These weekly reflections have been nothing short of INSANE.

For me at least…

And this week has been a week where the final end-of-week reflection has been incredibly powerful and fulfilling.

This is Week 4 of The Unicorn Founder and realization after realization has been made, all in the name of progress 📈 

I have updates on the agency structure, the plan to scale it fast, and some philosophical reflections.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🗓️ A New Way of Using Your Calendar: A lesson from last week, applied this week, transforming future weeks.

• ⚡️ The Agency of Growth: The format for the agency that primes it for optimal speed, growth, and profitability (of time and money).

• 💡 The Questions That Matter: Why the questions we ask help us more than we have ever possibly realised.

• ➡️ Direction: The next steps to keep cracking away at those revenue targets.

🗓️ A New Way of Using Your Calendar

Imagine a world where we were so pedantic about how we spent our time that we actually tracked every day, every hour, every 30 minutes, every 15 minutes…

Welcome to my new weekly tracker.

The key thing for any tracking system intended for better usage of time is to make sure that the tracking itself does not take a huge chunk of time to do.

I find this calendar tracker to be extremely easy, maybe 2 seconds of time x 10 times a day = less than 30 seconds used to do it throughout the day.

You are more than welcome to critique the way I spent this last week - which was completely different from the usual routine (my brother is down in SA on vacation) - but the main measure I use is based on output, the means are completely subjective to the person.

This has has been a tremendous help for me to analyse where I have managed to get into “flow” work and also how my energy moves throughout each day.

I can spot:

• Inefficiencies

• Distractions

• Opportunities

And why am I so pedantic?

Because I am in a rush. Not hastefully.

But with intention I have urgency in the work I do and the results I wish to achieve.

Use it, don’t use it.

⚡️️ The Agency of Growth

On Wednesday I ran a series of 15 interviews with freelance developers to hire them on my team.

I had a whole plan laid out for how the agency would work, with commission models in place, community forums, and, and, and…

Then I had a very interesting call come in from the UK, specifically northern Scotland - which shed very enlightening ideas and insights into a more efficient/profitable approach, which I am since pursuing.

→ To build software “modules” which are sort of like “custom-built” templates, which would remain somewhat the same 70%-80% of the time, and the remaining % would be completely customized for the client at hand.

In that way, I can spend a somewhat large amount of time in the beginning (these last few days and this next week) to build the base of each module (5), and then find 10 different clients for each module (bringing myself to have 50 unique, customized software applications rolled out in the next 3 weeks).

That would mean, if I charge between $1,500 - $3,000 upfront cost for each application, there would be between $75,000 - $100,000 generated in the next 3 weeks, not including the monthly retainer each client would pay.

Bet.

Let’s see what happens - this is all theoretical numbers - but potential nonetheless.

The big thing here is that for the five different modules, the heavy lifting is done in the beginning and then it is just between 2 - 6 hours of customizing work for each new unique client.

💡The Questions That Matter

Revealing:

• If someone is paying attention.

• Someone’s intelligence.

• Someone’s interest in the discussion/topic at hand.

One of the big questions I have been asking is:

It’s an incredibly freeing question to ask and then answer - ideally over and over as we go through life and situations.

Currently the answer is: Quitting.

So that makes things sooo much easier, because all I have to do is not quit and just keep on keeping on - pretty easy.

The bigger question is whether we want to keep on keeping on, which then requires us to go deeper and ask the questions such as:

• What happens when I go down this road?

• What is the result of passing milestone X on this road?

• Why am I doing all of this?

• To what end does this all serve?

• And many others for another newsletter.

The next big question for me is how I can get those base module software structures built as fast as possible - the first one is almost done - took around 8 hours - I will get faster as I build more.

➡️ Direction

So, going onto where we’re headed next is very simple:

• Complete the first five module base structures.

• Get the first client to pay for each of the modules.

• Get the next 9 clients for each module onboarded.

And, alongside that all is a continuing conversation I am having with a Scotsman, a VC investor, and some successful agency founders, all of which is turning out to be extremely profitable - more on that next weekend.

😖 If you hated this, tell me.

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

🔋 Power in Community

Life is not easy, but having good people around you helps a ton!

• 1 Referral = Thinking of starting a startup/business? Get the Billion Dollar Case Study to get some points on where to start from the ones who have done it already.

• 2 Referral + = Are you interested in knowing more about other billion dollar companies? There is a lot of exciting research conclusions I’ll be releasing shortly as rewards.

• 5 Referrals = Exclusive access to a private slack channel of founders/entrepreneurs and even some investors from all over the world.

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

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Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan