Category: Business

The Flywheel

The Flywheel is a concept that came from Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great. He went on to further cover it in Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great.

Truth is I haven’t read either of these. But I did hear Jim Collins describe the flywheel in an interview with Tim Ferriss.

Jim states “In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”

Then I saw it covered while reading The Everything Store. I played with the concept a bit then, but didn’t get anything nailed down.

Finally, in my third exposure to the concept, late last year I read The Bezos Letters. (Shout out to Jeff and Beth McCord for giving me the book!)

This time I felt it was time to really focus on it. I’d recently started doing Computer-Free Work Days once a week. Part of the reason for that was to free me up from activity so that I could take chunks of time to think deeply about such concepts.

Make no mistake, figuring out the flywheel for a business takes some hard thinking. I sat at my whiteboard for probably two hours sketching out different versions.

Ultimately, I came to this:

I then shared it with others and my team. I reflected on it some more. No one could come up with any improvements on it.

So I handed it off to our graphic designer to make it a bit prettier and this is the result. (You’ll notice the order on the bigger wheel is switched, but that is because of the gears spinning that would be required for this to be physically real.)

In working on this, I recognized that all it is is a systems diagram (systems thinking being an area I deeply explored last year). At this level it is shown as the big picture.

But it is fractal! This means that you could zoom in to see more detail. Already I’ve spent some more time systems diagramming the business in more detail and plan to continue to do so.

Other Examples of Flywheels

In order to come up with Lost Empire Herb’s flywheel, I found it helpful to look at a number of examples. So here are a few more, and of course, you can dig around the internet to find even more.

This is Amazon’s:

A company called Noble Journal:

A blog called FutureBlind maps out the following three for Microsoft, Google and Walmart.

And then Ben Munoz’ blog shares even more:

Understanding the Loops

As you can see many people map out a single loop. But often there is more than one. These might be completely independent or touching on each other in multiple ways.

Back to Lost Empire Herbs. You can see that there are three loops, and these are made three different sizes for a reason.

Small Blue Loop

The small blue loop goes from customer experience to reviews & feedback to service & education. We live in the “review economy” nowadays. The more reviews you have the more of a network effect you have. (It’s not nearly as strong as an Uber network effect for example, but still a network effect.)

The more reviews and feedback we get the better we can do with our service and education. For example, a customer comment or question may become a blog post and/or video that is then there for future customers as well.

This in turn feeds back to greater customer experience. It is very important, but it is the smallest wheel for a reason. If we had double the reviews it likely would improve sales to a small degree, but not nearly as much as the effects from the other loops.

Core Green Loop

The mainstay of the business is our quality product selection. In this phrase we capture the quality of the products which is crucial to what we do, as well as the selection we offer. In this way the expansion into new products is covered here too.

The products are the main thing that leads to customer experience (though not everything as shown by the small blue loop).

And since it is “customer” experience this means the people are paying us money, aka revenue is coming in. If a customer has a good experience, then they come back as a customer, meaning more revenue.

Revenue gives us purchasing power. The purchasing power is then used to fund inventory, aka the quality product selection. That’s not all that revenue goes to, but a crucial part of our business.

(By the way, in looking at the flywheel examples, it seemed that people and internal systems was presupposed. I had done some flywheel drawings that added these in, but in the end I felt it didn’t need to be shown if I make the assumption that people and systems is important for every single thing shown on the flywheel which they are.)

This is the core loop in that it is the core of the business. It could potentially run without focusing on the other two loops, but this part forms the mainstay of what we do.

Big Red Loop

This is the biggest loop for a reason. Being the bigger wheel it is harder to turn, but then it accelerates everything else faster.

The purchasing power that comes from revenue doesn’t just go back into a quality product selection. Our bigger mission at Lost Empire Herbs involves making steps towards vertical integration. (Ultimately owning or controlling everything from the farms or wild-harvesting of the herbs to the delivery to the customer.)

Moving towards vertical integration takes even more purchasing power, hence it being a bigger crank and harder to turn.

But once that is done this allows for both quality improvement and cost savings that then impact that quality product selection in a big way.

We started our 2019 year planning meeting with this and I felt it got the whole team on the same page. This simple systems diagram describes our business and where we are going in the future.

Getting clear on this we’re making some steps right now on the big loop that will take some time but will pay off in big ways down the line.

