What do you need to do to quit your job and run your Sub Box full time?

I get this question a lot and it boils down to 3 main things

Let’s dive in 👉

1. Master your marketing

The most difficult problem every subscription box founder must overcome is figuring out a way to generate sales 

This is the 1 thing that will kick start everything, it takes time to learn and optimise your system

But it’s the 🔑 to everything else

2. Outsource low-value work

If you spend most of your time answering CS emails and packing boxes…

That takes you away from high-value work such as marketing and sales

Hire a VA, get friends/family or fulfilment partners to pack boxes, and automate as much as you can

3. Optimise your business metrics

You will never outrun bad churn, a bad profit margin doesn’t get much better with more sales

The key is to aim to have your business profitable at the lowest possible amount of subscribers

LTV
CAC
Churn
Profit
Payback period

Optimise them all

This week’s story:

How to stay consistent, in business, in life, in everything you do

The big problem with consistency is its seen as something you either have or you don’t. We never give ourselves enough credit for all of the things we’ve learned and formed as habits in the past.

So today, let’s dive into consistency of effort and sticking to your goals until you reach them.

Learning how to be consistent and sticking out tough times is the recipe for a happy and fulfilled life. It’s the path to achievement, to positive change

Firstly, failure is a necessary part of any effort

Secondly, you will never be 100% consistent, and that is something to encourage you, not deter you. The reason why is no one can be 100% consistent every single day.

You get sick, you have unexpected emergencies, plans and commitments you can’t get out of.

Our goal is to aim for about 80% consistency. This is how I live my life personally, if I hit 90% or 100% in a given week, great. I hit my stride and I’m making progress.

If I hit 50%, no harm no foul. I recognise it using the strategies below and I get right back on the horse. If the next week is 100% then I averaged 75% over the 2 weeks.

No one is perfect! But we can set systems to get as close as we damn can.

“But I’m busy, I’m tired after a long day of work. I also don’t know what I need to be doing to reach my goals”. We’ll take care of all of that today.

Look, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. It’s time to break the cycle and take the first step towards the rest of your life. The life you want and build for yourself. Not society’s idea of where to pigeonhole you.

Staying consistent is something that is very hard for people and that included me for many years.

I used to be more interested in drinking all weekend than setting big life goals and working every day to achieve them.

Back from around 2009-2014 I spent my life partying, recovering, saying I’m never drinking again, and then repeat the cycle come Friday night.

Obviously with that lifestyle I knew it wasn’t good for me and I did want to change, but I still kept it up for years.

Many attempts to make a change in my life were kickstarted on a Monday but binned by Friday when I had the chance to go out drinking & doing drugs again.

I wasn’t consistent with anything. I wanted to start going to the gym, but I couldn’t stick at it. Lack of energy from a crazy weekend, craving high calorie foods, lack of motivation.

These all left me overweight, unhealthy and unattractive to almost anyone of the opposite sex for sure.

What changed?

In January 2015 I started going to the gym with a friend, for some reason this time it stuck. I think I know the reason, we made it bearable.

My previous experience with the gym was it was a big undertaking, preparing your bag, driving to the gym, getting changed, doing your workout, showering, getting changed, driving home. That could take 2.5 hours +

You could also add in much more, warmup, cardio, stretching etc etc.

For someone who likes to spend almost all of his free time drinking or thinking about it. This seemed like a big job, and you’re supposed to be doing it almost daily? 5-7 times per week? This?

Now, my life is totally different. I have 3 successful online businesses in varying stages of development.

I go to the gym 4-5 times per week and do HIIT sessions 1/2 times per week. I’ve managed to control my weight, my alcohol consumption has dropped to almost nothing and I meditate daily, write & produce content, work on my businesses and travel in my spare time to see the world.

I have challenges in my life for sure and I’m far from perfect. But I can safely say I’m in control of my life and my habits to the point where I can decide on a new goal, start making moved to achieve it and stay consistent with it fairly easily.

I even started learning Mandarin Chinese last month and take weekly lessons, ahead of a planned trip to China this June.

I can add in new goals and habits and stick to them with relative ease. But only because I have practise and experience, so I’ll try and share some of my best tips and strategies with you today.

Let’s dive in!

• Write down your goals

The most important thing you can do today is to take an afternoon or an evening and think about your 20 year goals.

Career, family, healthy, financial, spiritual.

What have you been putting off until you’re “less busy?”

Take a sheet of paper or a blank Google Doc

Write out where you would like to be in 20 years. Think of as many things as possible (one of mine was to be fluent in Chinese).

Go big. Go hairy and set yourself very high standards for your future. If you set the bar at 200 and hit 180 it’s better than setting it at 80 and hitting 75 or 90.

I’m serious, do this exercise today and ask yourself what are you working towards. I only started doing this in late 2022.

