5 Must-Do Accounting Processes for Moving Companies - Louis Massaro

SUMMARY

In this episode of The Moving Mastery Podcast, Louis Massaro shares how to systematize your moving company’s accounting.

“For the first seven years I was in business, I ran my moving company essentially blind because I didn’t really know my numbers.”
“Things like a Profit and Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, Marketing ROI, Cash Flow Statement, etc, were all foreign to me. It wasn’t until the recession hit in 2008 and money got tight, that I realized I didn’t really know where any of the money was. Talk about a scary feeling!”
“After sitting down with my accountant and actually learning how to run my business from the numbers, I finally found the clarity I needed and fortunately, I was able to make it through the recession. A lot of companies didn’t make it.“
“If you have achieved some success in your moving company up to this point without knowing your numbers, it will be like adding a turbo-charger to your company when you get these accounting processes implemented.”
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TRANSCRIPTION

Louis Massaro:
What’s up, guys? Welcome back to the Moving CEO Scaling Series. What is this? Episode nine. We’ve been going strong for nine days in a row, working on scaling your moving company, taking it to the next level, taking what’s working and stacking and growing and stacking and growing. We started off by stabilizing, right? There’s really a few things that need to happen before we could scale. We started off by stabilizing. We went through a few days of just kind of getting things back in line, stabilizing what’s feeling a little chaotic.
Today, we’re going to talk about systematizing your accounting. Some of you may have scrolled through and saw accounting and just said, “You know what? Let me keep scrolling,” because it’s not the sexiest of topics. But I used to feel that way myself. And then it became a whole different ball game for me when I realized the true benefit of what it can do for my business. And so, this is actually a really, really, really important episode. A lot of people will dive in, “Tell me the marketing stuff. Tell me the sales stuff,” but when it comes to the accounting, people kind of turn a blind eye to that. And I’m here to kind of plead to you that, make this a priority. Make accounting, make your numbers a priority because if you are trying to run a business and you don’t know what your numbers are, it’s like being a captain of a ship without any coordinates of you’re going. And it’s a big ocean and it’s a big sea and you might be out there for a while and be okay, “Well, I’m sailing, I’m cruising.” And you might feel like you’re really doing good. And you might be doing good. You might be making money. Then all of a sudden, you hit the iceberg. And now, you’re the Titanic. You might have had the biggest, best ship, but now you’re going down because you hit the iceberg.
And I’m saying this because this happened to me. When I started my company, again, I was 19 years old. And almost right away, after getting through some initial hurdles, it started making money. And so, I based everything off of, “How much did we book today? How much did we do today? How much money’s in the bank?” And that was the extent of it. I’d have my CPA saying, “Louis, your P&Ls, your P&Ls, your P&Ls.” And I’m like, “All right. Yeah. What do you need to figure that out? And you figure it out.” And, to me, it was just something extra in the business that I felt like the accountant needed. My mind was focused on, “I need to book jobs. I need to hire some movers. I need to get more business, more trucks. Get into storage.” That’s where my mind was. And it just felt like, to slow down and review these reports, that the first few times I tried to look at them just felt like they were… it was like reading hieroglyphics. I’m like, “What am I even looking at here?” And I ran my business, I’ll admit, I ran my business for probably the first seven years and built a massive company in that time not really knowing my numbers, not really reviewing my profit and loss, my balance sheet, and my cash flow statement.
And it wasn’t until the recession hit in 2008, where all of a sudden, cash flow got really tight, meaning there wasn’t enough money to pay the bills. And at that time, I had six locations. And I was scrambling. One office was doing okay; another office wasn’t doing okay. And it became this like, “Where’s the money? What is going on?” And I had no clarity. And so, imagine nowadays driving, and just being totally lost. And you don’t have your GPS with you. You never learned how to read street signs. You never understood the logic of how they put streets together, and what northeast means, and how one side of the street’s even numbers, the other side, odd numbers. Imagine you just never knew any of that, and you didn’t have your GPS to tell you where to go, and at the same time it was rush hour. That’s what it felt like. It was like, “Man, there is so much that I need to know and I need to see to navigate myself through this tough time, but I don’t have the information to do it.” And that’s when I got really, really serious. It was like, “Okay,” you know?