(Once again, even though it is simple to look at and understanding, a lot of hard thinking went into creating it.)

I hope you’ve found this post enjoyable and helpful. If you get inspired to create your own flywheel please share the results with me in the comments.

Top Books Read from 2019

Out of the 111 books I read last year, here are some of the highlights. I’ll be saving my #1 book of the year for the following post. And if you missed it, the full list can be found in the previous post here.

With reading this many books it is possible to read quite a few around different topics. I like to consider these “Deep Dives“. These included:

All of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books (and I’ll likely re-read some next year)
Masculinity
Magick, specifically chaos magick
Systems thinking (including reading Thinking in Systems twice)
Conspiracy (aka history and biography)
Habits (in preparation of my release of HabitsOnDemand.com)
Medical intuition

A number of these will be addressed a bit more below.

Favorite Fiction Book of the Year

I only read ten fiction books this year. Most of which were Sci-Fi but not all.

It’s hard to call out a favorite of these as there were some great ones! Notable runner ups were Gates of Fire, Blood Meridian and Pandora’s Star. (The Brothers Karamazov was really good too…but it did take several hundred pages before I was really hooked. Actually the same for Pandora’s Star but the payoff at the end was worth it.)

But the award goes to Daemon by Daniel Suarez. (With the sequel Freedom™️ being right up there.)

This book has a bunch of themes that are currently present in our world and seeing them play out in a really fascinating way was great. It was also relatively short compared to some of the other monstrous novels I read.

Tip: A while back I searched for a list of top 100 science fiction books and used that to identify many titles, I’ve been reading the past couple of years. Working my way through the books that stood out to me on such a list is one reason I’ve been reading so much science fiction.

Favorite Book on Masculinity

King Warrior Magician Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

In the early part of the year I felt drawn to dive deeper into the topic of masculinity. One of my favorite articles I wrote all year was Masculinity Forged in the Gym. It’s worth reading, and covers the four archetypes mentioned here too.

I re-read a bunch of books I already had on the topic and got some new ones. Of them all, this one is my favorite. I find it a useful framework of archetypes to work with. (And truthfully, it can work for women just as well too, simply sub out King for Queen.) This led me a bit deeper into Robert Moore’s work including the topic of initiation which is interesting too.

Favorite Books on Systems Thinking

Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows

2019 was the year I got into systems thinking. And I’m kicking myself for not diving in sooner! For a long time I have thought about systems, but I finally found some great books on the topic.

Thinking in Systems is a short read. But it is so good that I read it twice in 2019. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book twice in one year, so that is saying something. I’ll be working further to understand and utilizing the Systems Traps/Opportunities and Leverage Points covered here.

The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge

And I can’t not mention The Fifth Discipline as well. This is a business book and covers other topics too, but the section on systems thinking here is worth it alone. It gives a bit of a different take on the systems, diagramming them differently as well.

Systems thinking is so important it should be taught in school. Since for 99% of people it was not, I would encourage you to educate yourself on the topic now.

Best Book on Parenting

Becoming the Parent You Want To Be by Laura Davis & Janis Keyser

I haven’t read a whole lot on parenting, but of what I’ve read so far this is my favorite. It covers a lot. One tip I heard from another parent was to read a book about development. This helps you to know what is coming. Well, this book covers that topic quite well. And on that note, I’m sure I’ll be referring to it again and again as new ages occur and new strategies are needed.

Best Book from Taleb

Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I would say that all of Taleb’s books are worth reading. I read them all this past year and there is a good chance I’ll be revisiting at least some of them in 2020 as well. Highly entertaining while being highly educational.

I’ve heard several people say that different books of his are there favorites, but for me the concept of antifragility was a big aha. I’ve been talking about it ever since, like in the health sovereign podcast. It applies to strength. It applies to health. It applies to so much. And it’s not like this book just covers the one concept but so much else.

Taleb gets a high recommendation from me!

Most Useful Business Books in 2019

I’ll cover three different books here. By most useful I mean that I took the ideas and put them into action.

One to Many by Jason Fladlien

This book is about webinars. I did two webinars in 2019. One was before I got this book and it was all over the place. The second one was much more tightly focused using the model Fladlien lays out in the book. That was The Art and Science of Habits On Demand that I did in December.

I’d like to say I crushed it and sold a boatload…but unfortunately the audio cut out during the close which, needless to say, was not the best way to sell. Still I think the webinar went really well.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

There is a lot going on in life these days. This book, is about stepping away from activity, in order to really focus on what is important. Reading this, along with some other situations, has led to me doing computer-free work days which have thus far been quite amazing. Without using a computer I’m able to focus on deep thought. I’ll likely be reading this one again at some point.

The Bezos Letters by Steve Anderson with Karen Anderson

This book shares principles gleaned from Jeff Bezos’ letters to shareowners of Amazon. There’s some great stuff in here. The distinction between type 1 and type 2 decisions (primarily, those that are reversible and those that are not) was very helpful.

In addition, it got me focused on figuring out the Flywheel for Lost Empire Herbs, which I’ll be sharing in an upcoming post. (Which happens to be a systems diagram!)

Best Science Book

Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity by Denis Noble

“There’s no privileged level of causation in biology.” -Denis Noble

I got turned onto the work of Noble from Perry Marshall (whom I interviewed recently surrounding such topics here and here.) He shared that quote at one of his seminars and I new it was important for me to learn more about.

Of Noble’s two books, this one is more recent and better. It covers a lot of similar information as Perry’s Evolution 2.0, which I highly recommend (and re-read this year). But this is a bit more technical though not overly so. And you see that a systems approach is necessary here, rather than reductionist science.

Best Mind Stretching Books

A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber

I found myself coming back to this distinction multiple times since reading this book. That is the four quadrants of the individual vs collective and the internal vs external. (The common thread of systems thinking runs through this, but is only a part, i.e. the external and collective.)

These in turn leads to the Good, the Beautiful and the True. This shows why Sam Harris trying to derive values from facts will not work. Incompatible quadrants.

That’s far from everything covered in this book, but a critical distinction, like I said, that I’ve been reflecting on a lot.

The Watchman’s Rattle by Rebecca D. Costa

Collapse. It’s something we are quite likely facing. So much of what we humans are doing right now is unsustainable. By definition, that means it will not sustain. We must either change such things…or we will go into some form of collapse.

This book takes a look at past civilizations, which pretty much all have collapsed to see why that happens. And basically the answer here is that the people stop being able to make sense of what is going on. Do you perceive that as going on right now? I sure see it.

I’ll be returning to this topic, but I did find this book a great way to dive in.

Best Biography Book

The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot

This book is about Allen Dulles, one of the early heads of the CIA.

It details how much he worked with Nazi’s after the war in his fight against the threat of communism, along with his brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State during the Eisenhower administration.

It covers the CIA coups against democratically elected leaders in Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere. (Are you aware of these? They’re common knowledge outside of the US, but for some reason aren’t taught in our schools.)

This stuff is disclosed nowadays and out in the open. But it also goes into detail of some of the stuff still hidden. Seeing Truman’s response to the CIA, when he was the president that created it, was eye-opening.

“I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”
“Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there’s nobody to keep track of what they’re up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they’ll have something to report on. They’ve become…it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.”
Former President Harry S. Truman, regarding the CIA he started

So that’s just some of my top picks from the year. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I’ll be sharing my top pick for the year in the following post.

Tech Constraints and Opportunities

I’ve been very blessed to have come of age as the internet got started and off and running. By seeing it do so, I jumped on board the wave and have been successful in doing so. (Over a decade of experience in online business makes me have more experience than most!)

Yet, throughout that time I’ve also been very, very frustrated by technology…

Long ago when I first got started in online marketing (back in 2008) I hired a web designer. Starting on a shoe-strong budget that didn’t seem a long-term viable option.

So I learned how to use HTML templates and do basic HTML coding. Not long after that I switched to easier to use WordPress for the vast majority of my websites. My coding skills never moved beyond the most basic of HTML stuff.

Technology on the internet has moved fast and vastly improved in ease of use. So many things can be done with drag and drop editors without any coding needed. Yet things have also become more confusing because there is so much that must be done.

All-in-one solutions soon enough became things that needed still more bolted on top of it. (I’m talking about you Infusionsoft.)

A friend of mine called his websites and business a Frankenstein monster seemingly held together by duct tape.

I feel his pain, all too much!

