How do you get from where you are to be where you want to be in life? Well for me what works best is talking small steps towards my goals.
Continue reading “How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be in Life”
How do you get from where you are to be where you want to be in life? Well for me what works best is talking small steps towards my goals.
Continue reading “How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be in Life”
2017 has come and gone in gone in what seems like a blink of an eye. As I sit down and write this post on New Years Day 2018 and reflect on the past year I am so thankful for everything I have been blessed with and my accomplishments in 2017.
I went back and reviewed my goals for 2017 and will provide an update to how things went and what insight I have gained this year.
Conferences
Microconf
WordCampUS
In addition to these goals I did several months of 30 days challenges. Here’s a few I did.
March – no social media, FB can be toxic and most people are addicted to it and don’t even know it.
April – daily exercise, using the 7 minute workout I referred to above.
May – cold showers, I would turn the water as cold as I could get for about 20 seconds. Post forth coming on why this year.
July– daily meditation, used the Clam app, more to come on this as well.
August – read every night, no tv
So there you have it, not to mention I was so blessed in so many other ways in 2017. I was able to take my kids to Disney 3 times this year. Yes, we are Disney nerds. More to come on this as well. I have Disney down to a science and will share my strategy.
On New Year Eve as I laid in bed prior to Midnight I was thinking about everything I wanted to do and accomplish this year. I hope I can recall everything because I had it perfect in my head 🙂
Anyway, here it goes… Ezra Firestone of Smart Marketer talks about the importance of having a motto to drive your Business and Life. So after doing to some reflecting and thinking here’s mine. Gratitude, Give and Grow. This is what will drive my goals for Business and Life going forward.
If you do some research of what actually makes people happy and gives you long-lasting joy you’ll see that gratitude and contributing back are driving forces. It’s crucial you also get clear on the difference between pleasure and joy as well. Pleasure is short, joy is long-lasting.
This year I plan to start my days ( I did this some in the past but this year everyday) with a morning ritual where I give gratitude through prayer and just focusing on things I am truly grateful for and happy about.
Most people focus on what they don’t have all the time. Try focusing on what you do have and see how that makes you feel.
In addition to gratitude I plan to add visualization to my morning ritual. I would have never became debt free or have a business, etc… if I hadn’t visualized these things. You have to know where you want to go to get there.
Meditation will also be a part of my morning ritual. I did a 30 day challenge this part year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have a very busy mind as I’m sure most people do. Meditation helps calm a busy mind and build your focus and clarity muscle. Your ability to focus will determine how successful you are.
Also I’ll will be adding some form of exercise. Jogging or a workout. I’m not looking to become Arnold Schwarzenegger, but I am looking to become fit and healthy.
A major part of becoming healthy is your diet. This too will be a focus this year. More raw and less meat and processed. I made great strides in this last year. This year it’s a focus.
So the goal this year to is implement this morning ritual everyday and be mind and body health focused.
Up next my business. Just like every business, the goal is to grow. Last year I did a lot of consuming on the topic of marketing, this year will be focused more on implementing these things I have learned and blogging about the results.
In the department of giving back. This blog will become a lot more active this year I’ll document and share my knowledge and journey and hopefully will inspire other to achieve whatever it is they want in life.
Ultimately the goal is to be thankful for and enjoy my life, my family, friends, help others, to grow and enjoy the process. I also realize that I don’t have it all figured out, there is no such thing as perfection and that’s OK Gratitude, Give, Grow
So here’s to a great 2018 and remember there is no such thing as failure. Any situation you can label as a failure or as a painful you can find a lesson in if you look hard enough and apply it to the greater good. Cheers to you and to life!
I hate debt and I’m sure most everyone does, but for the majority of people (8 out of 10) it’s normal to have debt and be in debt most of your lives and even take it to the grave. I mean you have to have a house, a car, education and things right? And all these “things” take massive amounts of cash which most people simply do not have working a normal 9-5 day job so they take out large loans. Add a wife and kids to the picture and most people live paycheck to paycheck. A slave to debt. So what’s the answer?
Well for me the answer was living within my means and I knew I had to make more money than what a normal day job would pay if I truly wanted to be come debt free and own a house, provide for my family and not worry about money in the long term.
The way I see it is if you are tied to a fixed income then you need to become really good at saving and minimizing expenses to chip away at your debt. This is a long play for most people. The other option is to live the American dream and start your own business where your earning potential is nearly limitless.