Listen, it’s human nature, right? We know we should do something, we know we need to do something, but until we feel the pain of not doing it, until we have that heart attack from the food we’re eating and not working out, until we know are totally depressed and miserable because we’re not taking care of our well-being, until our business is on the verge of going under, we don’t feel enough pain to do the things that aren’t the fun things to do. And that was my moment. That was my time, where it was like, “Look, I need to know these numbers. I need to get these on point.” And I became a student of it. I went to my CPA and I’m like, “Let’s go. Teach me this. Start the clock. Whatever you need to charge me. And let’s go through this. I need to know what this means, what that means. I need to understand all of it.”
And I got to tell you, as hard as it was to go through that time, that recession period, it forced me to grow as a business person, it forced me to grow as a leader, and allowed me to learn the stuff that was totally outside of my comfort zone. Totally outside of my comfort zone. I felt like I knew what I was doing, but I avoided that because I wasn’t good at it. I didn’t know how to do it. And I wasn’t feeling enough pain from not doing it to get me motivated to do it, if that makes sense. And so, when I finally did, it just… listen, I became a whole new person, a whole new business person. My level of clarity that I had to be able to run my business off of numbers was incredible.
That’s what really allowed me to get to that next level, is understanding, look, the numbers don’t lie. We could all mask it with, “We’re booking a ton of jobs. Look at all these pretty trucks. Look at this. Look at that.” And what I know now is sometimes that’s a facade. It might look like a company’s big and doing a lot, and they might be doing a lot of gross revenue, but where are the profits?
And so, by knowing these numbers, man, I just… it’s hard to explain. It’s like you finally learn how to play a game. You think you’ve known how to play a game all this time. Maybe you played poker when family was over, just messing around, and then you finally learn how to go play Texas hold ’em or whatever. You learned the rules of the game. And accounting is the rule of business.
And in the moving business, there’s only five things that make up everything you do: lead generation, your marketing; booking moves, your sales; servicing moves, operations; creating raving fans, your customer service; and accounting, knowing your numbers. That’s it. You get those five on point, you learn the rules of the game: you go where you want to go. You scale how you want to scale.
… weren’t looking at their numbers before, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m not guilting you. I’m not shaming you for not doing it. I’m not saying that you’re not a true business person. What I’m saying is the level of success that you’ve achieved so far without knowing your numbers, if you know your numbers, it’s like you just got the juice. You just got the turbo charge. You’re on a whole different level now. And it’s not even what you could accomplish; it’s the clarity. It’s the peace of mind of truly knowing how you’re doing.
It’s about knowing and understanding where you’re truly at. I mean, how many of you have thought that you’ve had a great month and great summer, great year, and then you’re like, “Where the is money? Where’s the money?” Because there’s profits, and then there’s… I use the term profit, not as a technical sense. When I say profit and thrive, when I say, “Profit in business, thrive in life,” that profit is money for you to take home. But technically, when it comes to accounting and truly knowing your numbers, you could show a profit, but not have the cash. Profit on your P&L doesn’t always translate into cash in your pocket.
But I just want to take this little extra time up front here and set the tone on how important this is and acknowledge that, as many millions as I was making in the business, as many locations as I had in the business, as many moves as we were doing, I was still in the minor leagues until I learned my numbers. And I know companies that are doing great. They’ve got great businesses. They’ve got great staff. They’re making money. They’re taking money home. They’re living a good life. And they’re doing it consistently year after year, but don’t know their numbers. And so, my thing is, if you learn that and you knew that, you will unlock more potential in yourself than you could possibly imagine. You now have a tool, where you’ve been trying to use a screwdriver all this time to do all your assemblies, and now you’ve got to drill, a cordless power drill. That’s what it’s about.
