It's 8:30 am, Sunday the 11th of August.

I try to write these newsletters on Thursday so they're planned in advance but this week has been insane.

Thankfully, my son's Grandad arrived late last night and is helping us with a little babysitting today which is much needed!

I knew it was going to be hard to juggle owning 2 businesses and raising a child but the time compression throughout the days is seriously intense recently and has been having an impact on my energy levels.

My partner doesn't live close to her parents and there are already a lot of grandchildren + hectic things going on in my own family's lives to get consistent support right now.

It doesn't help that he started teething recently and loves to wake up an extra 10 minutes earlier each morning LOL 😖

We make lives harder for ourselves by home-cooking all my son's food from scratch (my Mrs makes the most incredible food for him!) with organic ingredients and using zero technology (iPad's etc) to babysit him.

So I try to help out as much as humanely possible and often start work a little later if necessary.

My daily schedule looks something like this:

6:30-7:00 am: be smacked in the face by my son; pray to god he will fall back asleep. Reluctantly accept defeat after 30 minutes when he doesn't and make my way downstairs (I try to give my partner an extra half an hour in bed if possible as she has to look after him the majority of the day).

7:00-9:00 am: make the strongest coffee humanely possible, whip out the toys in the living room and playtime begins for the next hour or so.

9:00 am: if I don't help with feeding him breakfast, I drive to the office to try and get some productive work done. Sometimes, depending on his mood or what's going on at home, this stretches to 10 am.

9:30 am - 4:30 pm: try to be as intentional as humanely possible with getting work done. No fluffy meetings or low-level tasks.

5:00 pm - 8:00 pm: round 2 for daddy, playtime, walk (if the weather is nice) outside, feed him dinner.

8:00 - 8:30 pm: bath time and story before bed (this is my favourite time of the day as my son gets ridiculously excited for some reason)

8:30 pm - 12:00 am: Try to fit an hour more of work in if I have the mental bandwidth, watch an episode of Game of Thrones with my partner to try and spend some quality time together and switch off.

*Repeat (and hope we don't have to wake up during the night)
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This week, I noticed a bad habit creep in where I was creeping towards Slack on my phone when I was with my son. I've never done this since he was born. So my goal this coming week is to focus again on being completely present and keeping my phone away from me at all times when I'm with him.

I write all of this from a position of great privilege and with deep gratitude. I could not have asked for a happier, healthier, more beautiful child. I am completely infatuated with my son and blessed to be in such a fortunate position to spend so much time with him.

My full respect to all parents (especially those with multiple kids!) for how hard but deeply rewarding this job is.

Anyway, let's talk business...

AUGUST COHORT PROGRESS

I launched the new personal branding cohort and had to run the onboarding for 6 clients to ensure they hit the ground running.

That's a critical lesson I've learnt over the years running service-based businesses: without a fast start, buyer remorse sets in or your client loses the motivation to extract the full value from your service.

So I've thrown everything into this and next week is also an intense one as we move from defining their positioning to running their first interviews and introducing them to our production system.

They will also be optimising their social media profiles, setting up newsletter signup forms, and sending their first posts to me for review.

It's absolutely critical that all of these clients get great results. The future of Content Army is going to be defined by getting positive testimonials and success stories to infuse my content marketing strategy on social media and ABM play once we start outbound sales in Q4.

So I need to recuperate today and get as much energy as possible to help these recruits achieve their goals!

OKRs FOR THIS QUARTER

We're still very much in the "validate business model, refine service delivery, build infrastructure" phase for this business. Saying that, I feel as though we're still in that phase for Magnet Monster after 6 years lol - but things will always be a work in progress.

Here's what I have to get done this quarter to achieve my goals.

1: HubSpot CRM setup and integrated

I've mentioned a few times that this business needs a professional setup and high velocity of leads to be successful. A well-oiled CRM is mandatory to ensure we're organised.

Thankfully, I'm getting support on this so it doesn't affect my day-to-day right now.

2: Publish 5 new Case Studies

As mentioned above, case studies are going to be what attracts and converts new prospects right now. I'm making good progress preparing these and we're increasing the amount of value we deliver to clients in regards to the direction of the content and helping them compose it.

3: Rebuild Website

I'm not going to write out a fully-fledged rant about some of the mistakes I've made with the new website in terms of content (branded Adamkitchen.co), but let's just say that I need to make some serious modifications to ensure it's set up for long-term success, including:

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• Integrating our podcast's latest episodes
• Having a dedicated Newsletter section
• Designated case studies section
• (Future) navigation for the course
• Improved landing page on the homepage to explain more clearly our value proposition

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I'll go into more detail in the future on these and what I'm thinking.

In Q4, we'll begin outbound sales and create our course.

SOCIAL JUICE

Right, I want to get off the computer and outside to enjoy the sun. So here's a quick round-up of the best posts this week before I sign out.
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Last week, I helped my client get 75,000 impressions & 400 new followers from a single post. Here's a breakdown of the strategy.

​Here's why building an audience is a non-negotiable for me with every business I create.

These are the 5 most avoided strategies to grow your personal brand.

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