E109: My 2018 Goals

2018 just rolled in and there's no better time to set goals for the fresh year than today. I think everyone should be doing something like this, as having clear and sharp goals keeps you from getting distracted by seemingly important but meaningless things. It helps you focus your time and resources on the things that truly matter.

I put together 18 goals (yes, I did 18 to be cheesy) that I'm going to work towards achieving this year. It's a collection of goals for Terran (our holding company for ColorIt, IceWraps, Tactical, and WildBaby), for EcomCrew, and for my personal life as well.

Below are my 2018 goals (in no particular order) which I will explain in detail in today's podcast:

1. Develop 50 new products
2. Launch on Amazon Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and eventually, Australia
3. Optimize our Amazon listings to increase sales by 50%
4. Improve PPC
5. Implement the concepts in the book Traction in our business
6. Reach $10 million in revenue with a 10% net profit
7. Lose 12 lbs
8. Record 100 episodes of the podcast
9. Launch a new version of ecomcrew.com
10. Launch 4 new courses
11. Speak at at least 4 industry events
12. Hike 80 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail
13. Take an epic 2-week vacation
14. Visit the Philippines office at least once
15. Read 4 books (I know, I know… 4 books aren't a lot but I'm not really a book reader so please don't laugh at me)
16. Hand off my Facebook ads to other people within the company
17. Come up with at least one new tactic that no one else is doing
18. Never lose sight of the bigger picture: create 5 star products that people will truly love and continue to enjoy what I'm doing

That's a pretty long list; some of the items are harder than the others, but they're all clear goals that will guide our efforts this year. What are your goals? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

Resources mentioned:

Stamped.io
AsiaInspection
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
Under the Hood
ECF Live
Global Sources
Sellers Summit

Full Audio Transcript

Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to episode number 109 of the EcomCrew Podcast. It's so good to have you guys back. After being away for a couple of days, I realize that people probably don't listen to a lot of podcasts between Christmas and New Year’s. So we took a couple of days off, and quite frankly it was a little bit refreshing not recording a podcast for a few days. It's a bit of a grind.

I love doing it as someone asked me, would I rather be doing it or not. I mean I absolutely love doing it, but it is nice every now and then to just take a mental break from doing these types of things. And now that we're back for the beginning of 2018, it's crazy to say that another year has gone by. I think that this is the time to set goals for the year, and I think everyone should be doing this type of thing.

So this episode is focused on setting goals for 2018. I have put together 18 goals for 2018 just to be a little cheesy. And I hope you guys enjoy those, so we'll see you on the other side of this introduction, and I look forward to going over my goals for 2018.

All right guys, here we are January 4th, 2018, the first EcomCrew Podcast in 2018, and no better time than to come up with 18 goals for 2018. I have included goals for our company Terran, which is our holding company that does IceWraps, Colorit, WildBaby, and Tactical along with some goals for EcomCrew and some personal goals I throw in there as well. They're not in any particular order. I kind of have them intertwined in here. But I wanted to come up with 18 just to be cheesy and have 18 goals for 2018.

So let's dive right in. Again, these aren’t in any particular order. Some of these are more profound than others. The first one is a big one, which is to develop 50 new products in 2018. My definition for this will be placing an order for a new product before the end of the year. I'm hoping to be able to do that for 50 products. It's averaging about one per week.

It's kind of a crazy pace, but the reality is, is if we're going to hit one of our revenue goals which I have in here, we have to launch new products. There's only so much that you can do in your ecommerce business from a marketing perspective to increase sales of existing products. And we're at a point where we need a lot of new life blood for our business and new products.

Not all 50 are going to be as successful as some of the others although we're definitely in a position where the products that we launch are definitely launching at a higher success rate than ever. But we know there'll be some ones in there that don't do amazing. And then the reality is, for us to continue to grow at 200 or 300% per year, we need new products.

So, 50 new products ordered by the end of 2018. This cannot count to the color combinations or sizes. So if we order a new baby blanket, if there is a blue, red and pink one or whatever, that doesn't count. That's one SKU, or it's three SKUs but one product. So the way that I'll look at this is if I'm creating 50 new listings on Amazon, if there's variations, the variations do not count towards the 50.