For instance, with Lost Empire Herbs, our inability to make sales funnels quickly has hampered us big time in the marketing department. Making them wasn’t the problem so much, as was connecting to our limited merchant providers, CRM, fulfillment, etc.

Clickfunnels made building pages easy but did not play well with much else we were using.

And with Legendary Strength, I’ve been on some old systems basically since beginning. (Does anyone else still use 1ShoppingCart?) While still functional, these have held me back from growing.

I’ve tried several options to fix these problems with varying degrees of success (aka mostly not).

Feeling like I’m banging my head against the wall I’ve thought that it could be simpler to start over from scratch!

But I found something that does seem like it’ll help me out significantly. It’s still early in the game but from what I’ve seen so far, I’ve got some big plans.

So much so that all of Legendary Strength is moving over to it.

My new solution is Kartra.

More than anything else I’ve seen on the market today, this does seem to be the most complete all-in-one solution for internet marketing available.

Page builder
Optins
CRM
Email broadcasts and sequences
Products (both physical and digital)
Checkouts and order pages
Memberships
Affiliate program
Even a helpdesk

And with everything integrated together, guess what? It makes analytics much easier! (Along with the Frankenstein monster, getting good measurements on things becomes very rough too. And without knowing the right numbers it is tough to grow on a budget.)

No program is perfect, but this does look like it’ll solve some of my biggest problems.

As I mentioned, I’ll using Kartra for some new projects. (Like with habit change. Updates on those coming soon…)

And I’ll be moving a bunch of old stuff over to this new platform. This will take some time but on another good note, I’ll actually SAVE money in doing this because I’ll be using less overall SaaS platforms. Hundreds of dollars per month for something that works better. I’m sold!

I’ve already shifted the LoganChristopher.com optin and email list to it. So writing this post and sending it out was my first live test of the system.

I figured it was worth a mention to anyone else that’s suffering from the same problems I am.

This is an affiliate link, so I do get a commission if you sign up, but as you know I’d never promote anything I didn’t believe in.

If you’re interested in hearing more, including the details of the transition, let me know in the comments below.

Featured on Starter Story

How did Lost Empire Herbs get started? Well, it wasn’t even called Lost Empire back then!

Recently, I worked with Starter Story to share the story of the beginnings and how that has led up to today.

This covers some things that have not been shared anywhere else including numbers and stats, what’s worked, what hasn’t and many of the resources that helped get us to where we are today.

You can check it out here.

https://starterstory.com/stories/how-i-started-a-seven-figure-supplements-business

Feel free to ask any questions there or here.

And while I’m at it, I’ll also point you to a recent podcast episode I did with Grow Ensemble that also talks a bit about the behind-the-scenes of the herb business.

https://growensemble.com/logan-christopher-lost-empire-herbs/

How to Be More Personally Productive with a Trello Board

Personally, my experience in entrepreneurship has gone hand-in-hand with learning to maximize my personal productivity. For many years, being a one man show, the more I got done, the more I made.

Eventually my journey of entrepreneurship has come to involve an ever-growing team. While I’m still certainly involved, I get far more done by having my team be productive.

When I found out about Trello, I fell in love with it. Plus it’s free! Previously I ran my day off of a Planner Pad, but decided I could do better with Trello. That’s what I’m using to this day. Of course, how I’ve used it has changed up a bit.

Of course, Trello can be used in a wide variety of ways. Previously I did cover how I use it to collect writing topics. It’s also great for managing team projects. But it also can be used just by yourself to manage your time. It’s this latter category that I’m covering today.

Basic Scrum Board

The basic way to use Trello is to setup what is known as a scrum or kanban board. Why I like Trello more than other project management software is that it is visually driven and things are easily dragged-and-dropped.

With this basic board you make three columns:

To Doing – Doing – Done

Here is an example, which hasn’t been worked on in some time, though I am thinking about getting it finished now.

You’ll notice that there are six different things in the To Do column. There is nothing in Doing. And there are two finished things (from long ago!) in Done.

In essence, this is a glorified to-do list. But you can recognize better when you’re doing something and when it’s done with this format. Still, not too useful until we add in even more. That brings us to the…

Advanced Scrum Board

As you can see there are quite a few more columns going on here. This is a live and working board from which I run Legendary Strength LLC. off of.

