Hey now, welcome to the Productivity Edition of the Inside BS Show. That's right, today I'm gonna share with you how you can get more done in less time. So, you have goals that you wanna reach at the end of the month.

And we've talked about how habits lead to reaching those goals. As I'm recording this, there is one business day left in this month. It's tomorrow, Monday.

And you're gonna take stock of where you are. And because this is the end of the first six months of 2025, you may be thinking to yourself, what have I done in the first half of 2025? How have I made this year better than last year? Am I on pace to achieve my goals? Yesterday, I promised you that I would share the habits that have changed the trajectory of my business and made me more productive. And candidly, the first quarter of this year was about developing the right habits.

The second quarter of this year was implementing those habits. And the third quarter of this year, which starts the day after tomorrow, will be about reaping the rewards, the benefits of those habits. So I decided January 1st to do this podcast every day.

And that led me to a focus on tiny habits that make all the difference in my business. The other habits that I've included are scheduling meetings every day. So I try to focus on scheduling three to five meetings every day with people who can buy our services.

And then I try to focus on having those three to five meetings each day. It's my five by five strategy. What leads to scheduling those meetings have been two other habits.

Habit number one has been expressing gratitude to people who have been kind or generous to me in the form of saying thank you by writing handwritten note cards. I write three handwritten note cards every day and I drop them in the mail. I also use these three handwritten note cards every day to get in touch and stay in touch with people who I might have lost touch with over the years.

And this habit has been incredibly productive. I've had four meetings just in the last 10 days that have resulted in opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise and they're directly related to the handwritten note cards that I have been sending out. Now, I started sending these handwritten note cards out in the middle of May.

It's the end of June, I've been doing it for six weeks and they're starting to be productive. So I promise you, if you write three handwritten notes to three different people every day and you can pick those people however you want, you wanna say thank you to someone, you wanna recognize someone for something they did, you wanna send a handwritten note to somebody who you haven't connected with before, I promise you, it will be productive. Just this past week, here's what's happened.

I sent a handwritten note in the middle of May to a business owner, to the CEO of a business who I wanted to interview on the podcast. She called me this week, six weeks after getting the handwritten note. She said it's been on her to-do list for all this time.

She's kept the handwritten note with her and she reached out, called me and spoke with me. And it was a great conversation, we talked for 45 minutes. She agreed to be on the podcast.

I can almost guarantee you that at some point, she will be a client of mine. That was the kind of conversation that we had and it all came from a handwritten note. Number two, I reached out to someone that I hadn't spoken with in a long time, friend of mine, and wanted to see what she was doing, sent her the handwritten note card.

Two weeks later, yesterday, day before yesterday, she called me and she said that she was honored and flattered that she had gotten the handwritten note. She told me that she was doing something different now and it was providing a service that I thought could benefit me. And I connected with her and that service that she's providing is already paying dividends for me.

I don't wanna really get into it. It's something for my personal life, but it's already paying big dividends. I would have not thought to call her.

I wouldn't have known she was doing what she's doing if I hadn't written the handwritten note to her and she hadn't called me back. The third and final one that I'll share with you for today from the handwritten notes, wrote a handwritten note to someone who's a client years ago, and I said, hey, we haven't been in touch for a while. Let's get together whenever you have time.

Sent him a handwritten note. The next day, he called me, or his assistant called me, scheduled, CEO scheduled a lunch with me. I'm going on that lunch tomorrow.

Opportunity, maybe. Good thing to sit down with someone and have lunch with them, definitely. So three different opportunities that have come, and these are the biggest opportunities.

There have been other small opportunities, other things that I'm building on as a result of sending out those handwritten notes, but this is the accumulation of a habit that has gone on for six weeks. Now, other habits that I've been doing every day, writing a LinkedIn post every day. I've written one LinkedIn post every day for the last, I'm looking at my notes now.

It looks like 12 weeks, yes. It's 12 and a half weeks. I've written a LinkedIn post every day for 12 and a half weeks.

What has been the result of that? Well, right now, today, as I sit here, I can tell you that my number of LinkedIn followers has grown by 1,200, so by about an average of 100 a week. The number of connections that I have has grown by about half of that, about 500. And I will tell you that clients are going to come from this because LinkedIn serves as reinforcement for the other calls and the meetings that I'm making.

So the daily habits that I've installed so far this year, the daily podcast, which you're listening to, which is the foundation for everything, which sets the tone for everything else I do. The LinkedIn posts, which reinforce the value that I provide, demonstrates my thought leadership in the area of family business value and transitions and succession planning. The handwritten notes that I send out every day all have made an impact so far this year.

So for you, how do you use this to improve your productivity? Think of three tiny habits, three small habits. So for me, writing a LinkedIn post every day takes all of a half hour. Sending the handwritten notes every day takes maybe, maybe a half hour.

It takes longer to decide who to send the note cards to than it does to write the notes, address them and send them out. The daily podcast takes a total of an hour to put together. So those three habits take an hour and a half and they serve as the foundation for everything else I do.

If those three habits at the end of this year result in a million dollars in new business, is it worth it? Yes, definitely. If it results in $100,000 of new business, is it worth it? Yes, definitely. But I think it will be even more valuable than that.

So find three small habits you can implement today. Start with writing one handwritten note card. You don't have to write three, just write one.

Start with doing a three line LinkedIn post. Start with making three or four connections to people on LinkedIn every day. Small habits, tiny habits every day make all the difference in the world.

This is the Inside BS Show. My name is Dave Lorenzo. We'll be back here again tomorrow with another show.

Thanks for spending just 10 quick minutes with me today. Join me again for 10 quick minutes tomorrow and we will give you some additional habits that you can use to make a great living and live a great life.