What does cleaning out your garage have to do with you achieving your business goals? Everything. Want to find out what I'm talking about? You got to join me on this edition of the Inside BS Show. Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo.

I'm the Godfather of Growth. And today we're talking about you achieving your business goals and cleaning out your garage at the same time. So here's the deal.

Your goals don't really matter. It's the habits that you do every day that will lead to you achieving your goals that make all the difference in the world. And this is where cleaning out the garage comes in.

My garage over the holidays became an absolute pit. It really was a total pigsty. And the reason is because we had guests coming over the house constantly all throughout December.

And by the end of December, we had taken all this stuff that we don't want the guests to see, and we had crammed it into the garage. So that when my wife's family came down to stay with us three days before Christmas, and then all through Christmas week and into new years, our garage was full of the stuff that, you know, we had extra chairs, all the work stuff that was piled up in the guest room where our guests were now sleeping, all kinds of packages and boxes that had come for our holiday gifts that were either going to be returned or just needed to be broken down. And rather than break them down, some lazy family members just decided they were going to throw them in the garage.

So our garage became a pit, became a pigsty. And then when the holidays came and went, January came around and we had to repaint one of the rooms. So we moved some of the furniture into the garage, removed golf clubs and all kinds of stuff.

And then the summer stuff that we had been storing in our shed, which we wanted to get rid of in the back, ended up going into the garage. By the way, the stuff that we would store it in the shed, we hadn't used in about 15 years, so it probably was useless. So anyway, the garage was packed and.

I have been the one to clean out the garage the last two times it needed to be cleaned. And how I do it is I just block a whole day on my calendar and it's usually a weekday. It's usually a workday because weekends are full of picking up and dropping off kids at activities, doing family stuff.

So you have to take work time to do something like clean out the garage when you're using a whole day for it. I would just block off a whole day, grit my teeth, bring two huge garbage bins to the front of the house by the garage, and then go through stuff and throw it out. And the last time I did this was probably seven years ago, eight years ago.

So now the garage has eight years of crap piled up into it and I need to clean it. But I'm wiser now because I realized that daily activity in small steps that are palatable is the key to accomplishing big goals. It's the equivalent of the expression that little hinges swing big doors.

So my approach with the garage was to get a timer and to set the timer at 10 minutes and to get a garbage bin and put the timer on next to me in the garage and start throwing crap away for 10 minutes. And when the timer went off, I stopped, tied off the garbage bags, put them in the bin, moved the bin back to the side of the house and closed the garage door until the next day, the next day, the timer set for 10 minutes. And I did this until I built up enough momentum.

After seven days in a row, there was noticeable improvement. I had spent an hour and 10 minutes in seven days throwing crap away from the garage. And so on the eighth day, I increased the timer to 15 minutes and I started sweeping and wiping down the areas that I had cleaned.

And then I moved on to the next area. 15 minutes was up, turn off the timer, throw out the garbage, leave the broom, turn off the lights in the garage, come back the next day, 15 minutes, the next day, 15 minutes, seven days in a row. So that week I had spent over two hours working on cleaning the garage.

Eventually by the 19th day, the garage was done. It was spotless. It was completely clean.

And now I don't need to spend any time on the garage. And it was like, I really didn't even have to do anything. It felt like nothing because it was 10 minutes a day and then 15 minutes a day.

And then by the third week, it was three days of 20 minutes a day. And I had it done basically about five hours worth of work. What it would have taken me on one day, but it was five hours spread over a month of habits, daily habits.

And the goal was achieved. Now think about that. Apply that to your business.

You want to make more sales. So here's the deal. You don't like cold calling.

Okay. Set your timer for 10 minutes. Look at your prospect list.

Make phone calls for 10 minutes. If you don't get anybody on the phone, that's fine. Those are your sales calls for the day.

Leave your prescribed voicemail. Send emails for 10 minutes, cold outreach emails, right? Handwritten note cards for 10 minutes, stuff, direct mail envelope letters for 10 minutes until you have six activities that take up 10 minutes each. That's an hour, six sales activities.