Nick. Nick says, “Once I found my true numbers on monthly expenses and cost of goods sold, I have been a new businessman with a whole new perspective. Thanks, Louis.” Nick, I love it. I love it. That’s why I’m doing this. That’s why I’m doing this. I don’t want you guys to go through the suffering and the pain and the waste of time. If I had known that early on, if somebody really, like my accountant passively told me about it, but somebody that I really looked up to and respected grabbed me and just said, “Listen, stop. Before you go any further, know your numbers. Get this stuff locked down,” who knows where I would’ve been. But there’s no looking in the past. We’re just looking forward. I want to save you guys from making those mistakes.
So, let’s talk about some steps that you could do to automate your accounting. We’re talking about systematizing right now. We’re talking about getting a system behind it because if you don’t have a system behind it, there will never be a day where you wake up, go into your office and say, “I’m going to work on accounting today,” or, “What should I do this week? I’m going to work on accounting this week.” It’s just not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. So, we’ve got to kind of systematize it and make it easy and make it in a way where it’s just part of the process. Everything just becomes part of the process. And when it’s part of the process it gets done.
So, first thing you got to do is a daily closeout. Daily closeout. And so, again, if you guys are like, “Louis, I know. I do this,” just hear me out. Every day, in your CRM, you want to make sure that who… somebody. Again, when I say, “You, you, you, you, you,” I’m saying you need to make sure this happens in your company. You personally don’t have to do any of this yourself. You just have to make sure it gets done. I’m not telling you to go do all these steps that we’ve been going over. You just oversee it. You delegate it, and make sure it happens, and get it executed. But every day, close out. Close out the jobs. Meaning all the moves that were done for the day, go into your system and just close them out. Make sure that the money’s there. Make sure that the money’s right. Make sure the payroll for the movers is accounted for on that job. For those of you that don’t have a system that does all this, check out my software, SmartMoving software. Just go to smartmoving.com. We need to systematize this because when we get to the end of the month and we want to run reports and we want to see stuff and now we’ve got to backtrack and start filling in numbers, it’s chaotic and totally unproductive.
The other thing is payroll. We pay movers once a week. And in order to do that, we’ve got to make sure we’ve got accurate payroll records. And if you are in a situation where you are every week… I had this early on, for a short period of time. And I was like, “This is nuts. We need to do this daily.” To where every week, you’re going back through all the contracts, back through all the paperwork, back through your CRM, and trying to account for all of the hours that your guys worked, your movers worked, it’s totally unproductive. It’s a big waste of time. And whoever’s doing it, dreads it. Whoever’s doing it is dreading that process. And so, if you just close it out daily, making sure, “Hey, these are the jobs we did. Let’s verify. The job was $968. Did we collect $968? These three movers were on that job. This is how many hours they should get. This is how much commission they should get.” And do that every single day. Again, we’re systematizing. You might say, “Louis, I do that.” Okay. But are we doing it consistently? Daily? Systematic. Systematic. Not in theory. Is it getting done? That’s basic, but that’s the start of this whole thing.
The next thing we want to do is we want to automate our income and expenses. Automate income and expenses. So, when you look at financials, specifically your P&L, you’re going to have income at the top. This is what a profit and loss statement looks like. You’ve got an income at the top, all the money that came in. And ideally, you have that broken out by the type of income: is it local moving income? Is it long-distance moving income? Is it storage income? Is it packing income? The next section, you have your cost of goods sold. These are expenses that are associated directly with the cost of servicing the move, things like your movers’ payroll, any packing material that was used, and other things. And then after that, you have just general expenses. They might not be associated directly, like, you can’t pinpoint and say, “This is directly associated with the move,” but it’s other expenses in the business. And then you get down to the bottom of your net income and your profit.
