What's Your PQO?
And how much time are you spending on it?
I recently recorded a new video course I called 'The Solopreneur Success Formula'.
One of the modules is all about working out your PQO. This is a term from Brendon Burchard's High Performance Habits book. It means prolific quality output.
In other words what are the most important outputs you need to be focusing on for your business?
As an example;
Henry Fords most important outputs were more cars
Apple - more iphones
Seth Godin - blogs & books
Amy Porterfield - podcasts
Udemy - courses
Gary Vee - social media content
Mr Beast - YouTube videos
Beeple - daily digital art
Any niche site publisher - more blog posts
and so on.
If you notice, the one thing all the above have in common is that whatever their most important output is, that's their main thing.
Sure, Apple have a host of other products, Seth Godin also speaks and sells courses, Amy Porterfield posts on IG & Facebook too, Gary Vee has multiple businesses. But their main thing, the thing that helps them to grow an audience, gain exposure, build subscribers, followers, clients, buyers etc are their main outputs.
What's made each of those above examples successful is that they identified their main outputs early on in their operations and have focused relentlessly on them for years.
So what's your PQO?
What are the most important outputs you need to be focused on in your business and that you're prepared to consistently do for the next 1,3,5, 10+ years without fail?
Here's some questions to help you;
1. What is your ultimate goal with your business?
For example, Amy Porterfield, Gary Vee & Seth Godin have all built big personal brands which allow them to sell courses, attract clients, sell books etc.
Apple want to sell more products and a niche site publisher wants to build, monetize and sell websites.
Think about what you actually want to happen with your business long term, this will determine the most important outputs for you.
2. What are the main moves you need to make to achieve that goal?
Identify a person or company who is doing what you want to do long term and reverse engineer their strategy noting their main moves.
NB: Main moves don't include all the extra stuff like, building a site, getting hosting, creating landing pages, etc etc. These are the big strategies that have the most impact on moving you towards your goals.
As an example Amy Porterfield's main moves have been to; publish a podcast every week, build her email list, create and sell courses, collaborate with other course creators and now become an author.
Her PQO has been podcasting.
A niche site publishers main moves would be to; choose a niche, master keyword research, create a lot of high quality and consistent content, guest post to build links, monetize.
Their PQO would be blog posts.
3. Make a list of your main moves and your PQO's.
Make a list of your main moves that will take you to your ultimate goal, which should only be 3 - 6 moves in total (remember these are main moves) and identify from that list your PQO's.
You may discover that you have more than one PQO to focus on, although I would strongly recommend working on one at a time.
But for arguments sake, let's say you wanted to build a blog and a social media following, then your PQO's might be - daily blog posts, daily social media posts.
Or if you want to host a podcast and become an author, your PQO's might be - weekly podcasts, yearly books.
Once you've identified your PQO, that's what you need to be working on for at least 60% - 80% of your time.
If you're currently spending 90% of your time on a million different jobs and only 10% on the PQO you've identified, that will be the reason you may find your busy but not progressing.
Try switching to at least 60% of your time on your PQO (if not more - ideally 80%) and notice what happens. You may find that you start to feel more momentum in your business and you can finally see a path forward.