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Here we go.
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Welcome back to the episode of the LCR Media podcast where we get to know the pros. I'm your host, LCR Nailer Taliaferro. In today's episode, I'm, as I mentioned or alluded to in some previous episodes, I wanted to share some takeaways from or actually some snippets from my recent Inner Circle masterclass that I had two days in person up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cornell, Max Stopping Grounds. But my Inner Circle members joined us for two days and we were essentially workshopping for two days on all any of the challenges that they had individually. So, so that we can help them start the season off strong and have the most successful season that they can. Then, of course, we'll follow up throughout, you know, every week on our conference, on our, our coaching calls every week and through the, the private Facebook group and just making sure that everyone stays on track so they can win. That's the whole point of the, the Inner Circle coaching group that I have. So anyway, it was myself, John Pajak and Eric Triplet. We were there. The three of us were serving my inner circle at the highest level above and beyond what we can do at the events like the LCR Summit and Profit Accelerator Live that's coming up in June. You know, we, we can only do so much there because it's, it's a larger group, but it's still a lot more than when you go to the big conferences. But, but anyway, my point is what, what I'm going to share in this episode is this is pretty much how we started off or how I started off the, the two week, the two days and really focused on time management. That was one of the challenges that we wrote on the board for pretty much everyone. Like there are certain things, certain challenges that seem to be common or universal with the lawn and landscape community business owners. It's time management, underpricing jobs, right? Those are some two popular ones. There's so many more like getting out of the truck and hiring. Those are all also very common. So we focus on all of that. But in this episode, I really focused on time management. I thought it was very impactful and it's not as tactical. It's hard to share the tactical stuff when we're writing stuff on the board and doing math and formulas and breaking things down. That's a lot easier when you're in person or if you're watching the video than to just listen on the podcast. But some of the content is just as good at audio as it is in person. Where you're not really writing as much down. It's not as much of a visual learning. So that's what this episode has. It's me. And then Eric Triplett jumped in and shared some of his productivity strategies, if you will, and how he properly manages his time. And we're always learning, right? He's older than me and has more experience than me and has a much larger business than I've ever had, but he's still learning. Also, we never stop learning, so we're riffing off of each other and inspiring each other to help bring even higher value than we even originally planned
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at
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the master class so that we can just keep going deeper and deeper and live in the moment.
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Anyway.
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You're going to hear both me and Triplet sharing different ways, but still the same general idea of how to manage your time better, especially going into the spring with it being so busy and your schedule gets overloaded. You still want to have a life, right? There's just so much going on. So it's important to have a structure, have a system in place that you can follow that's not overly complicated, but also the mindset there and the discipline and the determination so that you can stay focused on. On the tasks at hand and your priorities. And so that's what we talk about. And I thought it was very impactful, so I wanted to share that with you all, so I hope you enjoy.
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So I wanted to start off talking about, you know, we talk about time and challenges and growing, but we allow default priorities to assign our time. We allow default priorities to assign our time instead of designing our priorities so we can get the most from our time. Because what we normally do is we. We prioritize our list, but we need to list our priorities. Like, think about this. Like, really, like, this is the. This is, like, this is the opening thing for these two days. Don't prioritize your list. You write down 10, 20 things that you want to get done in the day, and then you're like, okay, how am I going to get all these things done? You set yourself up for failure. List your priorities. And when we get into the bullet journal, that's the operating system because. And this isn't a bullet journal thing. This is just something I learned and I've witnessed in my own life. You can only effectively get two to three valuable priorities done in a day. I'm not talking about all the other nonsense stuff you do every day. I'm talking about, like, things that are really moving the needle in your life and your Business, your marriage, your family, your community, whatever that is.
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Right?