Notice that you still have the same Doing and Done columns. Those function the same. But much else is changed.

To Do (Week)

At the end of each week, I plan out the next. That involves moving or adding cards to this column. And at the end of the week, ideally, this column should be empty.

In this format, I consider the Doing column as my To-Do list for the day. If you can squint your eyes you’ll see LC.com Resume Articles in there. Hey, I’m doing that right now!

Waiting

Remember that this is a personal productivity method covered here. Well, often these projects involve other people.

And if something is done on my end, but I’m awaiting response or something else from other people, before I can take more action, into the Waiting column it goes. It doesn’t go into Done because it is not yet done.

Backlog

Backlog is another concept that comes from the Scrum method. Everyone has an ever-growing to-do list right? Wrong! Instead new ideas should simply get put onto the backlog as you have not yet decided if they should even be done, nor figured out the timing for them.

You’ll notice that the Backlog is the longest column, except for Done in this board. Some of these ideas have been here for quite some time (which means its good to prune this list every once in a while).

During my week planning I’ll pull items from here onto the To Do (Week) column if it is the right time to start that project.

Quarter Backlog (Q4 Backlog)

This and the next piece are the newest additions to my personal scrum boards. (Yes, plural. I have one for Legendary Strength, one for Lost Empire Herbs and one for personal stuff.)

I’m always seeking to better align time. What I mean by that is that I like think of time as fractal. If what I’m doing today is aligned with what I want to get done this week, which is aligned with what I want to get aligned this month, which is the same for the quarter, the year, the decade and my lifetime, then I’m doing the right things. For the board here I feel the quarter is as far as I need to zoom out, but in other places I do have those larger time frames covered.

Thus, I started keeping a backlog for specifically what I wanted to get done this quarter in this business. This has already proven to keep better alignment for my months, weeks and days as I have better eyes on it.

Month Backlog (November Backlog)

Thus, the month backlog is the same thing just with the month time frame. It’s in between the quarter and the week. Once again, the ideal is to have everything moved off of this list by the end of the month.

Intermediate Scrum Board

Most people may be best served by an intermediate version between these two. Before I added the quarter and month backlogs I just had the following model.

Backlog – To Do – Doing – Waiting – Done

I think the extra backlogs are more powerful, but if you’re starting from scratch something simpler, until you’re use to it, is likely to serve you better.

In case you’re wondering, these Trello board methods combine very well with the ideas I shared with Eat That Frog and The Ivy Lee Method.

How to Setup a Home Office for Maximum Productivity

I’ve been working from home for over a decade now. Over the course of time, I’ve done a number of things to make my workplace ideal for my own productivity. What follows are the many things that I’ve done, some of which have stuck, some which haven’t (but might be suitable for others). While there are a few conventional things covered here, I think you’ll be surprised to find some stuff that no one else is talking about.

Note that while I’m talking about a home office specifically, pretty much everything can apply to any office or space you work from.

Home Office Desk Setup — Forgive the bad lighting, it’s much better in person. Below I’ll describe many of the things going on here.

Desktop Computer

I know more and more people are strictly using laptops, tablets and even phones for their work. That’s fine if you’re on the move. But if you have a stable place, as a home office kind of assumes, then I’d recommend using a desktop computer. Your call whether you want a PC, Mac or other option. (I’m one of those unusual people that prefers a PC.)

Or, if you use a laptop, at least getting some external options which could include a monitor, mouse and keyboards. But if you use all three of these you might as well have gotten a desktop in the first place!

In general, you’re going to pay less for more computing power and features than you would on a laptop.

Right now, it’s about time I replace my desktop as it’s starting to run slowly and crash more often. It’s been a solid run of over 10 years. That’s impressive by computer standards. I’ve looked around a bit but haven’t made any decisions.

Monitor

One of the most important aspects is your monitor. This is your visual workspace. Depending on what you’re doing you may want to have multiple windows open to do side by side work.

Previously, I had dual monitors. However, for some reason, certain files wouldn’t work in the second monitor which was aggravating. Then I saw a friend that simply had a single, but very big, monitor. I moved to that and haven’t looked back. My current monitor is 26 inches. And one other tip. The top of the monitor should be at the level of your head. This helps fight against “text neck” as you don’t need to look down, but can keep your head in a neutral alignment.