And so, what we want to do is, in order to get accurate numbers, in order to get an accurate report, the numbers that go into your accounting software… don’t try to do this stuff by hand. Into your accounting software. I recommend QuickBooks online just because it’s easy to use, and it integrates with SmartMoving. And to get it all into QuickBooks…
That’s half the battle. Systematize. You don’t want to sit there at the end of the month, whether it’s you or a bookkeeper, whoever, and try to input all the income, input all the expenses. So, how do you do this? Well, first of all, Smart Moving. You get that going. I know a lot of you are on there already. If you haven’t, go get a demo. You owe it to yourself to at least go look at it. I don’t push it on anybody. You’ve got another CRM that works for you? Awesome. We’re still friends. It’s all good. But you go in and you connect it to QuickBooks. QuickBooks is your accounting software. That’s what’s going to generate your profit and loss, your balance sheet, cashflow, pay your bills. Everything is done from there. You need something like that. If it’s not QuickBooks, look up alternatives, if you’re against QuickBooks.
And what happens is when you connect that with SmartMoving, all of the income from the jobs automatically goes over to QuickBooks. And it will separate it out however you want it separated out. You do a couple little clicks of where you want things to go in the back end and you tell SmartMoving, “Hey, this line, that’s a long-distance move,” once in the back end like, “These are my long-distance jobs. These are my locals. This is my storage revenue.” And it will put it in QuickBooks already separated out, which to some of you, you’re like, “Okay. Yeah. Cool.” But for me, and a lot of you that never had this feature, it’s like we would have to take the revenue, the credit card statements that came in, the bookkeeper would have to go and look it up and see what the revenue was, do splits and journal entries, like, super time-consuming. And so, to be able to automate that is huge.
And your expenses, the same thing. You could hook up all of your credit cards and bank accounts to QuickBooks. And so, every transaction is automatically there. And now, all you have to do is go and tell QuickBooks, “Oh, that’s truck expense. This is marketing.” And once you do that a few times, it’ll start to remember what it is. I mean, it’s so simple, but you need to set yourself up to make the process easier because otherwise the process of like, “I got to do accounting?” And it just feels like it’s got to be this whole, day-long project of like, “I’ve got to get everything input… ” that’s what stops most people. You systematize it. We’re not doing this account accounting because the act of accounting is what we want. We want the outcome. We want the numbers. We want the reports. But we have to set a few things up. We have to systemize a few things in order for that to happen. So, automate income and expenses.
Next one is you need an accounts payable process. Accounts payable process. So, accounts payable is basically an accounting term of saying, “Pay your bills. What money do you owe?” And in your accounting system, it’ll say, “Here’s what’s owed. Here’s the accounts that we need to pay on. You have accounts payable, and then accounts receivable. Accounts receivable are people that owe you money. So, you need a process for this.
So, there’s a few ways you could do this. Back in the day, before technology, automation, all of this, I’d have my bookkeeper bring me what’s called a unpaid bills report. Unpaid bills report. And put the unpaid bills report on the front of a manila folder. Put all the bills that came, like, when all the bills used to get mailed to you. Put all the bills in the manila folder in the same order as they are on the sheet, so that if I had any questions or I needed to see like, “Why are we paying this for this?” I could go look at the invoice, and it’s right there for me. And there was a set day and a set time where I got that information. I was prepared for it. I knew. It was a block on my calendar. We talked about that early on. I went in. I reviewed it. I took the sheet. “Check, check, check, check, check. What’s this? Research this. Why is this? Ask them why this bill is this. Da, da, da, da. Don’t pay that right now.” And went through. And that was the process. Then she went and cut checks. And then I signed the checks. And so, that’s one way of doing it.
Another way is to just have a day once a month, twice a month max, where you have it on… you have reminders. You got a list of bills that need to get paid. Maybe it’s the same bill every month. And you just sit down. You pull up that list. And you go manually make the payments, if you’re the one that’s going to do it.