Again that's pretty ambitious. We are starting off the year on the right foot. We are in the process of launching about eight new products, replacing the products and ordering about eight to ten new products almost right off the bat. But it's going to take another trip probably to the Canton Fair later this year or other sourcing fairs to be able to continue on that pace as we just don't have another 40 prospects as of right now.

So, this will definitely be a big one, and we'll see how it goes as 2018 moves along. The second goal here is to launch on Amazon Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and then eventually Australia. Some of this we're well along the pipeline; the process of doing that. I will eventually have a podcast episode dedicated specifically to this. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest areas of growth for us in 2018.

I've talked to a lot of friends and people in the industry to kind of get tabs on other people who are selling in all these different marketplaces. And the consensus I got by averaging everything out is that on average you can basically double whatever you're doing in Amazon US by being on these platforms. So in other words an aggregate of Amazon Canada, UK, Germany, France, and Italy is about what you should be able to do in Amazon US.

And again, obviously, this is an average of everyone I've talked to. Some people have launched with miserable failure in Europe. Their products just don't resonate for whatever reason in Europe. Other people have had the opposite effect where it actually resonates better in Europe than it did in the United States. We'll see how this goes.

And as a part of this, as we launch on Amazon Canada and Amazon UK, our plan is to offer our products on Colorit.com using multi-channel fulfillment shipping directly within the country so there's no import duty or shipping charges. We’ll be able to offer free shipping on the same rate that we do on our US store for those jurisdictions. And the word on the street from everyone that I talked to in Facebook advertising land is that it's way cheaper to advertise to Canada and the UK. So I’m extremely excited about the prospect that this has, not only on Amazon, but on our Shopify channel as well.

Number three is to optimize our Amazon listings to increase sales by an average of 50%. We've done some testing with this already, but as we continue to scale and have more and more products, it becomes more and more difficult to do this at scale. It's just one of these things. With a lot of things going on in your business, it's hard to keep tabs on everything. But we've done some testing with both Splitly and with imagery, and we've actually been able to double sales.

So this 50% target is on the lower end. But I'm averaging this out over all of our Amazon listings for 2018 taking the same listings that we have. Let's say we did three million dollars in businesses to use around number in 2018 on Amazon with our current listings. I want to do four point five million, let's say, with those same listings, not including all the growth and other things that we're doing or other things that might affect the listing, but just by improving the listing, having better titles, better imagery and doing some split testing with Splitly to increase the effectiveness of a listing.

Again this is something that we've already been testing in the fourth quarter of 2017, and there's just no doubt that we can get a lot more out of our listings. And this will be something that we’ll be writing both a blog post about and doing individual podcast about because it's really profound. We’ve been able to just really with numbers and data show that there's so much more we can do with the existing listings.

And obviously, I'd rather get more revenue from existing products and listings. There's more economies of scale to be had there than launching new products. So that's the – the exciting thing always is launching new products, and what ends up happening is you lose focus of the stuff you already have. And we're going to definitely work on that very, very diligently through the first half of 2018, and hopefully be on the path to increase our sales by 50% just through Amazon listing improvement alone.

The next one is somewhat akin to improving the listing, it's also improving PPC. As we've continued to grow again just on scale, it's difficult to have hundreds, or getting close to a thousand, different Amazon PPC campaigns between automatic campaigns and then broad and exact match campaigns and product placement ads and headline ads. There's a lot to keep track of.

I did some training with one of the amazing VAs that we have in the Philippines, her name is Lourd when I was in the Philippines, and she's doing an awesome job there. We had to pause the effort she was doing there for a couple of months because of the holidays just getting kind of crazy. And unfortunately, we have one VA who left because of some family stuff, and she was moving and unfortunately she had to leave our company, and Lourd had to take over some of those responsibilities.

But we have a couple of replacements that have finally started which we're really excited about, and hopefully we can get back on that PPC train and really optimize our Amazon PPC more effectively. This is again something we've experimented with and been able to see really great gains by spending way less money and actually increasing sales. But it's manually intensive and something you have to be on top of all the time.