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And the bullet journal helps you with that. Or any journal, but the bullet journal helps you write down what are your future. It's called future casting. Right? Like, write down what some of your priorities are for the future. Like, for me, it's. It was and still is. Like, I had three Growing my business, but very specific. Strengthening the relationship with my wife and strengthening my relationship with my kids. Those are the three separate things. And then you break it down. What does that look like? How do you do that? But that's. You have to have a specific, measurable goal. So for my wife, it was a time, like 90 days. How do I show my. How. How do I make my wife feel more loved in the next 90 days? And then I write down all these ways that are measurable. Like date nights, every Thursday night. That's measurable. Because then you keep track. Oh, did we miss a date night? Right? Measurable. Measurable goals. Otherwise you have no idea. You're just throwing stuff out there. We're all have a bad habit of humans of just writing down goals like, improve my marriage, grow my business. But that's not a measurable goal unless you have a specific, like, grow my business 10% or add another crew in 90 days or by next year. You know, in a year, I want to hit a million dollars in revenue. Like, those are measurable. Time and money. Right? Time and money. Those are measurable. Those are examples, like just saying, I want to grow my business. You're not going to be able to hit that target because you don't even know what that means. You got to really write it down and see what that means to you. What does that look like, growing your business? What time frame? Because Parkinson's law, right? I've talked about this. If you give yourself forever to grow your business, it'll take you forever to grow your business. But if you want to grow your business to a certain point in six months or change something in your business in six months, then write that down. And then write down how you're going to do that. The specifics. I'm going to hire an operations manager or a new crew leader, or I need to hold my current crew leader accountable. And if he doesn't, you know, and look for his replacement, you know, being proactive in case that person doesn't get together. Like, specific, measurable goals. So if you were to only write down two to three priorities a day, priorities like, did I text my wife that I love her? Did I spend? Did I check in with my kids, and did I give my daughter a call or my son a text? Like, very immeasurable things. If you write those things down as priorities that are part of your ultimate goal. Imagine in a year, you have hundreds of things that you got done. Hundreds. Just doing two or three things a day instead of trying to write a huge list, and you get none of them done. Or you get all the easy stuff done. You get all the minuscule. You get all the minuscule tasks. You're like, oh, that's the easy one. Boop. Check that off the list. But no. So it's an interesting concept that really makes sense to me and that I've been doing a lot of is prioritizing, writing down your prior, listing your priorities instead of prioritizing your list. Yeah, come right on.
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We didn't plan this. This is. Okay, we're just doing it. So this is riffing urgent, and this is not urgent,
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okay?
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And then we have, this is not important, not important, and this is important, okay? And so we. You're going to find yourself in these tasks every day. You're going to find yourself in one of these quadrants every day. And this is the Eisenhower matrix, okay? So first of all, if it's not important, you're like, oh, it's easy to do. I'm going to do it and check it off, feel good about myself. This needs to be delegated, okay? And then if it's not urgent and not important, we want to delete this from our life, okay? And then we want to do the important things, and the things that are important and not urgent, we want to do them later. So just. I don't want to take this stage over. I just want to give this to you, be like, everything that you have to do every day. And this is especially for John. He's like. He's like, I'm everywhere. And then my adhd, and then I'm like, the squirrel. And then he might want to check an easy box to feel good about himself. Then you're in this. You should have deleted that. Or you should delegated it to your son. He wants to do more. So everything you look at in the morning, you should be like, where am I? This is where you need to live right here. These important things that.
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That are.
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That you know, that are just important to you. So if it's important and not urgent, boom, we want to do this. Important and urgent. We want to get them done. So that's kind of how it needs to go. So I just wanted to throw that out there for you guys. That was really profound for me. When I learned that it was one of these little sessions with the Hormozi family, you know, I was like, oh, this is really good.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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I just wanted to make sure. I kind of threw that out there because. Exactly what you're talking about.
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No, that's great. No, yeah, no, for sure.
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That.
