Taking Action

It’s important to be action-oriented in business and in life. In this New Year’s Day episode, learn what Tom and Tracy Hazzard did that led them to take action in their own life and business and the associations they moved to that helped these actions. Tom and Tracy dive into taking the first step and the tactical plan you should have not only to keep you grounded and somewhat unfazed of the unknown but also to achieve that ultimate goal with great success.

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Happy New Year.

The first day, I’m excited. This is going to be a great year.

We were going to not post one because it’s a holiday and then we thought back and we said, “There are going to be lots of people driving home from holiday and maybe they’re following podcasts. We hate to not be there for them.” Let’s start our year out right and continue to be there. We’re here for you on holiday and I hope you had a great day. We talked about New Year’s resolutions and one of the things that we’ve learned clearly is the difference between the way that we work and the way that a lot of other people work is that we’re tactical and action-oriented compared to a lot of people.

We don’t just talk about doing the things that we do, we do it.

A lot of people will sit around and say, “I’m going to start a podcast.” They never do it. We not only start a podcast, we put a 25-step plan in place to start that podcast. We’re a little tactical about everything.

How many books did you read?

Ten.

How many podcasts did you listen to?

Of episodes, I probably listened to 50. I listened to about 6 or 7 different podcasts about learning how to podcast.

You did the main research and then you pointed me at some things and I researched.

We did some videos too.

I got into more of the technical research of the equipment and all that stuff. We take action.

We laid it out.

We did it and it’s an important thing. Obviously, this is a 3D printing podcast but one of the things that’s inherent in this 3D printing industry at this point in history is that many of the people getting involved in it are either researching it and getting to know it to either enhance their existing business, to grow or build a new business or to educate themselves and their children to be in a better position to get a job and using it in business at some point in the future or having fun. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m talking about those that would be using it for one of those first three purposes. One of the important lessons in business that we’ve learned, and we’ve been in business for ourselves since the late ‘90s is that taking action is as important as all the other technical things you’re going to educate yourself on and skills that you’re going to gain. If you do not take some action, it’s never going to happen.

It’s permanent potential.

We go to these business conferences to improve our business and network with other people.

A super networking group is what it’s called. It’s like an association but it’s an association that is focused on action.

There are lots of great speakers who talk about their secrets to success.

It’s part inspiration but it is part actionable items as well.

There’s definite real meat on the bone here. It’s not just motivational, “Go do it.” There’s one particular that we saw named, Greg Reid, who has a formula that applies to this.

Taking Action: Taking action is as important as all the other technical things you’re going to educate yourself on and skills that you’re going to gain.

This is Greg Reid, author of Three Feet from Gold, which is an action-oriented book anyway because you think about what happened in that story there. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should read Three Feet from Gold. It’s a great book. He has a formula and it has a great message that says, “Passion plus talent plus association and action.” Two A’s in there, plus some faith. If you have some faith and belief in what you can do, that is the formula for success.

When Greg talked about this and we wrote it down, I kept thinking like, “This makes so much sense.” It certainly applies to us. We have the passion all the time. We’re passionate about what we do. We have talent, in our case, its design talent and among other things, some business talent. I have some talent at CAD in using that software. You have talents in other aspects of marketing and vision for what to make. We have faith in ourselves for sure. The thing that made the big difference was the action.

Our missing link, which we rectified and it has changed our business. In 2015, the thing that we changed was our associations. We moved in a whole different level of associations both in the 3D print community and in the business community. We shifted all of our previous associations from our business and moved into a greater growing association. That’s the difference that we made that made a change for us because we already had the action done.

We’ve always been movers and shakers, action people to make things happen.

Many people that we talked to are scared of the first step, like, “What is the step? I can’t visualize this. I can’t lay it out.” They don’t take action.

That’s sad. Taking action would be one of the easier things to do to improve your business.

Some people get paralyzed with the unknown. You get paralyzed with, “This is costly,” or whatever this is that they don’t even take the action. The reality and what we believe strongly is you can take small steps. Test things out and say, “Is this worth it? Is this what I want? Is this the thing to do?” You don’t have to dive into the deep end, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start swimming. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get wet. That’s how we’ve always approached it. We’ve always approached it by taking things off and breaking them into smaller pieces and giving actions that you can take. We do this for our clients all the time.

When we produce a tactical plan, we put it into phases so that there’s always a go, no go decision before you start spending more money. You’re not only validating what you’ve done and it was done correctly and that everything you want was there. Does it meet the original goals you had or have those goals shifted? If they’ve shifted, we’ve got to re-shift our thinking for the steps going forward. We always do that. We break it off into easy chunks. Otherwise, getting a product to market is incredibly difficult and time-consuming and costly. If you don’t break it off into chunks, then you aren’t properly assessing when you need to crush the project and sometimes you do.

We realized within the first half of 2015, maybe even the first quarter of 2015, because we’re independent, we’re our own company and we work out of a home office that we were in our own world a little too much, a little too closed off. Even though we’ve started this podcast, we’re reaching out to people in the world, we weren’t getting out there enough. The associations was the big thing. We realized, “We want to grow our business.” We want to get to some goals that we have professionally and personally. We’ve got to get out there. We’ve got to start associating with different people, different organizations and not just living in our own self-employed world here.

We did that in a bigger way, that’s what we changed and that was the action we took. We did it not only on joining social media groups and LinkedIn groups and other things, which we’ve met a lot of people through. We went out there and went to meetups and events and other things and met people face-to-face. We did it both online and in-person. It made a huge difference in our business and in the speed of growth on our podcast as well. For us, that was the action we had to take. We had to fix the association. For many people, it’s the action part that they need to start taking action.

When you think about it, you either have talent or you don’t and I would hope most people have talent in something. You either have talent or you don’t. A lot of people are passionate about something, whether it’s something in their personal life or in their professional life.

We hear from people who have passion for STEM education all the time on this podcast, absolute passion for that. If they’re not going out there and advancing their own personal education on it so that they can teach others or if they’re not going out there and trying to explore more areas of STEM and in our case, we recommend adding the A. Try some art if you’ve been STEM focused on the science, technology, engineering and math. Have some art and see what happens.

The point I want to make here is that you have passion, you have talent. Hopefully, you have faith in yourself at least and maybe faith and more than that. It would seem that the action and the association are the two things that you can affect the most significantly without needing a whole lot of time and education to do it.

You don’t need time, money or education to do any of those things.

It’s a tactic you can do and if you’re not doing it, then you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle here to success.

You’re missing a piece of the formula for success. We hope that on New Year’s Day that we have inspired you to take those resolutions you made and put them into action.

If you haven’t made them, it’s not too late.

Start making some. Take action and make those resolutions.

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Three Feet from Gold

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Taking Action

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