Ever since I graduated college I made this clarification and I knew I wanted to run my own business. I was never satisfied working for someone else and I knew my time would be better spent making my life better as opposed to some company. But I had no choice, businesses just don’t start themselves and they are hard.
So after college I took a day job and I was making just enough to live. So essentially I was working to live. That year I set my goal to start a business and one day own my house, cars and things outright and not have to worry about debt. That was 18 years ago (from setting my goal) and this month, I’m happy to say, “I became 100% debt free!” And yes it does feel incredible but it was a hard fought battle.
How did I become debt free? Well I must say it was not easy. After graduating college I took a day job at a startup in Nashville. At night I started working on a business idea I had dreamt up and it took me about a year or more to build out my first version. I was new to programming so I was also essentially teaching myself how to program at the same time.
I ended up launching a band website builder called eArtistManagement and since I lived in Nashville I knew a few people would I could get to instantly start using it. So I launched and I think the first month I got 2 or 3 signs ups at $15 per month. Needless to say I was excited. But the next month I got no signs ups. I thought I could just build something and people would flock to it. I had no idea about marketing at that time and it would take a while to learn that lesson. Over the next 5 years or so the website chugged along and at the peak I think I was making around $1000 per month off the site and while this is not wildly successful it did prove I could make money on the internet and it afforded me some extra income.
I continued to work my day job and hone my programming skills at night on the site adding features which I thought would attract people. At one point I decided to rebuild the site on a new platform at that time called WordPress. I thought it would be easier to add these features since WordPress had a plugin system. I spent a year porting the site over to WordPress. Launched and crickets. No more new customers and my revenues stayed about the same.
So I did what any good programmer would do, I built a new page builder for another niche without doing any research. This time I built a custom page builder for Facebook. I thought since Facebook was a social network it would be easily for people to discover my product and to get to new customers. This was around 2010. I spent a year building this new platform on Google App Engine and learning to program in Python. I remember thinking to myself since this is going to be huge I need to be able to scale. Again I had no clear concept of marketing, product market fit and I certainly did not need to worry about scaling. I launched and nothing.
At this point I really didn’t know what to do next. I was married now living in Charleston, SC and had two mortgage payments. My wife and I had both bought property before getting married and the housing market crash. We had around a half million dollars worth of debt between our houses, cars, student loans and credit cards. I was drinking about every night and smoking around a pack of cigarettes a day. I was not happy or healthy. I was still working a day job and thinking this can’t be the rest of my life. Also my first child was on the way and I knew I had to keep searching for a way to provide for my family and a way to achieve my goal of owning a business and being debt free.
Somehow I found a website called Micropreneur Academy. It’s tag line was something like “Where solo software developers learn to develop and market their first product“. I thought this is perfect, while I was not the best developer in the world I knew I could build anything I could imagine. I was just missing the marketing secret sauce, I thought.
I instantly signed up and was eager to learn the marketing side so I could solve all my problems and learn why what I had built previously had failed. I consumed as much info as I could in the Academy. Being a developer, marketing is a hard skill to learn and I’m still learning to this day.
I realized it was time for me to shut down all my other products and and use their blue print to find a new product that had an audience.
Since I had learned WordPress in and out porting my band builder application to it and the WordPress theme market was coming to life during that time, I thought I could build a WordPress theme as my next product. The theme I had in mind would be geared toward SaaS companies.
In the academy I learned that you should test your idea before you actually build something. Essentially put up a coming soon page and drive traffic to it and see how many leads and interest you can generate. I went looking for a good coming soon plugin and could not find one. So again being a developer I built one and released it for free on WordPress.org.
A few months later, while I did have some interest in the new theme idea, it still was not generating quite the buzz I thought. But at the same time something strange had happened. My free Coming Soon Page plugin had become quite popular on WordPress.org. I think in the first couple of months the plugin had gotten over 10,000 downloads and I had people posting to the forums and emailing me for features. The WordPress plugin market was in it’s infancy at this point.
Then it hit me! This is the product. I spent about a month putting together a pro version and then released it to people who had asked for the features. September 14th, 2011 I made my first sale. Ever since then I have been making sales, learning to market and growing the business keeping my goal of becoming debt free in mind. Slowly I started chipping away at my debt.
Did I also mention that I had been working a day job this entire time as well, even after my plugin sales exceeded my day job I kept it for insurance and just incase the business went boom. I have a wife and two kids to provide for and while I could have left I wanted to see it through.
