Amy Porterfield Changed My Life [queue eye roll ?] No,Really!!!

Where have I been these last few weeks: I broke my ankle in the worst way and had to have surgery. Let’s just say margaritas and wedges are a bad idea.

Now on to the show.

I started listening to Amy Porterfield’s Online Marketing Made Easy podcast back in 2013 when I was trying to grow my senior living business.

She always had hands-on tactile advice.  She really does try to make every episode a mini training.

I learned a ton from her and after every episode, I would make an effort to implement what I had learned. And it was working.

Fast forward 2 years, when I finally signed up for B-school and I only signed up for it because I wanted Amy’s bonus package.

It was so full of behind the scenes gold that I used to get my business systematized and functioning like a well-oiled machine.

In the fall of 2015, I went to the bonus 3 day mastermind weekend with Amy.  There were about 150 of us and we got to meet Amy, go through even more awesome training and pick her brain.

It was ah-mazing, to say the least.

During this weekend, I also met 4 other women that have changed my life, you’ve met one of them already, Monica Louie and you’ll meet another one next week Sarah Schwab.

But today is all about Amy.

So now that I got all of the backstory done let’s get to the heart of it.

The 1st thing she taught me was to model those that I admired.  Don’t recreate the wheel!

This was crucial at the beginning because I could’ve wasted a ton of time trying to do it solo.

Now she wasn’t saying to be a copycat or to be exactly like the person you are modeling.

She meant to model after the big picture, put your own spin on it and make it your own.

Think business models or social strategies.  Not copying!

Why did this change my life?

Well, I decided to model Amy and in doing that it saved me a ton of time, stress and feeling lost.

She had already done it!  Created an amazing online business and that’s where I wanted to go.

So I used her systems, her organization methods and her style of content (teaching with every piece of content).  It gave me a roadmap.

And the fact that she is vocal about modeling after businesses you admire gave me the permission to not have to recreate the wheel for my business.

This was not a popularly held belief 4 years ago.

At that time, it was all about being authentic and creating your own way.  Which can seem insurmountable when you are starting your online journey.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about authenticity but I don’t think you need to take the long way.  Model, make it your own and do it on your own terms!

The second way that Amy has changed my life is through what she calls closing loops.

Amy attributes a lot of her success to the fact that she doesn’t have a lot of ideas and that she can focus in on one project and see it through.

If you are anything like me then you know that struggle is real.  Shiny object syndrome is no joke and as an entrepreneur, we are especially prone to this.

I mean I am guilty of having a new idea every day or sometimes every hour that I immediately want to act on because new is fun!

This is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur in opinion.  And I’ve been so guilty of this in the past.

I would start a project and then get bored and start another project and then get bored and the over and over again until all you have is a bunch of partially completed ideas and nothing to show for it.

The key to success is closing loops.

Start one project at a time and complete it.  And then you can move to the next thing.

This is key to success right here!  Follow through and consistency!

In one of her recent podcasts, she said that not closing loops can actually hurt your team too.

So if you are trying to build your empire with a small but might (like she says) team then you wanna make sure that you closing your loops.

Now finally the last way she has changed my life is through SCRUM.

You’ve heard me talk about Scrum before if you’ve been listening to the podcast.

But for those of you who don’t know what Scrum is, let me break it down.

Scrum is a rugby term used by the IT industry.

There is a book called Scrum, The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland but I’ll spare that read or listen.  It’s very long and boring.

Trust me, it put me to sleep quite a few times but I finally made it through the entire book so you don’t have to.

Anyway, at Amy’s mastermind weekend she taught us how she uses Scrum in her business and it was revolutionary but also so simple.

The guys on the show Silicone Valley used Scrum when they were writing one of their apps.  See this YouTube clip here.  I love this show, every episode has me rolling.

So here it is.

Basically, you go from super big picture to minute detail.

Take a projects end result and create a post-it note for every single little task that goes into a project.  It’s called a backlog.

Once you’ve created your backlog, then you sort them into categories and start a sprint.

A sprint is a short determined amount of time, maybe around 2 weeks.  This is where you see how much gets done and where you get stuck.

If you are working with a team this is crucial.  Checking in regularly to adapt and evolve is key.

Once you do this for a while you have a much clearer idea of how much time specific tasks take and how long projects will take.

This backlog process also works really good in systematizing.

Because you are documenting each minute task for a project…if this is a recurring project you can create a checklist and system around it.

Or if it is something that you might want to teach one day then you already have all of the steps documented.  Talk about a time saver.

I use Scrum almost every day.  I love sprints and knowing exactly where I am in a project.

Alright, so there you have it.

Links mentioned in this episode:

Thanks for Listening!

Check out the most recent episodes:

How to Make $10k a Month as a Virtual Assistant

Making the Transition from Corporate to Entrepreneur with Fabienne Raphael

Top 5 Online Business Tools for Under $30

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Special thanks to Amy Porterfield for inspiring me and to Carson Baker for being an awesome sound engineer.  Until next time!

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