There isn't an automated version of this out yet that we've been able to find that really, really does a great job with it, and maybe it will exist someday. But right now we have the formula, we know exactly what to do, it's just a matter of implementing it at scale. Doing it on five products no problem, doing it on 100, or 200 or 300 products becomes a full time job and you've got to be really diligent.

So that's number four. Then moving on to number five is implementing the book basically called Traction. If you guys have a business that has more than just you, even if it is just you, it can be helpful. But definitely as you have a team, this is really, really helpful. This is a book that I was recommended through one of my masterminds. Again it's called Traction, and I'm really excited to be implementing this in our business.

We have some meetings set up in the first month of the year here in January to really start ironing this out. Basically the goal is to get everyone in our company on the same page, make sure everyone understands what our mission statement is, what our goals are for each quarter for the year for the next five years whatever it may be, and get everyone heading in the same direction. This isn't something that a lot of people do.

There isn't a lot of companies that I've worked for, I’ve been involved with where a CEO is setting goals and that's going to submit and pass maybe an executive team and getting everyone on the same page. So, I'm excited to be doing that especially with having Jacqueline here, our new Director of Ecommerce, I think this is going to be a lot easier. She's a lot more organized and better planner than I am.

And the goal again is to set these goals to define our mission statement, to have our quarterly rocks as one of the things they talk about in there, and make sure that we're achieving this stuff in a monthly, quarterly and then yearly basis. To be able to hit not only the other 17 goals in this list besides this one, but also the next goal here which is our revenue goal of $10 million next year, which is crazy to have that insight.

We've been able to double every year or more up to this point, and it's definitely been harder and harder, there's no doubt about it. Going from $100,000 a year in sales to $200,000 a year in sales is a whole lot easier than going from five million to ten million. There's a lot more moving parts. You can go from $100,000 to $200,000 in sales probably by yourself, or even a half a million to a million by yourself.

But once you start adding team members in and there's more moving parts, and the more things start to drop through the cracks and you're not doing a good job with some of the things I already mentioned, keeping listings fully optimized, launching products in a timely fashion, doing PPC efficiently, all these different things. There's just becomes a lot of balls in the air and it gets harder and harder to get more and more of a headwind than necessarily a breeze at your back.

And it's frustrating because we know exactly what to do; we know the exact perfect formula for doing all this stuff than just trying to get everyone to get on the same page and moving forward, marching to that same goal. And as a part of this, I want to make sure that we're also profitable. It's not just an ego thing of throwing up ten million dollars in sales. I want to make sure that we're doing that at a 10% net profit. And that would be before taking a salary because I don't really look at my salary as necessarily an expense in the business as a part of that net profit. So 10% net profit before any owner salary on that ten million is the goal.

The next one is a personal goal which is to lose 12 pounds in 2018. I think a lot of people always have these weight loss things. This is not a New Year's resolution by any means. I've actually already lost almost ten pounds in the last few months, but it's a lifestyle thing. I'm just trying to continuously eat a better diet, a lower carb diet probably, certainly eating more fruits and vegetables, which I've already been doing for the last five plus years, but also intermittent fasting. I've been actually doing a really good job with only eating between noon and 8pm.

So I've cut out of a meal per day basically. I'm not eating breakfast anymore, and I feel like my just overall demeanor and happiness is actually better by doing that. And I'm probably going to try to shrink that window down to seven or six hours per day of only eating in that window, because it's actually pretty healthy to do intermittent fasting. It's something you can do some research for on the internet. And hopefully, just lifestyle change and over the course of next year losing 12 pounds basically an average of a pound per month should be a slam dunk to do that.

Again just being disciplined and not falling off the wagon and doing silly things, which if you can get in a habit forming position, which I've already done, which is not eating breakfast and not eating before noon becomes pretty easy. I actually didn't even eat today until like 1:30 or 2:00 and only really even did that because I know I wasn’t going to quite make it to dinner time, which I think that even getting to point where I’m eating just one big meal a day is possible and certainly to lose weight that way. So we'll see how it goes. We'll see if we can lose 12 pounds or even possibly more in 2018.