So here we are almost twenty years later and I have reached my goal. It’s an amazing feeling and even though the battle has been won I still have many more new goals and and new journeys that await.
I also just want to communicate that whatever it is in your life that you want or want to change, never give up and keep on keeping on. During this journey there were times I got down and burned but I keep going. Always find the “why” to the things you do. When my kids were born it was major motivation for me to keep going and never give up and ultimately it’s family who motivate me to do the things I do. Thanks to WordPress for being an open platform and thanks to Rob Walling and Mike Taber for building the academy and sharing their knowledge.
What to find out what’s next for me? Keep an eye out for my 2017 Year In Review and 2018 Goals Post.
I wanted to write this blog post mainly as an accountability tool for myself. At the beginning of the year I wrote out my goals for 2017 and just wanted to give an update on how things were going. BTW it’s crazy how half this year is already gone.
Here were the goals I listed for 2017 and an update for each one:
OK so that’s it, so far I’m pretty happy with my progress. To keep up my momentum I’m going to start doing monthly challenges every month to help me improve on the areas of my life and business that I want. So subscribe and keep up with my progress. I’ll be announcing my July challenge which I have already started later this week.
2016 has been another great year for me personally and for my business. I feel very blessed for everything I have and I still get excited and motivated about what’s to come. Ever since I started my business back in 2011 the main focus has to become financially independent of any debt. Including a house payment. This summer if everything goes as planned I will have achieved that dream of being 100% debt free!
Aside from being debt free, part of the reason I wanted to start a business was to have more time with my family and enjoy seeing my kids grow up. 2016 I thought would be the year I would quit my day job to have more time but as I approached my goal of becoming debt free I wanted to keep my income stream as high as possible to complete my goal as fast as possible. Other goals I had this year were to read and write more. I signed up for a service called Blinkist which basically breaks down books into 15 – 20 minutes reads. I love this service. I usually read around 3 titles a week. Also in the second half of 2016 I gave up social media for a short time to try to better my writing skills. I would say it worked. Every time I went to go waste time on social media I wrote instead. I was more productive at writing in those 30 days as I was the whole rest of the year. While I back on social media I now only check it a few times a day.
As with most everyone else I had the goal of becoming more fit and making better food choices. I had a big problem with staying consistent with this in 2016. In 2017 I plan to do a 30 day challenge to form a habit in both areas.
My business grew 6% from the previous year and it has grown 132% from 2012. I think I found a way to break through a revenue plateau I have been fighting the last couple of years. If things go as predicted I should see a 15+% increase this year. I still remain a solo entrepreneur and I still have a day job. I don’t plan to change this in the immediate future but will review this every 3 months.
This year I did a major revamp of my flagship plugin, Coming Soon Page Pro, and made my own version of the WordPress customize to make edits in the plugin. I thinks it my best version of the plugin by a long shot and very proud of the work and performance of it. I also released a few other small plugins in an effort to increase my average revenue per user. This seems to be working. More experimenting in 2017.
I also released a platform independent Coming Soon Page builder which you can find at https://comingsoonpage.com This has for the most part has been a failure. With a WordPress product there a clearly defined marketing channels. When you venture outside this ecosystem they channels are more blurred and I’m not interested in doing paid ads at the movement. So for now I have focused that site to be freemium with the hope of organic growth, but it won’t be a focus this year.
OK, so I’m going to change it up this year. While I am going to set yearly goals they will be generic. And to be honest most people all have the same yearly goals. To gain more wealth, become more fit, eat better, and in general become a better person, right.
This year I’m going to set more defined monthly goals and write about them each month in an effort to better achieve my yearly goals. This will also help me write more and find my voice which is a goal.
Here are my generic 2017 Goals:
January 2017 Goals
A few days ago I set a 30 day challenge for myself to quite using Facebook and Twitter. My motivation for this was 2 fold.
I felt I had become addicted to social media, without even thinking I would be checking my phone to see the latest on Twitter and Facebook all day long and in any situation. And while there is a lot of great content on these platforms it was over taking my day, controlling me and my actions like someone addicted to smoking. Once I recognized this I decided it was time to take action. So here’s the plan.
With the time I free up I plan on creating content rather than consuming content. This includes writing blog posts like the one you are reading now to share my entrepreneurial experiences and to write more blog posts on my business’s blog to help promote it.
