A lot has happended in 2007.  Overall, it turned out to be a FANTASTIC year and a year filled with tremendous learnings. 

We really started to pick up the pace in 2007 and finished the year up over 200% from last year!  In 2006 MindValley’s revenue only grew by about 50% so this is an excellent acceleration in our growth rate! 
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A big congratulations and thanks goes out to our awesome team that has worked very hard and made huge progress in terms of “working smarter” and not just working harder.

So what are some of the things that I learned last year?

There are far too many key learnings to list them all but here are 5 important learnings that I wanted to share with you.

1) You must continue to learn passionately

I have to thank one of our most recent members (Kenneth) for really waking me up again to the passion of learning.  Over the past two months, I have been more hungry for learnings than in a long time.  When Kenneth first started with us not a single day would pass without Kenneth saying… “hey, lets buy this ebook to learn more about x, y, and z.”   And boy was Kenneth right.  Things, especially online, keep changing at a torrent pace and you constantly need to stay on top.  In addition, work is A LOT more FUN when you constantly keep learning and applying new things. 

I have always been interested in learning but I did notice that for a period of a few months I just was doing things the way I had always done them but some of our biggest breakthroughs that led to a lot of our growth in 2007 came from studying the success of other people and applying the key learnings.  Currently, I have about 6 new ebook and 4 hard cover books that I just started reading in the past two weeks alone so if I seem a litle extra excited and scatter brained its because I have so many ideas in my head.  :-)

2) Follow your gut

When it comes to running and building a team, I learned that I really have to listen to my gut.  During 2007 I often had the feeling that something was wrong but I would not always take action and only later I learned that I should have explored my gut feelings and acted on them.

More specifically, I have written before that as a leader it can get lonely at the top.  In other words, if things are wrong or not working well for some of our team members not everyone is equally comfortable to bring things up right away.  So what one has to learn as a leader is to pay a lot of attention to subtle queues such as body language, indirect comments, etc. because more often than not they point to some underlying issue that needs to be addressed but that is not being openly discussed.

I work every hard at encouraging a very open culture and while things are continuously improving, I have also learned the importance of paying attention to all the subtle queues and if your gut tells you that something is not working perfectly, then act on it, ask, and find out! 

3) The power of networking

Everyone has heard about the power and importance of networking and building relationships.  However, in 2007, we got to experience first hand just how transformational this can be to your business.  In 2007, virtually ALL of our new clients that we started working with came out of increased networking that both Vishen and I started to focus on. 

Networking is perhaps one of the least understood and underutilized tools to grow your business and most people don’t really know how to go about doing it.  Fortunately, we have started to work very closely with one of the worlds best networkers.  His name is Larry The Connector and if you ever get the chance to meet Larry or learn from him don’t miss this opportunity!  In 2008 our business is going to explode and a lof of this is happening due to our professional network and the new relationships that we are building.

4) The importance of systems, processes, and documentation

When I first came to MindValley I have to admit that I first loved the fact that we had no established processes.  I used to think, wow, this is cool, here you can do whatever you want.  I used to say that processes and documentation is only for big companies.  Boy was I wrong!  As we started to rapidly grow and scale I learned how frustrating things get when you constantly have to re-invent the wheel.  Instead of following a proven process when launching a new site we frequently got stuck having to struggle through the same problems that we had previously mastered. 

The solution to this was to have systems, processes, and documentation.  For example, we are currently developing a 30 day launch process that will allow MindValley to launch 12 new ecommerce businesses in 2008.  Even better, all of the frustrating and repetitive work will become a breeze because we now have a clearly defined process that anyone can be trained up on and just needs to follow.  Instead of boring, these processes are incredibly liberating because doing the basics has become way easier and faster and all of our team members can shift their attention and efforts on more high value and creative tasks to move the business forward.

5) Get help to run the business

One of the things that I wish I would have done MUCH sooner is to get more help on running the business.  In October of 2007, MindValley hired its first office manager / accountant / administrative assistant.   Before Nicole got on board, I had to take care of everything including accounting, preparing financial statements, book keeping, payroll, etc. etc.  Having to do all of this as the leader of a company is nonsense and having waited so long was a huge mistake.  Instead of helping lead the team and helping to set the strategic direction for the company I was drowning in the work that it took to run the company. 

While that work is crucial (you always need to know the financial health of your company and run a smooth office) there are excellent people that can be hired to fill this very important role and if you don’t do this as a leader you will eventually drown, burn out and your entire business will suffer.  Fortunately, I finally read the book The E-Myth and listened to Alex Kazim, one of my friends and mentors who over a breakfast told me that the very next person that I had to hire and should have hired a long time ago was an excellent office manager that could wear many hats and help out with all tasks required to run the office.  Fortunately, we found Nicole, who has done an excellent job so far! 

What’s next?

One of the things that I really want to figure out next is how to replace some of the things that really helped to glue the team together that we had to stop as the company got to big. 

We used to have weekly lunches to just update everyone on what was going on and even had our famous “Happy Chappies” where everyone would talk about how they are doing (in terms of work and life).  Now that we are too big to have lunch together in the office we have not yet settled on a new approach to do this. 

I think this is currently missing and it is on my mind to find a way to bring this back.  I think we will start having regular monthly meetings where we give a detailed update on how the company is doing financially as well as in terms of each project.  In addition to the monthly meetings we will probably also have a Friday evening happy hour twice a month so everyone can get together and just catch up and socialize.  We had a few of these towards the end of 2007 and it seems like they have been a great success.

I am also thinking about how to increase the fun factor in the office.  Sometimes things are very quiet in the office and I think that one of the biggest problems is that we have an open office with not enough rooms and areas where people can easily socialize without distracting everyone else.  The good news is that having learned that our current environment is not perfect we have bought a new office where we will come up with a very different layout.  However, we have one more year to go so if you have any ideas on how to address this, please do let me know.

Overall, I must say that one of the most rewarding things of 2007 has been working with the phenomenal team that we have assembled.  Not a single day passes where I do not learn something new and most of the learnings come from the interactions with everyone on board.  

So, thank you Talat, Jiangti, Khalid, Paul, Fatemeh, Janne, Arie, Wu Han, KhaiLee, Nika, John, Katalina, Meike, Caroline, Kenneth, Nicole, and Mike for having made 2007 a fantastic year!