What we’re trying to avoid is we’re trying to avoid, “Oh, shit. I owe that money. Oh, I got an email. I got to pay this. Oh! Oh! Oh!” And it’s so reactive. This stuff doesn’t have to be reactive. What needs to be reactive: the phone rings? Let’s book the job. There’s a move? They need extra equipment? There’s enough reactive stuff in the business; this has to be smooth.
And another way to do this is just to autopay bills. Autopay bills. Put them right on your credit card. And let them just charge you once a month. Get the points. You know how many points that I’ve got over the years from paying for yellow pages and marketing and all this stuff on a credit card? I’m talking major trips on points. So, if you could autopay stuff, where you don’t even have to worry about it… obviously, you need to be in a good cash flow position to where you’re not needing to make those decisions like, “No, we can’t pay this. We can pay this.” But set up your accounts payable process.
The next one is, get yourself a bookkeeper. Get yourself a bookkeeper. Unless you’re going to learn accounting, which you should, by the way. You should learn it. You should always know what your bookkeeper’s doing and understand their process. But unless you’re going to learn it and actually do it: hire somebody. You don’t have to get a full-time person; you could get somebody part-time these days that works virtually. You don’t have to send them all your paper bank statements and all. We live in a virtual world now. You could easily find somebody for a few hundred dollars a month to make sure your books are on point. Make sure your books are on point.
I had a private client, when I first started work with him, this is, I don’t know, three years ago, four years ago. I still work with him today. And at first, I’m like, “Okay, I need to see your P&Ls. Let’s go through that.” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t have it.” “All right. No problem. We got some other stuff to work on. We don’t need it right away. Let’s get some of this other stuff going. But get that done.” He’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got an accounting background. I’m going to get it done myself.” And after a period of time, we kept hitting roadblocks of things that we needed to figure out, answers that he was looking for, paths and strategies that we were trying to map out, that we needed to know numbers in order to make the right decision. And finally, I’m like, “Look, you’ve been saying you’re going to do this for a long time. Just hire a bookkeeper. You’ve got the money. Do it. I don’t care that you’ve got an accounting background. That’s great. You’re going to be able to look after and make sure they’re doing the right thing. We need this. Let’s look at how long we’ve gone without it. Do you really want to continue to go, do you really want to continue to not have that clarity?” He hired a bookkeeper right away.
And so, I see a question here: a bookkeeper as compared to an accountant? Here’s the thing. You need a CPA. You need a CPA, which is someone who’s going to be able to handle your tax returns and your accounting from a higher level, from a tax level. And you want someone that is familiar with business, small business tax strategy, so you’re not paying extra money. But as far as someone to manage and clean up your books and just keep them up to date and keep them up to speed, you need a certified QuickBooks bookkeeper. That’s what you need. So, good question there. Good, good question.
A lot of people will have an accounting office, a CPA office, and they’re like, “They do my books. They do my taxes.” Cool. Great. But be a part of the conversation. That’s what I had at first too. And they would send me these P&Ls and balance sheet. And I didn’t say, “Where’d you get that number from? How’d you do it?”
It’s a big, big deal. And so, a bookkeeper is just someone that’s going to help keep QuickBooks accurate. Get the numbers accurate. Depending on how you choose to do your accounting, there’s two accounting methods: there’s cash basis, there’s accrual basis. I’m not going to get into that today. We’re just talking about systematizing. But depending on how you choose to do that, there could be additional work involved other than just adding the income and adding the expense. There might need to be some journal entries and some… you need everything reconciled every month to make sure what’s in your books matches the reality of what’s in the bank and your credit card charges. So, get yourself a bookkeeper.
Like I said, I hired somebody full-time when I first did this. This was my first real hire, by the way. And now, you don’t need to do that. Now, you don’t need to do that. You could totally find someone virtual. Few hundred bucks a month. They could handle it for you. Whoever does your taxes, talk to them and say, “Do you guys offer bookkeeping services as well?” See what that is, and go from there.