In the last few days I have caught myself unlocking my phone to check Facebook an Twitter even though I have deleted the apps. If this wasn’t a sign I was addicted then I don’t know what is. I now recognize this behavior and makes me want to even more limit my usage.
After 30 days I do plan to go back to using Facebook and Twitter but in a very limited fashion and not leaving them open on my desktop all day long or checking my phone every few minutes.
I’m on day 3 currently and can all ready tell a difference. With my free time I have already written over 300o words in blog post content. I’ll do a follow up post after the 30 days which should be around November 18th 2016.
2014 was another successful year. There were some goals I accomplished but also some I failed at as well. Over all a blessed and great year.
Revenue from my Coming Soon Plugin for WordPress grew by around 10%. I had intended on releasing another major plugin in 2014 but the rebuild of my Coming Soon plugin took a bit longer than I had thought. My goal was to 2x my revenue. Unfortunately I missed it but the important thing is I know why. I focused this year more on developing than marketing and the numbers show.
One of my other goals was to release https://www.sellwp.co a SaaS for selling WordPress theme and plugins. I spent the first quarter getting this product ready. I released it in limited beta and got lots of awesome feedback. However I quickly realized this would be a slow revenue ramp. I decided to halt the product to the public. My plugins were making more money and it didn’t make sense for me to switch gears to a slow ramp SaaS since I still work a day job and have limited time. I still think this is a viable product however. I get weekly request wanting to know when it will be ready.
2014 was also going to be the year I quit my day job. Well I’m still work a day job…What happened? We had another baby. My wife and I were blessed with my son in September of this year and I took 3 months off to be with him. During that time I evaluated whether I should quit my day job and or not and if it felt right. I decided that I wanted to get my other plugin out the door to see if I could replicate my current success. I wanted to reassure myself I was not a one hit wonder. Plus I want more runway with another child.
I attended two conferences this year. Pressnomics (WordPress Business Conference) and Microconf ( Self Funded StartUp Conference). I was honored to present an attendee talk this year at Microconf.
Both of these are A+ conferences and I can’t stress how much networking has to do with your success.
One goal I badly missed was blogging more. I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve created a blog post. This is going to be one of my main goals for 2015.
This year was the first year in my family’s new home.
I welcomed the birth of my son Jake Dylan Turner.
We’re putting a pool Clark!
My daughter is learning to ride a bike.
Also I started jogging this year which was one of my goals from last year. I jogged consistently up until my son was born. I have been slacking a bit but plan to make it part of my routine again in the new year.
In no particular order here are my goal for the new year.
So that’s it. I’m truly blessed and grateful for everything 2014 has given me and my family.
Here’s to an awesome, healthy and prosperous 2015.
Cheers!
2013 was an incredibly busy and awesome year in my personal and professional life. I accomplished most of what I set out to do this year but I have a few goals that will carry over.
Personal Life
We sold our house in April and lived in my father-in-laws river house for 8 month while my family and I searched for a new house. Did I mention I had no internet for 8 months. I used my cell connection the entire time to run my business. To say that was challenging is an understatement. We finally found a house in late September, remodeled it in late October and November and moved in December. We got settled in just in time for Christmas. The whole process of moving was extremely time consuming and really dominated most of my time and thoughts in 2013. I ‘m super glad to finally be settled and don’t plan to move again for a long time!
Other notable moments include: My daughter turned 3 and is really becoming quite the princess 🙂 We made 2 trips to Disney World this summer. My wife and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. Overall we have been extremely fortunate in 2013 and I am so grateful for that.
Professional Life
One of my goals for 2013 was to quite my day job. While my business has enough income to do this I needed to have my day job to get a loan and make the process of buying a house go smoothly. So I worked a day job and on my business at night this year. For 2014 I do plan to accomplish this goal once I get my reserves built back up.
I 2x my business, SeedProd, income from 5 figures in 2012 to 6 figures in 2013. I attended Pressnomics in Arizona. And I started the planning of a WordCamp in Charleston for 2014. I didn’t get to grow my business as much as I’d like in 2013 since I was working a day job and moving but I have some high expectation for myself in 2014.
Goals for 2014
I really want to focus on my business this year and quit my day job.
In no particular order here are my goals:
So that’s it! 2013 in a nutshell and my goals for 2014.
Here’s to an awesome New Year and I hope this is the best for you so far as well!