BUSINESS INTENTION
2023-2030

DIRECTIONAL STORY

Where I’ve come from:

  • 2x time engineer (BEng Mechanical, MEng Civil & Environmental)
  • Changed career to become a copywriter/marketer because engineering alone wasn’t fulfilling enough
  • Marketing satisfies:
    • Creativity (Design and Writing)
    • Systems Thinking (Analytics + Process)
    • Personal interactions with humans
    • Deep dive into human psychology
  • Former corporate employee (Intel etc) hated it, left to become a freelancer
  • Copywriter turned marketing manager turned CMO
  • Burned out on launch model
  • Became freelance marketing DFY business owner (agency)
  • Wrote a book: Open Every Day
  • Digital nomad for 4.5 years traveling the world

Where I’m at:

  • I’ve come off the road – ended my digital nomad chapter
  • Settled in Canada with residency for next chapter of life
  • Living in the Quebec countryside on a lake
  • Moved from DFY -> Coaching
  • Getting married
  • Buying a house

Where I’m going:

  • Becoming a husband and father
  • Growing my coaching business
  • Focusing on balance in life
  • Train: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
  • Write: Books
  • Create: Music
  • Raise: Kids
  • Do my best work (yet)
  • Using my engineering skills to build a system that brings more of the ideal people to me.

INTENTION STATEMENT

I will engineer a business that:

  • Brings in $500,000 – $750,000 per year in profit
  • Runs as a 2 person business (me and my wife – collaboration is important)
  • Runs on less than 2 days of delivery/production per week.

So that I can:

FOR ME

  • Train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu every day of the week.
  • Make music and release albums.
  • Write books on ideas and philosophies I’ve accumulated.
  • Eat, Fight, Fuck, Create
  • Diet, Discipline, Duty.
  • Have free time to explore topics I find fascinating and motivating
  • Have enough financial resources to explore speculative side projects and patron the arts

FOR THEM

  • Have a loving and meaningful relationship with my fiancé/wife.
  • Be a great provider and present with my future kids, so I can raise them to be strong, healthy and responsible — positively affecting the world around them.
  • Travel between North America and Europe to spend time with my family and friends. Having my children create bonds and connections with my country and their first cousins.
  • Show my wife and family the wonderful world we inhabit.

THE CONSTRAINTS

Creative Constraints

  • 2 fixed days of “delivery/production”
  • 2 floating days of “design/creativity”
  • Max. 6 hours of zoom calls per week
  • Without sales calls.
  • Without launches.
  • Without resorting to unethical marketing strategies (e.g. fake scarcity/urgency)
  • Without having to become a social media (TikTok, IG, YT) style star.

What I won’t tolerate:

  • Unnecessary calls with clients/prospects wanting/needing to talk for the sake of talking.
  • Calls should not be the default communication method.
  • Timewasters.
  • It’s the resource you can’t replenish
  • People who consistently don’t do the work.
  • Avoiding effort is one thing. Avoiding effort and not practicing self-awareness for why you’re avoiding the effort — and correcting the problem — is unacceptable.
  • People who won’t/can’t follow simple instructions.
  • Your learning style is not an excuse.
  • Take your best effort action, come with questions.
  • My own ego getting in the way of my progress.
  • I acknowledge that I have the potential to be my own biggest problem. I must strive to always be aware of when this is happening and take swift action to correct it and get out of my own way.

What I will tolerate:

  • Getting up on stage (digital, physical) and presenting
  • It is a strength and a gift. I must take up space in a leadership role to attract my future clients to my world.
  • The need to create in order to attract attention for my business.
  • As much as I may try, the machine will not run without me. I will embrace the ways I enjoy doing this and do them effortlessly.
  • People needing help to work through the parts of life/business that aren’t just tactical (emotional and mental blocks)
  • The biggest breakthroughs are internal and the human side to coaching is the future. I will embrace this.
  • People who need a little extra hand holding from time to time to do something significantly different.
  • Sometimes knowing what to do isn’t enough when you’re doing it for the first time. That’s ok. I am here to help.
  • People needing individual attention when they need my help to see what they can’t see
  • While we all walk the same path, everyone might need to take different routes. Sometimes it takes someone to point their specific route out to them so they don’t fall down into a ravine. I have the gift of vision and I should not hoard it from my clients.
  • Calls – when absolutely necessary
  • Sometimes a quick conversation is the quickest way to fix the problem. In the interests of saving time, sometimes a quick conversation is a time saver.
  • My own need/desire to “do the work” when necessary
  • Sometimes I will want to work for the sake of doing the work and I will embrace that.
  • I am not aiming/trying to build a 100% automated business. I am building a collaboration environment to work with my dream clients in a way that creates leverage for us both.
  • Investing time, effort, and resources to build something lasting that works for me and my clients.
  • I will front-load the work so it moves me towards my goals and longer term wins