Listen, think about everything that we do. He’s saying the daily closeout, he’s just been doing it whenever he does the deposit, but we were talking about doing it daily. The more that you can get in a rhythm in your business to where it’s consistent, it’s a consistent rhythm, week after week, day after day, your team can get on board with that. You can scale. You can delegate. When things are done, like, here and there and here and there and here and there, you’re the only one that could control that chaos. Nobody else could get really in there with you. And if they do, they’re just in the chaos with you. I want to get you guys out of that.
So, then, once we have that, we’ve got to make sure that we actually review these numbers. So, we need a monthly review as part of our systematizing, with a checklist. Monthly review with a checklist. And what this means is you need to block time on your calendar, set aside some time, and review your financials every single month. Every single month. This is so important because when you… those of you who do this, you’re like, “Yep, yep, yep. I know. Yep. You’re right. You’re right.” And those of you that don’t, hopefully I’m painting the picture on why this is so important good enough, but you won’t truly feel it and understand it until you do it.
For me, I remember looking at my financials one month. And at one point, I had six locations, plus a long-distance division, plus my corporate office. So, you’ve got eight sets of financials. Each one has its own individual set of financials. And I’m looking at this one office and I’m like, “Why are the claims so high? What is going on there?” And because I recognized that and I saw that, this is one example of so many, I went into the CRM. I drilled down into the claims. I looked at what was going on with the claims. We found out who was causing them. And we found out what specifically they were damaging. And we were able to find out that it was because they were damaging flat screen TVs, they were damaging marble tabletops, they were damaging pictures, basically stuff that needs to be packed in a very similar way. And it was a specific set of movers with a specific set of items. So, what did we do? We went in and we did targeted training. I wasn’t even there. I called the ops manager over there at that office, “Here’s what we need to do. Get it done.” And that was it. We solved that problem. The claims went down. You could identify problems so easy by looking at the numbers.
Maybe the first time you look at your… you may say, “Louis, I’ve looked at the P&L and I don’t see anything.” And that’s because you’re not comparing it to anything else. You’re going to need to review these for a few months in a row to start seeing what the trends are, to start establishing what your baseline and what your benchmarks are for certain numbers, what the percentage of income is for a certain category. “We’re spending X% on fuel.” So, if you’re spending 5% on fuel, and then all of a sudden… you’re looking. You’re like you know it should be right around that number. And now, it’s 8%. What’s going on there? This is actually another example. Found that going on. Drilled down into it. Looked at the fuel cards we were using. Found out guys were stealing fuel at the pump. They were fueling up other people and taking cash. That’s happening to a lot of you, by the way. Just saying.
I’m not a cynical person at all. I want to believe the best in people, but I’m a realist when it comes to business. And I know that if you leave the key in the door of the candy shop, people are going to go in and take the candy. You leave opportunities on the table for people to grab a little extra here and a little extra there for themselves, not everybody, but people are going to do it. But by knowing your numbers, you’re able to stop all this right away. You see it. You identify it. And now, you’re able to make changes. So, not only are you looking at problems, you’re looking at opportunities as well like, “Wow, how could we increase that? That’s working really, really good.”
So, just like anything, the only reason you’re confident in tying your shoes is because you’ve probably done it hundreds of thousands of millions, I don’t even know how many times. You’re going to need to do this month after month. And at first, you may suck at it. You probably will suck at it, the way I sucked at it. You probably will get a little frustrated with it. But stick with it month after month, and it’ll start making more sense. It’ll start becoming more clear. You’ll start to be able to know what’s going on by the numbers. When the numbers change and the ratios change and the percentages change, that’s the language of your business. That’s what you’ll be able to see. That’s what you’ll be able to make improvements on. And that’s what will really change everything for you.