(This goes beyond home office setup, but with this, you’ll want to learn the keyboard shortcuts that allow you to move windows around to half screen, full screen, etc. rather than having to drag the windows around by mouse. Extremely useful.)

Computer monitor — Along with a new dekstop computer I am contemplating getting a new bigger monitor like this 32 inch curved screen.

Stand Up Desk

I sat on my ass for eight plus hours a day for years. At some point when the stand up desk trend began, I realized my half hour or so workout each day, didn’t make up for being sedentary the rest of the time. So I got a stand up desk and haven’t looked back since.

Specifically, I purchased a TrekDesk. It’s a bit expensive compared to most, but does give a big workspace. I know others that have even built their own.

Of course, just standing still in one place for a long time is just another form of being sedantary, with different, but still existing, side effects to it. That brings me to my next point…

Treadmill/Wobble Board

For a few years I had a treadmill desk. I used this off and on for a bit. Then it was much more off. After not actually turning the treadmill on for over a year I decided it was time for that to go.

But I still wanted to move more. Enter the wobble board. While you could easily make one of these for yourself, I bought the Uplift E7 Motion Board. This bit of movement and shifting of position allows me to be less sedentary while standing. I really like it.

Fairly expensive for what it is…but it also should last forever.

Nature

I’m reminded of one study that found that hospital patients recovered faster when they had a window that had a tree outside of it, rather than a window looking at a brick wall. (source) Nature is good for us in many ways we’ve completely forgotten about (and that science is only beginning to explore once again).

As you can see in the picture at the top of this post, my computer and desk is right next to two windows that look outside to nature. If you do not have this option at this time, a picture of nature could still give some benefit.

Essential Oils

Here is where another aspect of nature enters into your home office. Research around what is called “forest bathing” shows that it is the phytoncides, or essential oils, of trees and plants that help lower stress, make for better thinking and much more that occured when walking in nature, versus walking in a city.

While you should absolutely go for walks in nature, you can bring a piece of this indoors by using essential oils in a diffusor. Previously I used a unit called a nebulizer, but recently I upgraded to a larger unit that has a 6 hour run cycle. The thing is, I would turn on the smaller unit in the morning but then forget about it the rest of the day after it stopped running. Now I can load it once, when I start my day in the office, and it’ll continue to run throughout. I mix up the different essential oils I use. Recently I even distilled my own douglas fir.

essential oil diffusor — This runs in my office the whole time I’m in there.

Air Quality

There are other things you can do improve your air quality besides essential oils. Studies show that air quality leads to improved productivity, sometimes amazingly so. Having plants in your offer. Having an air purifier. These are all worthwhile steps.

One study looked at office workers and the air quality in different buildings. They found: “It has now been shown beyond reasonable doubt that poor indoor air quality in buildings can decrease productivity in addition to causing visitors to express dissatisfaction. The size of the effect on most aspects of office work performance appears to be as high as 6–9%. (source)

Music

I play music while I work. Mostly metal and hard rock as that is my genre of choice, but I do mix it up from time to time. This is another reason to have a desktop; higher quality speakers.

One practice that I have found particularly useful for writing is to use the same album…or even the same track on loop. There is something about the repetitive nature that helps me and many others get into the flow zone easier. If I put on headphones while doing this it further drives me into the zone as I don’t hear my fingers typing or other ambient noise.

Dedicated Space

Ideally, you want your home office to be just for that, working. When I started my business I didn’t have the luxury of a space for my home office, so it was in my bedroom, but as I became more successful this became a must.

A dedicated space, even an isolated space, keeps you anchored to being productive (assuming your productive when you use it). This helps to make the container for work. When I’m in my office I’m working. When I’m outside of my office, I’m not working…at least not in the same manner, as there are different types of work.

Anchored Space

Besides the dedicated location there are other ways you can use anchors in your space. As covered before I read a lot. My home office is also where all my books are located. Having all the books in there helps me by being a sign and symbol of my accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Plus, I can easily go and reference any of these books that I might need for my work as frequently happens.

Over the years I’ve used plenty of other things like pictures and quotes that are aspirational. There’s been vision boards and stats I’m tracking on white boards that I would look at each day. Not doing any of that currently, but it was useful in the past.

