What Is Your Word of the Year
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 3rd, 2023
Ever heard of ‘Operation Cannonball’?
It’s more than just a cool name…it’s groundbreaking for businesses.
Join me as I share how this concept supercharged a climbing holds business I worked with.
Plus, I’ll spill the beans on the ‘word of the year’ trick we used for success.
And guess what? I’m curious about your word of the year too.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“We need to fire bullets before cannonballs.
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
So back in 2017, I had just moved back to Minnesota. I was looking, trying to figure out what I wanted to do next on my journey. And my buddy Ryan, he had a business called Escape climbing. And at the time, they were doing, I think, $300,000 top line revenue. And he had been running this business for over a decade. I think it had originally started as a side project that he was like a senior thesis, actually, for his college degree in graphic design, of all things. He had to design a business and all the branding and all this stuff, and he created it for this company called Escape Climbing. He had been making climbing holes in his garage for his own home wall for years, and so he kind of turned this into a full business.
And then a couple of years later, he started selling these things online, and he had a nice little business. Going fast forward to 2017, whenever I talked to Ryan over, like, the previous couple of years, he was pretty happy, just content with where he was. He was making good income just off of this. 300,000 might not seem a lot, but he only had two employees and not a ton of overhead, so he was doing pretty good. But for whatever reason, in 2017, he decided he wanted to make more of an impact on the world. And that to do that, he would need to scale and escape and make it bigger so that he could get better pricing, better distribution, he could create better products, and he wanted to take this thing to the next level. So we got to chatting about how to do that. And in 2017, I joined the forces.
And one of the first things that we did was we created a word of the year, or, like, an idea of the year that would guide our efforts moving forward. And for that year, the concept was Operation Cannonball. And Operation Cannonball stemmed from a book that we had read called good to great by Jim Collins. It’s a fantastic book, one of the best business books out there. And in there, he talks about how you need to fire bullets before cannonballs. And this stemmed from, like, old nautical times. If you’re on a boat and you were a pirate and you saw another ship coming towards you, and you’re like, oh, no, we need to fight those people. The wrong thing to do would be to just start firing cannonballs at them, because you have to triangulate the angle of attack, and you only have so many cannonballs on the ship with you.
And so if you just start firing all willy nilly and then try to triangulate as you’re doing that, you might run out of cannonballs before you ever actually hit them. And so what they would do is they would fire bullets, because you can carry a whole lot more bullets first. And then when they finally hit the other ship with their bullets, they’d go, oh, that’s the angle. And they would do the math, and they triangulate it, and then they would start firing the cannonballs. And so we took this concept and applied it within the context of our business and said, okay, we need to fire bullets before cannonballs. And the bullets were really, we need to prove that we could hit certain targets, that there was a market for the products that we had in mind, and that we had the ability to actually hit those things. And those were around three areas in particular, which were climbing holes, hardware, and wooden training implements like that you see on America. Ninja warrior.
Now, for the years before 2017, Ryan had proved that there was a market and that he had a product that people were willing to pay for, and he was doing good money there, right? $300,000 a year is not chump change. And so now we knew there was a target that had been hit. Now it was time to go. Operation Cannonball, which was, let’s now scale up and start firing the big balls, see if we can’t sink those ships. And to do that, we needed to reach a certain scale. So, for 2018 and 2019, the thesis for those years was Operation Cannonball. That is, we know there’s a market there. We know we have a product that wants it.
Now we just need to continue scaling. So everything was about scale and efficiencies and systematizing our processes, because this is a manufacturing environment. And within three years, we ten xed. So we were doing just over 3 million in top line revenue. And then it shifted. So we had scaled, we had done what we had set out to do, and then we set a new word of the year, which was escape velocity. Now we had size, we had scale, we had mass. Now it was time to separate ourselves from the competition in everything that we do.
1% incremental improvements is no longer about the really big, massive actions, but now it’s the steady incremental improvements that would continue to distance us from our competition. And I have done this every single year since I’ve started working with Ryan, was coming up with this word of the year concept. I think it’s a really good way to frame your goals and your objectives for a year. And it’s just an easy way to remember, like, okay, what am doing, what is the guiding principle of this year? And so I wanted to share this with you because it’s a concept that you can apply in the context of your own life on your personal development, your goals for this next year. And I encourage you to think like, what is my word or concept of the year that I want to keep pinned to the forefront of my mind. For me, last year, one of the concepts was hyper focus or do less but better. This year, I’m thinking a lot about maximizing your return on life. What does that mean to maximize your return on life? And one of the words that I’m using a lot in my own mind as I’m thinking through my goals and I’m setting out my objectives for the year is leverage.
Specifically, I’ve done great in the past in leveraging capital and labor, but we know that there’s four types of leverage. There’s also media and code. And so this next year, I’m focusing very heavily on those two aspects. Media, which I’m doing with this content, with the YouTube channel, with the newsletter, all these things like continuing to leverage those as I grow the media side of my brands. But all of it is really in pursuit of maximizing my return on life and getting really clear about what does that actually mean for me. And that is a good true north as a guiding compass for all my actions and all the things that I’m trying to take on this year. I’m just putting it through the filter, does this maximize my return on life? And if the answer is no, then I try to put it aside and say, that’s not for this year. So I don’t know what your word of the year is, but if you were to leave me a review and drop it in there or shoot me a comment or shoot me a DM or shoot me an email, then I would know it.
And then this would not just be me monologuing at you, this would be a conversation. And that sounds way cooler. So how about this? How about you go and just take a second to share with me? What is your word of the year? I asked a bunch of friends on New Year’s Eve like, what is your word of the year? And some really great ones were o. Another was consistency, another was antifragile. I think those are all really cool words and I’d love to hear what yours is. So shoot me a message, let me know and I’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends. Bye.
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