Number eight is going to be to record 100 episodes of the EcomCrew Podcast. This is not number one for 2018. We skipped Monday's episode, actually I think Monday would have been New Year's Eve. So we are on the right track. Basically the situation is I need to record two episodes of the EcomCrew Podcast every week except for I can miss four episodes which is a big pace, a lot to do.

You might not think that recording a 30 minute episode podcast takes more than an hour total time per week, but it's a lot more than that. A lot of thought and energy goes into it. There is some pre-planning. As much as I like to just kind of wing it and do it, there's a lot that goes into it especially some of these new episodes we've been doing for Under the Hood which are coming out here next week.

It's definitely a ton of work and definitely something that I want to achieve. We’ve got to our hundredth episode late last year. We recorded over 50 episodes, about 50 episodes last year, which I'm really happy with, and trying to double that just like we're doubling our business is going to be a big achievement. It's a lofty goal. I think I can do it.

We've been doing two episodes per week the last couple of months, and that pace does feel achievable for me especially since we haven't been doing the Facebook live component anymore. That wasn't really sustainable trying to be at one place every Monday at a certain time is very difficult and it makes the podcast more regimented. And trying to do that plus another episode and not having them recorded in advance makes it tough.

I think the only way to achieve this is to batch these. I do record them a lot of these in advance. And in fact I've already recorded six Under the Hood segments which is actually going to end up being about 10 to 12 episodes of the podcast, and that's already done.

So, like I've already got a lot of leeway here. So I can actually go on vacation and do other things, or have a busy week or have something come up in an emergency where the podcast doesn't get skipped because it's not the priority at that moment. So, 100 episodes of the EcomCrew Podcast in 2018. For those of you who have insomnia, this should solve your problem. You'll have 100 new episodes to listen to, at least the first five or ten minutes until you pass out and fall asleep.

The next one is to launch a new version of EcomCrew.com. We're pretty close to doing this. I think that this is going to be a softball, but it's an important thing for us to do. We already did launch a new version issue of the EcomCrew earlier last year when Dave joined EcomCrew team and the podcast, and the blog and everything. And by the way, shout out to Dave for just producing some just epic amazing content on the blog. If you guys haven't been to EcomCrew lately, Dave has — he's always produced amazing content.

It's the reason I wanted to team up with him. But I think that because I've set the bar higher doing two podcasts per week, I may not feel guilty somehow, because like now he's like producing even more epic content. It's really pretty amazing, 68,000 word type posts on the blog, epic long guides. Even if you have been selling for a long time, these are just packed full of tons of amazing information. Go check that that stuff out.

That is not one of my goals for 2018, just a plug for Dave and the content he's been doing. But like I said, we launched a semi-new version of EcomCrew along the way there, but this new version is going to be even more epic. We teamed up with another friend of ours in the industry, another guy named Dave, another Dave, Dave and Dave. He will be behind the scenes, but he's just an epically amazing designer and videographer, and the site is about to have a huge facelift.

There's a lot of reason for it. I mean our goal and the next thing I have here kind of melts with it is to launch four new courses in 2018. And to do that and to get people to want to pay for a course and consume that content, I think that we need to stop taking this as a hobby and make it a little bit more professional looking. So goal nine and ten kind of go together. But to launch four new courses is a lot of work.

We already launched one course last year, at the end of last year. It was pretty successful, we're really happy with the results of it. We got some really great comments both positive and negative. The negative comments were mostly about the platform. So we're switching from ClickFunnels as our backend platform to a platform called New Kajabi, which is just a way better platform for doing training and hosting that stuff.

And we're also putting together a whole new area called my EcomCrew that's going to get released here in the next few weeks. It's going to be a free area with all the content that we're doing that's kind of behind the scenes, different cheat sheets and webinars and things like that. So these goals kind of all melt together, eight, nine, and ten, recording the 100 episodes of the podcast, launching a new version of EcomCrew and launching at least four new courses in 2018.

Those are all related to EcomCrew. I’m definitely excited about the developments we have going on there. Goal number 11 is to speak at, at least four industry events. I've started to enjoy these things. I think that again I've moved from being completely uncomfortable and scared about doing it to almost looking forward to it. And it's something that I think that as you practice it, you become better. And I want to become better at that for a myriad of reasons.