Tinctures

You’ll notice on the left side of my desk in the top picture that a number of tincture bottles are there. I love herbal tinctures because they’re easy to take (compared to powders, and even capsules in my opinion). The right tincture can help sharpen the mind or reduce stress in the moment. Thus, having them on hand helps support whatever you need in that moment for work. More information on tinctures at Lost Empire Herbs.

That is how I’ve setup my home office for maximum productivity. While I’m sure I could focus in on some finer details, that definitely is the broad strokes. Feel free to share what you do in your office in the comments below.

Two Business Building Interviews

Wanted to share two recent podcasts I was on where I discussed building my businesses, ecommerce, among other things.

First up is Your First Thousand Clients with Mitch Russo. I had the pleasure of meeting Mitch at a recent Maverick event in Vermont and was happy to be asked onto his podcast. If you’re not familiar with him, you ought to be as he has quite the business pedigree, including being CEO of the joint venture between Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes. He just recently launched Results Breakthrough, to harness the power of accountability.

65: Visualizing Success Affects Your Way Of Doing Business with Logan Christopher

Second up is the eCommerce Evolution podcast with Brett Curry. For the past couple of months we’ve been working with Brett’s agency OMG Commerce for running our Google Adwords at Lost Empire. In this interview, after initially talking about some feats of strength, we dive into how I’ve grown our ecommerce store to seven figures and aiming for more.

Episode 40 – Amazing Feats of Strength and eCommerce Growth with Logan Christopher of Lost Empire Herbs

I’ve always enjoyed being a guest on podcasts and plan to do even more in the future.

Business, Financial and Self-Help Books

In the previous post, I listed out the 72 books that I read in 2017. In this post, I continue my analysis of them. I won’t address every book, more the groups of them, with some call-outs to the most impactful.

(That being said, if you have questions about any one, feel free to ask in the comments below.)

My biggest category was business…

13 Business Books

The Great Disruption by Rick Smith with Mitch Free
Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! by Greg Crabtree
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff and J.J. Sutherland
Hacking Marketing by Scott Brinker
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
The New One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
Predictable Success by Les McKeown
No by Jim Camp
The Synergist by Les McKeown
Key Performance Metrics by Bernard Marr

Business is a broad category, and these books run the gamut.

Predictable Success as the most impactful as it changed how I look at business, as well as giving a big picture gameplan that has already turned out useful. I wrote about Predictable Success in this previous post.

Though not on the same level, The Synergist, his follow-up title was also good.

Who by Smart and Street was another impactful read. This details an extensive hiring system, proven to work great, that we have starting using as best as we could at Lost Empire Herbs.

Another favorite was Hacking Marketing. This came right after Scrum and is about that same topic. However reading the former was more applicable to me, using it inside marketing team, rather than in software development, where it was created. This is still an aspirational read as we haven’t quite got there, but the idea of it excites me.

No by Jim Camp was another great one. Famous email marketer Ben Settle kept talking about it and I see why. I haven’t studied negotiation much at all. But I applied just a few principles from this book and landed a high-dollar client without really even trying, by going for the no.

5 Financial Books

In the past, as I detail in the introduction for my money system book, I’ve read a lot about the topic. Now, not so much. Most of these occurred after I had purchased a home and wanted to expand in some new areas.

Succeed and Grow Rich through Persuasion by Napoleon Hill
The Sale of a Lifetime by Harry S. Dent Jr.
The Last Safe Investment by Bryan Franklin and Michael Ellsberg
Automatic Wealth by Michael Masterson
Buffettology by Mary Buffett and David Clark

Of these, The Last Safe Investment was the most different. Really the concepts transcend age, but especially for any young person looking for an alternative path the the classic college route, this would be a great read. This book challenges conventional wisdom, which makes it great (since so much convention is wrong).

8 Self-Help Books

Self Help Books

The Great Work of Your Life by Stephen Cope
The Book of Joy by Douglas Adams, Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu
How to Live a Good Life by Jonathan Fields
Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal
Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
The Art of Living by Bob Proctor
The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

Looking at it again, I lumped all these into self-help when it really covers a wide variety of things.

Tools of Titans covers lots of major topics so I just lumped it in here. As that is a collection of wisdom from many people, distilled down, I found a lot of useful bits in there.