What are you going to do the rest of the day? Maybe call current clients. Have some conversations with some current clients, with some strategic alliance partners. The next day, do 10 more minutes of each activity.

So you get through the week of that. Then increase it to 15 minutes for each activity in week two, 20 minutes for each activity in week three. Guess what happens? You very quickly become desensitized to making those calls, to having those conversations and the habits become permanent.

If you want to build a business, that's a $5 million business. Let's say you're doing a million dollars right now, you have to have $5 million habits. And those $5 million habits look very different than the habits you have when your business is at a million dollars in annual revenue.

At a million dollars, you can only make two or three sales calls a day. And that might be enough for you because each week you may only need to sign up one client. But if you want to be the $5 million salesperson, you probably need to make more than one sale every week.

You probably need to make five or six sales. So maybe you should be making 30 or 40 calls every day. That's the trick.

It's the habits that you're in. Now, if you don't know what your habits should be, and you don't have somebody like me to work with who can help you figure out what those habits should be, here's the shortcut. Find someone who's successful at what you want to be successful at and follow them around and write down what they do every day and you do those same things.

Now you might not have the same talent as they do. You certainly don't have the skills yet, but you'll master those skills with repetition. You'll master those skills with frequency.

You'll master those skills with consistency and persistence. Habits, not goals. What you do each day is what controls what the outcome will be.

Cleaning the garage seemed easy because I was only investing a little time every day. If my goal was to clean the rest of the house, that's how I would do it. I would start with 10 minutes a day and then move forward until I had gotten to an hour a day.

And then I probably would cap it at an hour a day because that's what the tolerance is for cleaning a disgustingly dirty space for you. If you want to get to your goals, you need to figure out what your habits should be, and then you need to slowly invest the time that's necessary to get them done. You want one final example? This podcast.

This podcast is more about me building a habit of communicating with you every day than it is about attracting listeners. It's about building a habit to set aside the time to do the work that is this podcast. Now, what am I driving toward? What's the ultimate goal? Well, the ultimate goal is to use this podcast to educate people who are suspects and eventually convert them into prospects.

There are a number of ways I can use the podcast to do it, but until I got into the habit of doing this every day, I couldn't be sure I could make it happen. I'm now on almost day 80, I think, day 83, 84 in a row of doing the show. It's a habit now.

I'm recording this right now at 10 30, the night before it's due to be released. You're going to get this tomorrow morning, which is Monday and it's 10 30 on a Sunday night. Had a great day with my family, went to the Homestead Miami Speedway to the stock car race, to the NASCAR race, and it was fantastic.

Had a great day. My driver, Kyle Larson, won the race. It was super exciting at the end and came home, fed the dogs, walked the dogs, watched a show with my family, sat down and recorded this podcast half hour after my bedtime because it's a habit and my day isn't complete until I do it.

I know now that I've made this a habit because just like brushing my teeth, I get up in the morning, I brush my teeth, I drink some coffee, I brush my teeth again, I eat a meal, I brush my teeth. Just like brushing my teeth now, I'm not complete. The day is not done until I've recorded, edited, and uploaded a podcast tonight.

I'll go to bed an hour later than I normally do because I have to get this done. Tomorrow I'll do it at my normal time in the middle of the day, like I always do, or early in the day. But making it part of my routine is now something that is automatic.

So my goal of using this podcast as a lead generation tool is absolutely going to happen because I'm getting better and better at creating content. It's a habit that I'm into every day, and I'm learning what you want to talk with me about, what you want to hear, and I'm delivering on it. By the end of the one year period, I will be great at this.

You will enjoy these conversations as I already do, and it will help me get closer to achieving my goal. You're closer to achieving your goal because you kept your end of the bargain and you listened today. If you liked what you heard, if this was powerful for you, if it was moving, share it with somebody because other business owners, other entrepreneurs like you and me, we need this.

We need this jolt of inspiration. We need this jolt of ideation to keep us going. I thank you for joining me today.

My name is Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth. I'll be back here again tomorrow with another show.

I'll see you at 6am. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.