The One Tool That Saves Me Hours Of Drowning In Email Overwhelm

As my co-author Rhys says, email is a great communication tool but a terrible work management tool.

The average professional spends at least 15 minutes reopening and rereading emails daily.

If you spend just 15 minutes daily to revisit, readdress or re-read old emails, you’re wasting 97 hours per year, taking no action, just redoing the same thing.

To combat this, I found a tool that I’ve used for the last two years that has saved me hours of anxiety when it comes to opening my inbox.

The tool is a Google Chrome extension (note you need to be using Google Chrome for this) called Inbox When Ready. 

It allows me to send emails without seeing who else is vying for my time in my inbox.

I can jump into my inbox when I want to tackle it and smash out what is needed in record time.

There is nothing mind-blowing apart from the fact that I may have saved you 97 hours with one Chrome Extension.

If you want to read how to tackle your inbox when you are ready - read Rhys’s articulate post on how he does this here. 

How We Routinely Beat Our Competitors

"Competing in sports is fun, but competing in business is a hell that should be avoided at all costs," said a random internet person.

Competition is unavoidable now - very few businesses roam free of adversaries. And most are stuck competing on price in a race to the bottom of their bank accounts.

I'm watching this play out live in my local domain. As interest rates rise, banks are sucking all the spare change from people's wallets, and competition for their custom is getting vicious. In my seven years of owning compound gym - I've never seen such aggressive discounting by my competitors. Some are offering no payment periods of up to 3 months.

Luckily for me and others who don't want to engage in this race. We have other options.

We can find unique combinations of features to produce best-in-the-world solutions (as discussed last week) or, far more straightforwardly, build better acquisition models.

Robinhoods, "get a free share on signup", and Shopify's "build a business competition" are two of the better ones I've seen in recent times.

With their clever acquisition methods, they didn't just eke out a small CAC margin over their competitors - they found a magnitude of order improvement.

The way we can find one, too, is with the Blue Ocean (a book on product positioning/strategy) marketing equivalent - look at what our competitors are doing and do something different.

This is the cat-and-mouse game of acquisition that we've relied on at Compound Gym to survive for the past seven years.

Every few months, I scan our market to see what other gyms are doing, and when I spot a shift from them to, say, Google ads, we move to something different.

When Google made a big push to compete with social media ad spending by offering to pseudo-run campaigns for businesses - many gyms jumped back into Google ads and forgot about social ads. We went to social ads and got leads for $25 a pop.

Then, 18 months ago, when the cost per lead on Google ads started climbing rather drastically, they dived back into social media ads but ignored SEO. So we made a big push in SEO and spent the last year in the number 1 spot on Google for our most valuable keywords. Again, we found a far cheaper way to acquire leads, this time at <$10.

When I sensed our competitors were making moves on SEO, we decided to go back into social organic in a big way. And this time, we'll try to build an unassailable lead.

Over the past six years, we might have had the smallest marketing budget of all our competitors - or, at the very least, started that way. Yet we've grown from 180 members to 650 at our peak. At the same time, many other gyms have disappeared or struggled, even with their 6 & 7-figure marketing budgets.

We've never reached Shopify levels of cleverness with our acquisition methods nor achieved orders of magnitude difference in acquisition cost. Still, we've undercut our competitor's CAC by 3 - 5x and beat them while routinely increasing our prices.