My favorite of this group was The Great Work of Your Life. This was recommended over and over by Yanik Silver. (Actually half of these books came from him and other Mavericks!) This book is great for you finding more of your purpose or calling in life. I will likely re-read this one over time as there are lots of great stories and ideas in it.

More next time…

Predictable Success

I read lots of books. When that happens you often come across books that leave you thinking “I wish I had read that earlier.” Or even a stronger feeling of “WHY WAS I NOT TOLD ABOUT THIS SOONER?!?”

Predictable Success by Les McKeown was such a book for me. (If that name looks familiar, I mentioned him in the previous post, talking about his second book.)

A big thank you to Michael Danner, CMO of DrAxe.com, for mentioning this book while speaking on stage at Ezra Firestone’s Blue Ribbon Mastermind.

In this book, Les describes the life-cycle of any business, and their movement through seven stages.

Businesses must move through these stages in order, except that they can go backwards too, and most businesses don’t make their way through all seven.

The Seven Stages as outlined in Predictable Success

I’ll briefly describe each one of these stages here:

Early Struggle – The start-up phase where the business seeks to make sales and cash. To go from idea to proof of concept in the marketplace. Many businesses never get past this point.

Fun – Like the name implies this stage is a lot of fun. You’re making sales. You’re meeting the demands of the market place. There’s a flurry of activity and the business can pivot on a dime. Often just a few people are involved.

White Water – The business grows to the point where it begins to get chaotic. More people, more operations. It becomes a battle of constantly fighting fires. This is where systems must come in.

Predictable Success – The best stage to be at. As the title implies it is both successful and you can predict it will continue to be. Not based off of people working 20 hour days, but by different people properly and predictably fulfilling their roles. This means the business sets goals, and hits them. Of course, there are still fires to put out, but things run smoothly based on systems and processes, while the business continues to grow.

Treadmill – Here, the business becomes over reliant on those same processes and loses that entrepreneurial spark. In fact, for many businesses this is the stage when the founders leave and the environment becomes much more corporate.

The Big Rut – This is a continuation of the above, except at this stage it has gone on too long, so that the business cannot recover, not by itself.

Death Rattle – There is usually a brief flurry of activity before the end. Perhaps the business is acquired, or tries to be so. Perhaps there is an attempt at restructuring or bankruptcy. Many just fade away.

How Do My Businesses Stack Up?

The reason I loved this book so much is that I can see in my career how I’ve moved through some of these earlier stages.

Lost Empire Herbs is the best example.

It’s startup involved being an outgrowth of Legendary Strength. A new website, finding a couple suppliers, and then selling some herbs from the kitchen table. It couldn’t have started on less of a shoestring. It went on like this for almost two years before we hit our stride.

The fun stage can really be marked as when we got our first office, officially formed a new LLC for the business. Shortly after this we got our first employees. It seemed like sales were growing by at least 20% each month, sometimes more.

Unfortunately, the Fun didn’t last too long. A few office moves, some changes in management and we landed in Whitewater. I’m very intimate with this stage because we’ve been living it the past few years now.

(The feeling of “Why was I not told about this sooner?!?” is because if I had this as a roadmap I believe we could have gotten to the next stage much faster.)

Legendary Strength itself has never moved past the Fun stage. The typical internet business based on cash flow and lifestyle actually aims only to get to this stage and stay here. It is purposefully kept simple to be a so-called lifestyle business. Nowadays I see this and aim to keep it that way. Previously, I didn’t know the difference.

Thus, with Lost Empire I was completely unprepared for the new things I had to learn with a “real business.” Thankfully, I’m good at learning, and beyond books, have lots of smart people that have done these sorts of things to learn from.

And we had a lot to learn. Here were a few of the activities of the past couple years:

Bookkeeping and how good finances work.
How to systematize and SOP the business.
Hiring and onboarding employees.
HR stuff such as insurance, payroll, firing, etc.
How to run more complex operations
Standardizing things so that it’s not all different
Good project management
And plenty more

I feel like right now we are just emerging from White Water into Predictable Success. It’s a good feeling. In fact, I feel so strongly about it that it has become Lost Empire’s theme for Q4 that just began.

Before I read this book, I was engaged in many of the things needed to do so. But it would have been nice to know about whitewater before I even got in it. Oh well, at least I’ll know this for next time…