to create.

11:47am: I buy a domain.

1:45pm: I made my store live. (In that time, I’d already found inventory to re-sell and put it on the site.)

Obviously I could have made the store a zillion times better, but I wanted to get testing to see what would happen. I’ll share with you in a second, but before I do…

The point to this step is to say that it’s important to get to a minimum viable “product”. It doesn’t need to be perfect, just workable. And when I say “product”, it could mean all kinds of things: a shopping list if you want to lose weight, an email asking somebody for something that you want that you don’t re-read a million times, etc.

Here’s the next step:

4. Take concentrated action on it.

Concentrated action means to take the significant action that will help you get results (or not). This could mean eating the food you need to lose weight, sending the email, or whatever it is you want to get results on.

In my Shopify example, this meant “send some traffic to it”.

So, as I said:

11:47 am: Bought a domain

1:45pm: Made my store live

2:01 pm: Posted it on Facebook

3pm: Got my first order

That’s a sale in 3 hours 13 minutes (and I was on a 30 minute phone call in the meantime). Here are the screenshots:

Of course, I could’ve tried to make my store perfect. But that’s boring. And I know that over-analyzing leads to inaction. The more we think about things, the more overwhelming it gets, and the more we start to think about potential problems. By then we bombard ourselves with so many things that could go wrong that we don’t want to ever actually get started.

With this store, I ended up getting 56 sales in less than a week.

I was so motivated by this that I opened up my new store – the one that’s made over 5 figures now.

5: Measure results.

Your next step is to measure results.

Have you lost weight? Have you made money? Did you get the promotion? Did the person respond the way you wanted?

In my case, I created a spreadsheet to make sure I was profitable. Sales are great, but I wanted to make sure I was making a net profit.

I calculated every single cost – the membership to Shopify, the fees they took out, the Facebook ads, the Pinterest ads, how much I paid for inventory, and so on.

If I was losing money, I would’ve tried to make some tweaks to become profitable. If I couldn’t have become profitable, I would have stopped here.

In my case, I was very profitable, so I kept going to step #6:

6: Learn more.

If things are going well, you can justify investing more time into learning more.

For my example, after my initial work proved profitable and I was making money, I decided I wanted to know how to make it even better. I went through more videos in the training, then tweaked my product even more.

I decided to hire a mentor who was getting even better results than me. I knew if the concept worked on a small scale, I could supercharge to make it even better.

To clarify, people choose mentors for all kinds of reasons. I chose to hire someone because I’d already gotten great results, had clear questions to ask, and knew this person was doing better than me.

I didn’t hire him because I was hopeful that this could work. I had proof.

I also asked him before I hired him if I’d be able to earn back his fee that first month if I implemented what he taught me and he said yes.

It’s helpful to be very intentional with who you work with.

7. Respond to obstacles positively.

As you’re working on things, obstacles will probably arise. It’s life. You might have technical issues, not lose weight, get a response you didn’t want, etc.

For me, I experienced a few technical issues as I was putting my store together because I’d set some things up wrong. I undercharged people for shipping, made it so people could order tons of a free item, and so on.

Instead of making that mean anything, I just course-corrected.

I contacted Shopify support for the technical issues. I changed the shipping rates. I found an app that limits the quantities of things people can add to their cart.

I’ve actually read about many successful people who accepted challenges without knowing what they were taking on. They just took on the new challenges and decided to course correct along the way.

This might not work for everyone, but if you can rise to a challenge, it does help you get more done than you thought you could because you don’t have time to convince yourself otherwise.

I hope this helps give you some good ideas on how to make something in your life happen.

If you have any questions about this, want me to go into anything in more detail, or have another question for me, let me know! I’m available on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or you can submit a question right here.

Thanks for listening and have a great day!

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