Distraction and being spread too thin… is not a good thing and is super ineffective. When doing the start-up company thing it is almost a given that being spread too thin is going to happen. The reason is that for the most part, nothing is set up and you have to start from scratch. Ugh… Also, like in my case, I have to grow and stretch every single day in about 10,000 ways and get out of my comfort zone regularly. In fact I would say I live outside of my comfort zone. Now, you will hear a lot of public speakers say how great living outside of your comfort zone is for you! I agree, however, it is certainly not the easy way and I am not the biggest fan of discomfort. Straight up, sometimes outside of my comfort zone sucks! But the value of stretching and growing and living outside of my comfort zone is that I get to have things like personal satisfaction, joy, pride, trust, success, accomplishment… lol you know little things like that!

There is a difference between living outside of your comfort zone and being distracted or spread too thin. I like to control things, that isn’t all that great sometimes. I tend to want to take on everything because “I can do it the way I want it done!” Good thing I have a brain or I would do stuff like that all the time. Spreading myself too thin keeps me: 1. super stressed, 2. totally ineffective at everything, 3. guilty like nobody’s business because I can’t actually do everything in a timely manner and well.

So this is what I do (note: I am SO not perfect at this, also don’t expect perfection from me, it won’t happen, in fact I don’t even want to be perfect I would rather be effective so if you feel like telling me I’m not perfect, stuff it!):

1. Educate myself on what I’m doing. This doesn’t have to be super hard, just go online and read about it.

2. Do it myself the first time- This I learned from E-Myth by Michael Gerber- that way I know what it is that I am getting myself into when I pass it off to someone else.

3. Pass it on! Find people to do take this on. Ok here is the other part of this though, because finding good staff isn’t always easy. Manuals! Create manuals so that anyone stepping into the job is clear on what they are doing. Give them freedom to think, people have good ideas, often better ones than you.

I don’t like checking email for the most part and I don’t like writing email for the most part. I have a lot of filming bookings to do and a lot of people that I meet at events to schedule for various things, like coffee meetings. I don’t like managing that kind of thing, not because it is unpleasant but because my time is spent in more productive ways elsewhere. For example, I would rather hang out with my brother Ross than check and manage emails and schedules.

A lot of people outsource their emails to their personal assistants, so I figured “why should I be any different? My assistant should do it too!” Well, I am someone who is pretty particular about how things that represent me, like me email, gets handled and it freaked me out a bit to give that to task to someone else. But, seeing as many people have done it with success, I figured I should try.

Here is what I did:

1. Created templates for particular types of emails. So for example, if I meet someone, find them interesting and want to meet with them further, there is an email template that I created for that called Coffee Request.

2. I send my assistant an email with the names and email addresses of everyone I just met and label each person with one of the email templates that I have created.

3. I shared my Google calendar with my assistant and inputed “Preferred” times already inputted into the calendar so he can just fill in the blanks. No room for failure there. Nice.

4. The email my assistant uses is actually an email address for me it is EStewart@WomanAnew.com so that people know who on earth is emailing them and BCC my personal email address so I can see what is going out.

5. Instruct my assistant to create a manual using my preferences that he learns along the way, so that any assistant after him has very little room for error.

So far this method has worked pretty well and the best part is that I don’t check a whole lot of email or schedule much myself. The hardest part for me about doing this was creating a solid structure for my assistant to work off of. I needed to be super clear as to what he was doing and what he was to say. Organization and structure here was king. I am slowly giving more and more responsibility to my assistant, with clear instructions of course. The outcome of this is I am happier. Epic win.

A friend of mine, who is a brilliant Generation Y marketer, Elysa Rice (her website is GenPink.com) turned me on to a blogger/author by the name of Chris Brogan (his website is ChrisBrogan.com). His blog has some extremely interesting articles including a recent blog post on the called “Charge for the Right Things.” This is of particular interest as we figure out how exactly to make money from our TV Show The Naked Truth Show (TheNakedTruthShow.com). Chris talks about the value of offering free content but charging high prices for ads and gave two example of companies that are doing just that successfully.