I think that it's just important in life to be able to present yourself in these situations anyway, but I do think that it's vital to the success, the long term success of EcomCrew. Every time I'm speaking in front of a room of three, four, or 500 people, and hopefully those rooms will get bigger, it's just more exposure for EcomCrew, which I'm excited about. But again, it's also achieving a personal goal as well. Feeling like I've done a better job with it is something that is important to me.

So, speaking at, at least four industry events this year. The ones I have already on the calendar through the first half of the year are EcommerceFuel Live which is in January in Laguna. I'll be speaking at Global Sources again. I just got invited back officially to that, which I think is in April. I don't have the exact dates handy. And then I’m also speaking at Sellers Summit in early May. It's going to be kind of a hectic April, May there.

I’m going to probably end up flying like directly from Asia to Miami for that which is just kind of nutty. And then we also have a wedding that same weekend of Sellers Summit. That's going to be a crazy few days of travel there, but again it's important to me to speak at these things. That gets me three right there through May. Hopefully I'll get invited to a couple of other ones and be able to meet the goal of four, maybe even five or six through 2018.

The next one is a personal goal, which is to hike 80 miles of the PCT, the Pacific Crest Trail. It's right in our backyard. If you guys remember, I did 32 miles in Alaska over like a four day period plus a bunch of other hiking that we did in Alaska. And my goal basically is to leave on a Friday night from work, directly from work, go out to the PCT and just set up camp and then spend the next nine days.

So it’ll be like Saturday, Sunday, Monday through Friday, then next Saturday and come back on the next Sunday, and average somewhere around eight to ten miles a day and do 80 miles of the PCT at one shot. It's a pretty lofty goal. I have never done anything anywhere near like that. I was a complete wreck after doing 32 miles in Alaska. But we were doing it at a little bit higher pace, and that trail up there was a little bit more challenging as far as elevation gains and losses. So we'll see what happens.

I also had a lot more weight in Alaska. I had to carry a firearm with me, which is not light and a bear canister and tons of food because we had to bring all of our food in for four days. Along the PCT, every so many miles there's places to get water and food, and I think that I can do 80 miles. So we'll see what happens. My goal really is to do 100, but I'm setting it at 80 to just be more realistic and try to do something I can actually achieve.

That will probably be in the March or April timeframe. The timing of that will be based on the weather. So luckily my schedule is pretty flexible when it comes to this stuff. I'm going to try to keep my calendar open and flexible, and just keep a close eye on the weather. It's going to be determined on the highs and the lows. I don’t want to be hiking when it's too cold or too hot obviously.

But more importantly than anything, I just need to make sure that there's a good water supply on the trail. Water weight can weigh you down quicker than anything else. Water is shockingly heavy. If you ever pick up a gallon of water or imagine having to have a couple of gallons with you or whatever, it adds a ton of extra weight when you're trying to keep your base weight down. So we’ll see how that goes. March or April is kind of the target for that, which will be right before I have to go to Hong Kong for Global Sources to get that week of vacation that I definitely need.

And speaking of vacation, number 13 is to take a one epic two week vacation in 2018. I have no idea what I want this to be. I need to talk to my wife about it. She was awesome enough to allow me the goal of doing the Alaska trip this last year. And so what I did if you guys remember, the first week I was on my own with my cousin. Actually not on my own but without her, but my wife came up to Alaska for the second week and joined me which was awesome. But it wasn't her first choice I know that.

I definitely appreciate her coming to do. I think she had a good time but again not her first choice, so picking someplace that she wants to go. I just like traveling wherever it might be. And something probably in the summertime when it's warm in someplace like Europe, or wherever it might be depending on where she wants to go.

Maybe it'll be something at the end of the year where we're going to maybe the Southern Hemisphere when it's their summer. So we'll see where that is, but I think it's important every year to take at least one two week vacation along with other vacations. But they're hard to get in because like it's two weeks away from your business at a time, and it's stressful on everyone else in the business. So we'll see how that goes, but yeah the goal is to take an epic vacation.

