How To Make 2019 Your Best Year Yet

I actually just took the picture for this article yesterday from the top of a mountain in Spain that looks out at the ocean. 10 years ago, this was so far beyond even my wildest hopes and dreams because I was constantly working every night and every weekend and could never afford to take even a single day off.

I was always at my desk and always stressed out. Over the years I began slowly burning out from constantly working at an unsustainable pace - for even someone like me. After about 5 years in a row of nonstop around the clock grinding, I finally hit the wall and reached my threshold for pain.

My wife was getting tired of never seeing me and I was getting tired of never seeing her or our new baby daughter.

I resolved to change my life and try to design the best year we had ever had. I called my company's employees and told them all that I wouldn't be coming in that day. Instead of doing my typical 'in the business' work all day, I drove just outside of town to a hotel with nothing but a pad of paper and a pen.

I descided that I was going to walk into this hotel looking out at the ocean and would not move from my seat until I had designed a new way of building a business that would be more profitable and would allow me to have a better quality of life at the same time.

I didn't care how many hours it took or what might happen as a result of me not coming in. It didn't matter.

I should mention that I didn't get a room at the hotel or even buy a lunch. I just walked into the lobby with my pad of paper and a pen and was on a mission to change my life forever.

First, I thought about everything that was going wrong for me.

I was entrenched in almost every part of the business. I listed out all of the different things it took for my business to run and put my initials next to every function that I personally participated in. It was almost everything.

I looked at all of the biggest impact things (that I never had the time to work on) and what it would take for me to be able to execute those great opportunities.

I listed out my top 3 objectives for the year and resolved to have laser focus on those 3 things above everything else for the next 12 months.

I wrote down the names of other people, vendors, tools, technology, processes and systems that I could replace myself with and be able to take my own initials off the list of all the different parts of the business that had required me.

I looked at the entire year from 30,000 feet up. I looked at the months that were always slow and put in new marketing strategies in the months leading up to those slower times.

I set new rules for myself and my life like how many times per day I would allow myself to check my email inbox. At the time, I checked my email about every 15 minutes. In a 12 hour workday, that's stopping what I'm doing and reading email 48 times in a day!

The reality is that my typical workday 10 years ago was about 18 hours per day. Seriously.

I set specific check times that I was allowed to open my email. The first check wasn't until 11am when I had already made a dent for several hours. I went from over 50 email checks per day down to only 4. About a year ago I went down to checking email about twice a day and for the last few months, I've been checking my email once a day unless I'm REALLY bored.

In our 12 Mavens meetings I get to spend hours upon hours brainstorming with the founders and CEOs of some of the fastest growing companies in America - every single month. I also have countless conversations with small business owners and entrepreneurs who are always tight on money and can't imagine spending even one afternoon per month away from their office working ON their business.

For the last 5 years I've obsessively looked into what the differences are between the business owners who have no free time or money from the business leaders who get to travel to great places with their families and are making an amazing income.

Successful entrepreneurs and CEOs spend more time focussing on, planning out and then executing on the biggest impact things. Not minutia.

Successful entrepreneurs and CEOs invest in their own continuing education and improving themselves. Small time players are "too busy" to.

Successful entrepreneurs and CEOs surround themselves by people who are where they are wanting to get to. Small time players stay in their bubbles.

One of the other things that is dramatically different about the small time struggling business owner from the ones with thriving businesses AND more freedom in their lives, is the difference between "knowing" these kinds of things and actually doing all these kinds of things that I'm writing about.

Ideas are the easy part. Executing on these kinds of things and actually DOING these kinds of things creates a different life.

What I've learned over the years knowing hundreds of entrepreneurs and CEOs is that the hardest thing for us to do is sit still. They say the hardest part of writing a book (or even an article) is sitting still long enough to actually write it. The same is true with designing the kind of business that reaches its full potential and designing a lifestyle that matches up with the life you're wanting.

For years I dreamed of another day like that day at that hotel a decade ago, but this time with a bunch of us (all business leaders) joined together for an entire day of "sitting still", planning out our attacks for the next 12 months.

I imagined we would go through a day long pre-planned agenda together, supporting each other, brainstorming with each other, and bringing in a few entrepreneurs and CEOs who have built MASSIVE companies from nothing.

The idea was to have a few of the most successful founders and CEOs around get up and give these TED talk-like speeches about how they grew their businesses and what advice they would give to younger them if they could.

One December back in 2013, that idea finally became Plan The Attack and we held our first all day strategic planning event, planning our attack for the coming year.

The event unexpectadly sold out so the next year we all got a bigger room. That year the event sold out again. The next year we got an even bigger ballroom and the event sold out yet again.

This year we've moved the event to the biggest ballroom in its history.

The event has become an annual yearly planning tradition because it addresses the things in-between a typical strategic plan too. It also incorporates designing a business that gives you an ideal life, not just more sales.

If you continue doing the same things you did in 2018, you'll most likely have a year similar to this year next year too. Join us at this year's Plan The Attack in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

You'll notice that Plan The Attack is not called "Plan A Pretty Good Year" and it's not called "Plan A Year Kind Of Like Last Year" either. It's called Plan The Attack!

It's an attack on your business and an attack on your life as a business leader.

YOU have to make it happen.

There is no reason why 2019 can't be your best year ever, and I hope it will be.

For more details about being in the room at this year's Plan The Attack go to www.plantheattack.com

About The Author

By his 30s, serial entrepreneur Jeff Davis had already built multiple national companies and has been featured in Fortune Magazine, CNN.Money, quoted by Inc Magazine and featured in countless other news stories.

In 2014 he successfully sold his national medical-legal trial presentation company to a Bio Tech which then became publicly traded soon after. He founded the national by invitation only community of CEOs and entrepreneurs known as 12 Mavens which the Business Journal describes as the Secret Society of CEOs and he is the founder of the popular annual strategic planning event Plan The Attack.

He’s a life-long entrepreneur who has dissected human cadavers at a medical school, he's competed as a skateboarder and he is currently spending a full year traveling the world with his family across 29 countries. In-between it all he shares his unique perspective of the world in occasional keynote speeches.