The first being GigaOm, let me interject for a moment that every site I hear about in a blog that I find interesting I now check with Compete.com because I want to see how well they are really doing. Compete.com allows me to see how many unique visitors (my metric of choice) these sites really have had over the past year. I enjoy thoroughly checking out the fact myself. In this case GigaOm checked out for me because in the month of March 2010 they had about 720,000 visitors. That is sufficient in my opinion to be considered successful enough to mimic.

The second one he suggested is Huffington Post. Based on Compete.com’s data, they had about 8.5 million unique visitors. That is surely enough visitors to be considered successful. What is difficult to tell, for me at least, is how many of those visitors click on the ads and the actual data that they use to measure their own success.

So am I 100% sure that free content with high priced ads will work, no. I am 100% sure that I personally hate paying for content, absolutely.

If it works for people who are able to do more testing and analytics than I can, I surely think it is worth a try.

I hope that this blog provides some benefit to you, the reader, who perhaps would like to be an entrepreneur and adventurer. But to warn you this blog will be full of trial and error, but hopefully you will be able to be spared my mistakes and take my successes and make them your own.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth Stewart, I’m 24 years old about to graduate from UT Dallas with a degree in international business. I have currently been to 9 different countries, Poland, France, England, Canada, Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. In a month I will add South Korea and China to that list (I’ll share how all of that goes down). I speak 3 languages, English, French and Polish and for fun I teach Salsa dancing.

About a year ago I started to seriously consider what it is that I want to do with my life, seeing as the end of my current college stay is nearing rapidly. I had seen a ton of other students graduate who hadn’t started even thinking about what they were going to do after graduation until about a month before. The majority ended up with no job, and the rest doing something they really didn’t enjoy just so they had a job at all. Right about that time, my friend Jason Levi gave me a gift. This gift guided my life in a way that was unexpected but quite welcome. He gave me the book, “The 4 Hour Work Week” by a guy named Tim Ferriss. Absolutely brilliant book. It took me about 2 days to get through the whole thing and go “WTF I want to do that too!”

Thus the entrepreneurial bug bit me and I was hooked on what was called “lifestyle design” every since. I have since come to find that there are quite a few people who are becoming experts in this and I will share with you my findings as I find them.

My first attempt at a business was quite ridiculous, to be frank. I attempted to sell extremely expensive rock fountains that cost anywhere from $100 to $400 wholesale using a yahoo store. Ya, totally ridiculous. To make any kind of decent profit from doing this I had to mark up these rock fountains to prices that I would never pay for them and the yahoo store was sorely inadequate for the job of selling much of anything.

But what it did give me was experience, which was very valuable. I spent a couple of months tossing over in my head what I would then sell. If I were reselling a product my margin would be smaller than if I had my own product, but what could I make to sell. At the time, I was teaching Salsa dance classes 6 days a week to help pay for putting myself through school and I was getting so sick of it. There are only so many times you can teach a basic step before it becomes sickeningly boring. Don’t get me wrong my students are awesome, which (other than the money) was the only worthwhile thing about it.

So my boyfriend/dance partner and I decided that is what we would sell. We had taught thousands of people how to dance and had come up with a method that effectively got absolute beginners to the performance level in less than a year with only one class a week. Thus Salsa Dance Underground was born, we would see online Salsa classes.

However, it is important here to note that too much good advice is a bad thing. When I became enraptured with the idea of my own, primarily online business I started reading and watching all I could on the subject. But there is TONS of information and a lot of it is telling you to do completely different things.

It was really freaking hard to figure out what I needed to actually do. So Salsa Dance Underground started off as a blog. One of my Salsa dance students, Tushar, offered to help get my dream and passion off the ground and together we found a template for WordPress that looked like it would work…Ya sure it worked in bringing people to it, but it didn’t work in selling anything. We got some great comments and helped out a bunch of people, but it was a black hole financially.

Lesson: Trial and error works as long as you don’t invest too much money into it. We did the first version on the WAY cheap and it forced me to be a jack of all trades, allowing me to learn every part of the business. Now, I understand way more about business than I would have if I had a ton of money to start it up.