When I say epic, it'll be somewhere far away from here. We'll use our Miles. We have accumulated fly first class, stay in nice hotels, or if it's a hiking type trip we still fly first class and go someplace really nice. And more importantly, the epic part of that is to just check out from the office to like not be on email and not interface with the office unless it's a true emergency. I think it's really important to do these types of things at least once if not multiple times per year, so enough on that.

Number fourteen is to visit the Philippines office at least once in 2018. This is on the list because this is not easy even though we've been to the Philippines twice already. It's a week away. I'm going to try to go for a week or at least four days or whatever it might be. It's time away from the office here. It's usually combined with some other trip to Asia. So it lengthens an already lengthy trip unless I go do this by itself which is just a lot more travelling.

Either way you cut it, it is not logistically easy to get to the Philippines. I love my time there, I love spending time with my team. I think it's really important to be with my team at least once a year there in person. So this is on the list because I think it's really, really important. I love being with my guys here in California. We get to spend every day together, and we just take that for granted.

The Philippines office doesn't have that same luxury. And for me it's really important to be out there, hang out with them for some time every year. It's also good not just for camaraderie and things like that, but good for taking leapfrogs and training and stuff like that. When I left there last time, I felt like we literally had like a leapfrog week, because I felt like we went six months forward in one quick trip.

So that's number 14, moving on to number 15. Some people are going to laugh at this probably because I know there's a lot of people out there that read a lot, the prolific readers, and that is not me. I am ADD; I have a hard time sitting still and just reading through a book. But this is something that I want to do in 2018, and I want to set the bar at something that's really achievable which is to read a book a quarter, so four books in 2018.

Again don't laugh too hard at me. I didn't even come close to four books in 2018. I do read a lot. I read a lot of short stuff though. I read a lot of news, definitely in the politics and news these days. So I’m reading a lot of stuff about that, but it's typically a blog post. It might be 1,000 to 4,000 words, and for me, for my focus level, that's great.

Reading a book is a lot more difficult for me to just sit down and find the time to do that. But I've been reading a couple of other books here at the end of the year. One of them obviously I mentioned was Traction, and I did find it to be a little therapeutic just forcing myself to sit down and read, get away from my computer and typically try to read outside. It's always nice here in California, so I go out on my balcony or the patio and read out there which is just lovely and forcing me again to get outside and do that.

And I just think that it gives you a perspective. It's good to read the stuff. These will probably all be business books. It seems like that's all I'm ever thinking about anyway. There might be an enjoyable biography or fiction thing in there, but mostly probably some type of business things. I've had some good recommendations, and I'll probably dedicate a podcast episode to each of those books as we go through 2018, and we'll see how that goes number.

Number 16, this is going to be a tough one for me. I almost didn’t put down on the list because I don’t even know if I can really do this. But it's to hand off my Facebook ads or our Facebook ads as a company to other people within the company. Realistically, I should not be doing our Facebook ads. We've been working internally to have Audrey our marketing girl who does an amazing job do some of the stuff already, but it's definitely tough to let go of six figures of spend per year.

So it's scary for me from that perspective, just having someone else basically do that and have full reins over that, definitely intimidating and scary. But the other part is that like I actually really enjoy it. I enjoy it more than anything the almost instant gratification that you get launching Facebook ads. This is something that like for me again being kind of ADD and not patient has been a long time coming. Like if I could have 20 years ago had something like this, it's almost just like taking a shot of some type of a drug, like smoking up of a meth pipe or shooting heroin or something where you get like this instant higher satisfaction.

It's almost the same thing to me running Facebook ads, definitely hashtag nerd alert there. But I do love the instant gratification. You think about like SEO or content marketing and some of the things that I used to do in the past, affiliate marketing, it is nowhere near instant gratification. It's six months, a year or twelve, a year and a half to sometimes two years before you really first get all that stuff, the fruition of all that comes to life.

But Facebook ads, you launch it and you'll know sometimes within hours if it's going to be successful or not, and I love that. I love that instant gratification. It allows you to build minimal viable products very quickly and do testing and coming up with new ideas all the time. And if it doesn't work, the sadness period of that is very quick. You can just dust that off and move on to something else relatively quickly, because you can launch another thing really quickly, versus developing a product or doing something in the old days. Ten years ago, 20 years ago, it was a crushing blow sometimes when something didn’t go right, it would take you months to recover from that.

