Your Business Is Not Your Boss

The two people you need to know in 2025

I just opened a Christmas present from someone I didn’t know when 2024 began. It may sound strange coming from a 48-year old, but 2024 was great because I made a couple new friends this year. I know some folks who can’t chart a path to their mailbox and back without making a new friend, but that is definitely not me. I don’t really need to stack up friends like firewood, but investing in new friendships this year has really shown me how refreshing and energizing it can be to develop connections with people with whom I don’t have history. As a result, I want to challenge myself…and you…to pursue two specific kinds of relationships in 2025. 1. Find a mentor. Identify someone you want to learn from and set up monthly or quarterly calls. 2. Find a mentee. Identify someone you can teach and set up monthly or quarterly calls. It’s not as difficult as you may think. Once you identify someone you’d like to have as a mentor, just send them this simple email: I’ve always admired the way you [BLANK] and I know I could learn a lot from you. Would you be willing to meet for coffee and tell me more about your career path? The mentee email is just as simple: You’ve got so much potential and I see a lot of myself in you. Would you be interested in meeting for coffee to talk about your goals? I’d love to see if I can help you go further, faster. After that first meeting, assuming there is a connection worth pursuing, make a plan to meet again in a month or two to do it again. I can’t promise that anyone you send these messages to will agree to meet, but I think you might be surprised at how willing people are to share their experiences, and how excited people get when someone offers to help. OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: Identify someone you want to learn from and someone you’d like to mentor in 2025. Shoot them a note and set up a call or a coffee date. PS: I made new friends this year, but your mentor and mentee don’t need to be strangers. The nature of the relationship is what makes it new.

No one should outlearn you

Derek Jeter ended his career in pinstripes as an iconic Yankee, but it wasn’t because he was the most gifted athlete on the field. In fact, he was famous for arguing that talent wasn’t the true measure of a person’s potential: “There may be people who have more talent than you, but there's no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do - and I believe that.” - Derek Jeter The gentle spin I’d like to place on this quote is to offer a pinch hitter for the word “work” in this quote. In the context of your small business, a key differentiator is not just how hard you work, but how consistently you are learning. My paraphrase would look something like this: There may be people with more capital than you, a more experienced team than yours, or a more robust network than yours, but there’s no reason anyone should be learning more aggressively than you. Opportunities to learn are everywhere and learning about ANYTHING is valuable.  Maybe you’re curious about new laws relating to your industry. Fantastic. Go learn more. Or maybe you have been dying to learn to play the drums. Perfect. That’s good too. The positive impact on your small business is not simply derived from learning something you can employ in your work each day, but from exercising your brain in a new way and maintaining a posture of curiosity and interest in things you haven’t already mastered. The most effective way to block opportunity and growth is to become convinced you know enough. OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: Identify something about which you are curious and pursue an opportunity to learn more about it. From free resources like YouTube and podcasts to paid offerings like online courses and seminars, there are myriad opportunities to expand your knowledge. Write it down and schedule time each week to pursue it.

This is the only way to grow

All growth is on the other side of incompetence. This means that the enemy of growth is an unwillingness to embrace incompetence. In order to do something you can’t currently do – like speak French, bench press 150 pounds, or make it through the day without feeling overwhelmed – you will have to enact behaviors you aren’t currently capable of doing well. In my experience, the people who do this best are at the early stages of their careers…and at the late stages of their careers. When people are starting out, they are hungry and recognize they have a lot to learn. They are squarely on offense, excited to grow. Later, once they’ve developed some competence, they often take on a defensive posture, eschewing growth in favor of proving how smart they already are. Appearing incompetent is dangerous and change is the enemy of the known. Much later, once they feel they have a lot less to prove, they recognize how little they really know. This makes them hungry again – at a point when they are completely unbothered by embracing incompetence – so they resume an offensive posture of growth. I call this the Inverted Bell Curve of Personal Growth. Where do you see yourself on this curve? Where would you like to see yourself? The great news is that the Inverted Bell Curve of Personal Growth is a trend, not a law. You can choose to embrace temporary  incompetence and accelerate your growth at any time. Prioritizing your growth might look like going back to school, or it might look like finding someone on YouTube who is a little further down the road than you. It could look like reading a book, or enrolling in an  online course. It could look like joining a mastermind, or finding a coach. The biggest prerequisite for growth is not in identifying the most complex and costly option, it is in becoming humble, hungry, and fully willing to not be good at something for a little while. OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: Identify an arena in which you’d like to grow – like time management, delegation, employee management, industry knowledge, etc. – and spend 5 minutes this week researching learning opportunities.   It’s time to swap stress and overwhelm for calm, focused, and effective days. My signature Mastermind will help you to clarify your goals, identify your priorities, and invest your time, energy, and focus strategically so that you can accomplish more with less effort. Join the wait list today! [http://geoffwelch.com/mastermind]