And so, the reason I say, “With a checklist,” is because for me, I still use a checklist when I do my monthly review. I still use a checklist. Why? Because I don’t want to waste time. When you do something once a month especially, I don’t want to waste time like, “Okay, well, I do this first. Then I do this first. Then I do… ” no, I have my little checklist up, just as a little guide. And I’m like, “That’s the first thing I do? Boom. That’s the second thing I do? Boom. That’s the third thing I do? Boom.” Because there’s a little bit of work that you need to do in order to get the information you need and make sure it’s accurate. There’s a few step involved in the process. There might be a little back and forth with whoever’s handling your books. And I don’t want to waste time thinking about that. I don’t want to waste time thinking about it. And I don’t want to skip a step because my mind might be somewhere else at the moment or I might be overly confident that I’ve done this so many times, I don’t need a list. Monthly review.
Just start getting your income and your expenses put into QuickBooks. Just start getting that put in there. And set a date. Set a date with a goal of when you’re going to have completed financials to review on a monthly basis.
I’m throwing a lot at you here. Anytime you absorb information, never feel overwhelmed with the fact that you’ve got to go and implement it right away. And I understand that that’s what can happen. It’s a matter of take… it’s better to know what you need to be doing and realize, “Oh, wow. Okay.” Just maybe in this Scaling Series, “Okay. All this stuff? That might take me 18 months.” Okay, cool. But at least you’ve got to a path. At least you know where you’re headed. At least 18 months from now, you’re going to be on top. You’ll stop dealing with all the stuff that you’ve been dealing with. So, I’m kind of preframing it for you to not look at this and go, “I’m going to get this done this month.” That’s not me like, “Go get it done today. Go get it done today.” That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, understand the importance.
And the challenge I will give you is, do not let this go past the first of the year. You got three months. You get whatever your other priorities are of things you need to do? You’ve got objectives for the fourth quarter? Okay. No later than January 1st. Starting fresh in the new year. I’m giving you a lot of leniency here. You make that commitment. And you start reviewing those numbers every single month. I know most of you are like, “No, I’m on it now. I’m getting on this now.” But don’t get overwhelmed. Always take all like…
One of the things that I had to learn that’s really, really helpful, by the way, and I think you’ll appreciate this, is that, as someone who’s always looking for a better way, like, that’s how I have done everything in my life was just, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way.” And when you do that and you go seek information, when you come and you watch videos like this, when you come to the seminars, when you get in courses, when you read books, these are the books that I choose to keep when I’m done because I’m like, “I’m going to read them again.” If they’re not good, they go. I donate them. And so, when you are on that path, you’re always getting ideas. So, having a little system, we talked about this a little bit earlier in the series, having a little system, being able to bring new stuff in and then decide when you’re going to put it into action is huge because otherwise, you’re like, “Shiny object! Squirrel! New idea! New business! This! That!” And you’re going to drive yourself insane. You won’t get that far. You’re going to be stressed out.
Accept the fact that you will have a massively growing to-do list or project list or idea list. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ve got probably more ideas written down than I could accomplish in a lifetime. Are they all great ideas? I don’t know. We’ll see. I go through them periodically and I pull out whatever I think should be… as I’m doing planning strategies sessions for the year, for the quarters, for the months, weekly plans.
Don’t worry about ever having too much information. Don’t let it feel overwhelming because here’s the thing. Wouldn’t you rather know there’s a better way? Wouldn’t you rather know that maybe you’re doing something wrong or you could be doing something better, or a problem that you’re facing consistently day in and day out, that there’s an answer for it, than to not know? Absorb. Absorb. Absorb. Have a place to keep it all: notebooks, notes in your phone, whatever, spreadsheets.
And then you plan. Go back and watch planning and productivity in this series, if this kind of stuff interests you at all. But I say that because I know what it’s like, to watch something, to take a course, to read a book, to go to an event and be like, “Oh my God. There’s so much.” So, you know the one or two or three things that are really going to make the biggest impact through this Scaling Series.