How I did with the 100 Day Project

I started my 100 day project on September 14 so it would end on December 20. Here’s the original post.

My objective was to focus on my businesses; to figure out where they can go and to set it up so they will. I outlined 3 business ideas: Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd, this Business Owners Success Club and Repair-Share.

That’s how I started. How I ended that 100 days is very interesting. Yes, it’s a great idea to stop and look back once in a while.

Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd.

I had 3 full-time people in the summer. My vision has been to build a business with a whole room full of bookkeepers helping lots and lots of business owners. The reality is that the margins aren’t there, meaning, for the cost of paying my bookkeepers a decent wage, continually training them, and paying for non-billed time, I can’t bill enough to do much more than cover overhead.

We also came to the realization about the type of clients we prefer. We work best with people who are actively building their businesses and engaging in the way their business. At the same time, bookkeeping is changing. (see the post here)

So we went back to our core mission: helping Business Owners succeed.

Two things came out of that exercise:

Work less on data entry and more on interpretation and coaching. Working less on data entry has us exploring the world of programing and web development. Cool, in a bumping along in a dark basement kind of way, not really knowing what you are going to run into.

We have enough experience and knowledge with business to offer a more complete way to make business, I don’t know, more Effortless. I spun off a new concept called Your Effortless Business in this blog. I’m really excited about this, mostly because of the response I’m getting. One of the responses is a group of friends who decided to make a publishing platform and they have decided to make Your Effortless Business book their first project. I’ve been writing furiously for the past month or so (which explains why I haven’t posted as much). Fun and exciting!

Business Owners Success Club

As I developed the Your Effortless Business concept, I wrote about it here. Eventually, I realized it needed it’s own platform so I gave it one here. That left me wondering about this. What is this about and why am I doing it?

The BOSC is about you, the Business Owner. YEB is about your business.

One of the keys to an Effortless Business is for the owner to belong to a group of people talking about business and being a business owner. That’s what this will continue to be. I can’t stress how important that is for your success and even peace of mind. Many of you already belong to groups and that is terrific. For those that don’t, I would like this to work for you. How can we make that work? What will give you the best benefit? The technology is available for us to meet in many different ways to have the discussions we need.

I haven’t come to any clear conclusions about what to do with the BOSC. I will continue to post Business Owner type stuff here.

Repair-Share

I haven’t made a lot of progress on this one. It will be an interesting exercise in teams. Have a look here for more information.

Other

I have been asked to join the Board of the Kentville Development Corporation Limited

I belong to an online, international book club and we are exploring the idea of starting a project to help entrepreneurs fail successfully. Failure is inevitable and even a necessary part of reaching in business. We want to help make it a smoother process, by helping people up, dusting them off and helping them understand what happened.

I’ve been invited by TEDx to join them in Doha, Qatar for a TEDxSummit. All paid, but the airfare. Now I have to raise the airfare very soon.

So the project list looked like this when I started:

  • Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd
  • Business Owners Success Club
  • Repair-Share

Now it looks like:

  • Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd.
  • Software Project
  • Business Owners Success Club
  • Your Effortless Business
  • Book
  • Help Develop my Town
  • Failure U
  • TEDx Summit

I don’t know if I am farther ahead or farther behind. I do know I’m excited again.

How about you? What will you do with the first 100 days of 2012? What will your 100 day project be? How can I/we help you with that?

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