Concerning my private life, I’ve had some challenges with a mild form of mobile phone addiction. For about two months, I had abstained from reading Google news. However, I got sucked into doing this again, and suddenly I read more Google news than before my news diet.

Hy, my name is Julian. I‘m a husband, dad and business owner from Berlin, Germany. On this website and corresponding YouTube channel, I‘ll share with you some proven strategies on how to live a rich and meaningful life. 

I’m usually super focused at work, planning my days in advance and proactively working on my most important tasks. If you want to know more about this, I recommend you watch my video, ‘How To Be Productive Working from home.’

However, it seems like I was much less in control of my time at home. There I’d spent too much time looking at my mobile phone despite knowing this wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

Without going into much detail here, that affected my family relationships negatively. 

As a consequence, I decided to implement some changes. 

I realized that my left logical brain is very active, while I tend to work like a machine. When I do that, I might suppress some form of anger that doesn’t get out of my system. So what I’m trying to do is to get into the moment and be present. I need a constant reminder of how important it is to do that and get in touch with my feelings. 

Mobile phone addiction: 4 things that have helped me

To improve the situation, I set up a box where I can put my cell phone and iPad. So whenever I come home from work, especially on the weekends, I’ll just put my devices in that box. 

Then, if I need the device for some reason, I’ll have to walk over to the other room where the box is. There, I can do whatever I need to before putting the device back in the box and walking back into the living room. 

Also, I turned my cellphone screen color to black and white. That’s advice from the book “4000 weeks” by Oliver Burkeman. I also activated downtime from 8 pm to 7 am. Using my cellphone is now a pain in the butt during those times. So, I just don’t do it anymore.  

August Business Update

Concerning my business, August was a good month in terms of revenue. However, I had to deal with a top client who reduced his monthly investment from around 3.500 € to 1.500,- € – and I’ve had another top client with cash flow problems pay 28 days late.

It was a bit of a shock to deal with those two issues because those two clients represent about 20% of my total monthly revenue.

Why staying at a plateau is not a good idea

As a result of this experience, I realized once more that staying at a certain revenue level is not enough. Instead, a continuous stream of leads, prospects and happy clients is needed. 

I also realized that even our best clients could run into money problems. If it happens to them, it could happen to all our clients. When I look at the news – which I try to avoid these days –  I’d say we are experiencing what others call economic winter. 

The approach I’m taking during economic winter

That’s why I immediately re-engaged in some serious sales and marketing activities. I’ve been getting a steady stream of leads in the past weeks and months. However, I’ve been applying some strong filters, not making an offer to every new prospect.

I’m rethinking the system I have to generate new clients.

3 things I’ve been doing to thrive during the recession

First, I’m studying the book “sell like crazy” again. Second,  I ordered a book about agency price strategies from the German Baulig brothers.

And third, one of my account managers and I have already started to call up existing clients and some ex-clients to upsell them, cross-sell them, and ask them for referrals. 

Seeing how two successful clients have been running into cash flow problems and the recession we are experiencing now makes me more determined than ever to grow my business and be prudent. 

3 ways how my business is profiting from my passion project

At the same time, I decided to continue investing the first hour of the day in working on this video project. It still feels counterintuitive to do that because I could use this time to improve my business.

However, I’ve noticed some advantages of doing that, spilling over to my business: first, this way, I tend to let go more by delegating more. 

That’s because I want to free up more time for this video project. I also think more about how we can delete jobs that don’t help our clients achieve results. And I’d like to implement systems for just about everything from lead generation to fulfillment. 

Second, it’s a pleasure for me to work on this video project. I still do most of the tasks myself, as I don’t have a business plan for this project. 

And third, I’ve started to apply the video techniques I learned to record videos for my online marketing agency. 

While recording videos like this one for fun, I don’t want to risk using too many resources for this. That includes my own time and the time of my employees. If there is no money to be earned with this, it doesn’t seem very careful to me to let my people work on this. 

I probably could define this as an infinity project. That’s something I learned from my business mentor James Schramko. That means I could have my team work on this whenever we don’t have enough work. However, we currently don’t have much downtime to allow for this, serving our existing clients.

The one thing that has boosted my productivity

By investing the first hour of the day in creating videos like this one, I managed to produce and upload one new video per week. I’m proud that I managed to do that. Before I decided to spend one hour per day on this, I only managed to produce one video per month on average. 

That’s it for this month’s life and business update. If you watched my video or read this article until here, I’d like to thank you for your time.

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Thanks again for watching, and until next time!