And that's something I love about Facebook ads. So I'm going to try to hand that off. I mean realistically if we're going to be a ten million dollar company, the CEO of the company should not be running Facebook ads. You can be involved with them and review them or talk about them, but being the person that's launching them constantly is probably not the right thing.

The next thing here, number 17 is to come up with at least one new tactic that no one else is doing in 2018. I kind of pride myself on being a market leader with whatever we're doing. I think back to online poker, we were the first ones to do incentivized marketing. No one else had ever thought of that stuff, and first ones that we do right back.

And there's a lot of other things that we've done that have been first in ecommerce as well, or at least leading the pack on. And I want to make sure that we're continuing to do that, not just being a follower and doing what everybody else is doing or just getting complacent with the things that we're currently doing, but coming up with some new ideas and ways to generate business in ecommerce.

I don't know what that's going to be yet, but we have a full year to be thinking about it. And if I'm not spending time doing Facebook ads or some of the other things that I won't be doing because we're implementing Traction, hopefully I'll have times to be the dreamer and the innovator. I forget the exact words that they use in Traction for that position. That is definitely my personality. It's not the organizer but kind of the person that's coming up with ideas. And hopefully in 2018, I will have some more new and good ideas, and hopefully I'll be able to share them with the community as well.

So rounding out the 18 goals, I put this one last. I said these weren’t in any particular order, but the last one is here last for a reason, which is to never lose sight of the bigger picture. We want to make great products that customers truly enjoy like five star products, hopefully five star products, no less than a four and a half star product people really enjoy. This is the thing that makes me enjoy coming to work every day, which is the other part of this.

So make great products and enjoy coming to work and doing what I'm doing. Life is short, I want to enjoy what I do eight hours or 10 hours or 12 hours a day realistically six or seven days a week. This is not just a job for me but a hobby and something that I would be doing even if I wasn't getting paid or making money at it. I really enjoy it, but I want to make sure that I continue to do that.

Some days are going to be frustrating, some days I’m going to wish that we didn't have this business. I get it, but like I want like 95% of the time for me to be like really enjoying coming to work. I'm happy to be here today. I'm happy to be recording this podcast, it’s exciting for me. I don't look at it as a chore or laborious. When it gets to that point, it will be time to find something else to do. But as of right now I love it, and I want to continue make sure that I love it.

And just as important is also for our employees to feel that same way. I want people that enjoy working for me, working for this company, enjoy coming into work every day. I know what it's been like to be an employee, I've been there. I want to make sure that people enjoy their job and feel like they're being challenged and have an opportunity to advance their career, and feel like that they're contributing to a greater good of a team. And again enjoying that five days a week, eight hours a day, that we treat them with respect and don't ever lose track of that.

I always say, we are not building a nuclear reactor here. We're not curing some disease like a bowl that's like running out of control. We have to keep things in perspective of how much of an emergency something truly is when we say it's emergency, or how critical it is when we say it's critical and not constantly being at that like 105% output level. We'll just burn people out, and they're just like miserable every day. Trying to do it in a way that it's actually sustainable and enjoyable for them is also just as important is for my own personal enjoyment.

So that's not been a problem in the past, but I think it's important to have on the list of goals because if you lose sight of that, it's easy for it to get away from you very quickly. So that is my list of goals for 2018, 18 goals for 2018. I hope you guys enjoyed the list. Don't forget to go to the comments to let us know what you think.

Again, you can go to EcomCrew.com/109 to get to the show notes for this episode, EcomCrew.com/109 to get to the show notes. Feel free to comment and let us know about anything you might want to raise about this episode. We're glad to be back doing the podcast here in 2018. Again looking forward to doing 100 episodes in 2018. One down, 99 to go. I’ll talk to you guys next week, and until then, happy selling.

Thanks for listening to the EcomCrew Podcast. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/ecomcrew for weekly live recordings of the EcomCrew Podcast every Monday. And please, do us a favor, and leave an honest review on iTunes, it would really help us out. Again, thanks for listening, and until next week, happy selling.