If you have no direction than any wind is favourable. Good or bad – Seneca

• Plan your days

Now that you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to identify the tasks (one time actions) and habits (daily repeatable actions) to get you there.

The difference is obviously you can’t work out one day and be skinny the next. That requires a consistent habit over an extended period of time. (I’ve lost 14Kg and it took me the past 19 months).

The tasks however are different, these are on time actions that help you to shift your direction onto the path of habit creation.

This would be to work out your daily calorie requirements, build your first website, create your logo for your coaching business or just decide you are going to do something and do the first thing you need to do in order to begin the journey. Then the next thing, and keep going.

The majority of the results come from habit and consistent effort, but we mostly work better crossing off to-do lists than we do sticking to our diet plans we set for ourselves this morning.

Now that we have identified the tasks and habits we must execute in our lives. We must write them down into a quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily planner.

This sounds like a lot, but its quite simple.

Starting with quarterly because it is a long enough time to get significant changes, but short enough that it inspires urgency. If you say this month I’m going to lose 7Kg, or make $5000 online, that’s a very difficult result to achieve in such a short time frame.

If you say you want to achieve these goals in a year, that gives you plenty of time to keep procrastinating until you forget about your goals and go right back to what you were doing before.

The idea here is to set an ambitious but achievable goal for the next 3 months.

Then in the first month, what do you need to do in order to get a good start on that goal. This should be easy enough to identify since a month is also a decent time framer to make changes.

Then weekly, how do we get started with this this week? Healthy grocery shop? No beers this week? Buy a domain name and brainstorm a business name?

Daily Tasks

OK so now we’re starting to see if I want to have an online business generating $5000 in 3 months, my daily tasks should become apparent.

Tasks: Research business ideas, find a logo designer, learn website design on youtube.

Habits: Wake up 1 hour earlier to learn or build in the quiet time, no Netflix until 9pm (or at all), no alcohol this week to stay energised.

Remember, your 20 year goals are clear to you, if you want to land anywhere near them you better discipline yourself or fade to a life of missed opportunities.

• Make it bearable – Craft a minimum viable habit

The goal here is to basically – Start Somewhere

If your goal is to make more money, start an online business or lose 20Kg. But you lack any self discipline in your life, your first step should be to find ONE area where you can exert self control.

Something that bothers you, maybe its snacking at your break, drinking a glass of wine every night, skipping the gym more often than you’d like. Something which you know leads to a negative outcome, but you can’t help yourself.

Start there.

There are studies that show exerting self discipline in one area of your life can spill over into your entire life. 

I recently read in the book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, in 2006 there was an Australian study that found – building willpower in one area (working out or money management) spilled over into other areas of people’s lives

If you go to the gym with self discipline, you start to look at what you’re eating with more discipline. You decide to make changes to your diet all by yourself.

If your new customer-facing job forces you to be friendly and listen to customers, you’ll likely be more engaged and open with your friends and family.

If you abstain from your daily drink, you start to feel better in the morning, you’ve got enough energy to make the gym after work, and the positive habit cycle begins.

• Have a tracking system

Beside my bed I have my habit tracker [Link]. I’ve been using this for 4 years. I have kept the old ones, so I can actually go back over the last 4 years and tell you with relative accuracy how many times I went to the gym, weighed myself, wrote content, read a book, went walking, worked on my second/third income etc etc.

I have never done this though, the reason is because it doesn’t matter for looking back. It only matters for today.

Every day before I go to bed I cross of an X on every habit I have completed that day. I can then see where I am remaining consistent with that goals and habits I set for myself and the ones I failed to do.

Your goal here is the Seinfeld strategy made famous by James Clear’s brilliant book Atomic Habits. 

It’s pretty simple:

1. Cross off an X every day
2. Don’t break the chain.

By tracking your goals that you set for yourself and seeing where you are letting your future self down, you can take full responsibility for getting back on the horse and starting a new chain.

The best motivation is intrinsic motivation, the motivation you find bubbling up inside yourself, if only you would lay claim to it’s source – paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius

5. Review your day & week

Related to the previous point is then taking the time to actually review your habit tracker, your task list and your goals for 5 minutes at the end of every day and for 15 minutes on a Sunday.

The daily review allows you to actually gauge how well you stuck to your habits, accomplished your tasks and executed your deep work to get you closer to your ultimate goals.

The Sunday review allows you to again essentially report to yourself how many of your needle-moving tasks you completed this week and how many are pushed to next week.

The point of this is to take the time to give yourself some feedback. Not every week will be perfect, but the idea is to ask yourself why this week did or didn’t go to plan.

Up late? Was I in bed early enough? Too many tasks left undone? How was distraction playing a part? Missed a workout? Were you drinking this weekend?

The goal is to see where you succeeded and where you failed and try to adjust mainly your habits. Your habits feed into your tasks, if you fail to execute a good habit you can usually see your tasks left incomplete as a consequence.