Geoff’s Law of Clean Countertops

A long time ago some dude named Newton came up with some incredibly popular ideas called Newton’s Laws of Motion. One of these laws, basically, is that objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion unless something interacts with them. This law parallels neatly with Geoff’s Law of Clean Countertops which states that clean countertops are more likely to stay clean and messy countertops are more likely to become more messy. It’s like this: When a countertop is empty, anything you put on it sticks out like a sore thumb. You know it doesn’t belong and are more likely to just put it away. But when a countertop is cluttered and messy, adding one more thing is no big deal, so they just get messier and messier. Geoff’s Law of Clean Countertops could also be applied to your mind, your calendar, and more. As a small business owner, the more cluttered your mind is, the easier it is to accept every challenge and inconvenience as par for the course. Anything that demands your attention gets it, because you don’t have a clear focus. The more cluttered your calendar is, the more you are willing to just give up hope it could ever be controlled.  But what happens when you have a clearly defined focus for your work and time? Suddenly anything that compromises that focus or attempts to co-opt your time is recognized as a threat to your plans and can be dealt with accordingly. OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: Take 5 minutes at the end of each day to clarify your plans for the following day. Block time on your calendar or leave yourself a note to remind yourself of your plan.   It’s time to swap stress and overwhelm for calm, focused, and effective days. My signature Mastermind will help you to clarify your goals, identify your priorities, and invest your time, energy, and focus strategically so that you can accomplish more with less effort. Join the wait list today! [http://geoffwelch.com/mastermind]

5 Ways to Regain Control of Your Time

I don’t know a single small business owner who hasn’t felt overwhelmed and exasperated at one time or another because the demands on their time are out of control. It’s not uncommon to feel like there will never be time for OUR plans because we can barely keep up with all the stuff that gets thrown at us. Yeah, same. Here are 5 levers I pull when I feel stretched thin: Do a time audit to figure out how much time is actually yours It can be so easy to overestimate the amount of time you actually have available to advance your plans. The formal version of this would be to take a week or two to track the way you spend your time. A simpler and more accessible version would be to review your calendar from the last couple weeks and determine how much of your time was actually available for YOUR priorities. This is an opportunity to get real about how you use your time. Practice saying NO The time audit will reveal your current capacity along with opportunities to delegate, defer, or delete work. You WILL have to say NO to some things if you want to create additional capacity for yourself. NO can mean you can’t do it, but someone else can. No can mean you can’t do it now, it will have to wait. No can mean it’s just not important, goodbye. Complete high-priority work BEFORE you let the outside world in Your priorities aren’t really priorities if you don’t put them first. They are just things you’d like to do if you ever get around to it. The best time to tackle YOUR priorities is before you let the rest of the world in. What would be different if you leveraged the first 30-minutes of your day for most valuable work?  Select ONE non-negotiable tasks each day and complete it no matter what Instead of negotiating the infinity of tasks on your to-do list and feeling like a failure for not making more progress, just pick ONE thing you will absolutely commit to accomplishing each day. What is something valuable that you could accomplish today? How good would it feel to set that intention and actually get it done? You’re free to do more if you can, but if you can’t, no worries you’ve already done what you promised you would do. Plan your weeks in advance The biggest game changer for me has been blocking time for my priorities. Every Friday I look at what I accomplished during the week, what matters most as I head into next week, and I block time on my calendar to make it happen. You might not be able to schedule 3-hour blocks for progress, but I bet you could sprinkle 15-, 30-, or even 60-minute blocks throughout your week to focus on your plans. OPPORTUNITY FOR ACTION: Find ONE item on your calendar or to-do list to say NO to.   It’s time to swap stress and overwhelm for calm, focused, and effective days. My brand new Mastermind is launching soon and will help you to clarify your goals, identify your priorities, and invest your time, energy, and focus strategically so that you can accomplish more with less effort. Join the wait list today! [http://geoffwelch.com/mastermind]