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I mean, this is one of the many things that I have. I have. I have. Binging isn't the word, but I've gone through, like, gone down the rabbit hole for so many years of trying to discover, like, the best way to manage my time. So I know all about the Eisenhower method. So thank you for sharing that. Because what this does, there's. There's several different. Other really good methods, too, that are different for different reasons, but this. This really helps you figure out what matters. Right? Like, what I like to say is either complete it or delete it. Like complete it or delete it. You like that? Yeah, yeah. Because we end up just. Just having stuff on our list. Like I said, back to listing your priorities instead of just prioritizing a list, you know, because then you end up carrying over stuff day after day after day. Just delete it. Complete it, or delete it. That's. That. That's just kind of one. That's a very good way to start things off here. So interim. And so the thing that you guys need to understand, I'm going to get into something later today that's. That's new, that you guys have never even heard of before. I created, essentially, but talking about time. Time is assigned either by default or by design. None of us have control over time. We don't make time. We don't create time. Time is there. It's ever present. We're moving through time and space. But what we can do is assign our time Instead of it just being assigned for us. It's always going to be assigned. Every second is being assigned somehow by default or by design. Meaning, do you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is go on your phone and an hour later, what have you accomplished? Did you just binge through social media? Did you do this, that, and the other thing? Like, did your phone assign your time? Did you just lose an hour because by default, your phone or social media or noise in your world assigned your time for you, time is valuable. If you guys remember at the LCR summit, time is infinitely more valuable than money because you can't make more time. You can make money. Money was man created time is everywhere. Time is not something that we created. It just exists in the universe. So we need to cherish our time and assign our time. Just like we should be more careful with how we spend our money as well, right? But we should be even more careful with how we spend our time because it's going to be assigned no matter what, by default or by design. So we're going to go more into that about how to assign your time by design, like actually how. And time blocking is a way. The bullet journal is a way. Listing your priorities is a way to assign your time better. But here's some principles of time. You move through time, you experience time. If you don't decide how to use your time, something else will. Right? I just said that. Like, just think about that, think about your day. And if you do nothing, something is going to just take up that time. Unless you actually assign what you're going to do in that time. Time isn't made, like I said, it's assigned either by default or design. Where your intention starts, your attention follows. So again, if your intention is to grow your business in a measurable way, a time frame, and what does that look like? What does growth look like? Money, amount of people, services, whatever, what does that look like? Right? Your intention, when you have that intention, your attention follows. Essentially, what you focus on is what you get, you know?
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Toro is a proud sponsor here at the LCR Media Podcast. And if you're a contractor, their fleet program is a game changer. Members can save up to 24% on equipment purchases, plus access to Horizon 360 job management software at no cost. For a limited time, you can combine fleet savings with special financing. Now is the time to stretch your budget and streamline your business. Click the link in the episode description or visit your Toro dealer to learn more about joining the Fleet program. Hey, just real quick, if you haven't heard, I I have a new event coming up this summer right here in Richmond, Virginia on June 26th and 27th. It's called the Profit Accelerator Live. Special guests, what you're going to learn there. So you're going to learn how to stop underpricing your jobs, improve your route density, close more bids, and fill your schedule with more profitable jobs. So stop sacrificing so much of your time for a little bit of money and join us at the Profit Accelerator Live link is in the episode description.
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When you focus on that's encouraging, then your subconscious starts thinking, man, this is going to be a bummer. This sounds like this Might be a challenge. I don't know if I want to go into all that. So you got to kind of rewire your brain and focus on, well, what are the benefits of taking on this challenge? What are the benefits of taking on this challenge and getting through this challenge? And who can I work with to help me through this challenge or these challenges? Because when you focus on that, right, your intention, then your attention follows. I mean, that's everything. You guys probably can think about your life, where that happens. Like, if you're driving a race car, you know, you can't. If you turn your head, you start going this way, right? Or you're riding your bike and you go this way, you just start going this way. Like, you have to look at where you want to go. I mean, it's life, right? Am I right? Like, where your intention is, your attention follows. So look straight ahead, focus on your goal, and don't follow all the shiny objects or chase down rabbit holes. Sometimes that's fun every now and again. But you want to be structured as much as you can. So start better intentions. Intention determines direction. Intention determines direction. And remember we talked about. So another thing for today, I'm huge on what Mindset. Because mindset times skill set. Remember this times skill set plus tool set equals asset, which is you. You are your greatest asset. You are your greatest asset. So mindset times skill set plus tool set equals asset. And I focus on mindset so much because, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, everywhere that I've been in this industry, no one focuses enough on mindset. Like events, trade shows, training. It's all about skill set and tool set. Like knowing your numbers, employees, finances, which are all great and important. But if you're not a leader up here and in here, none of that matters. You need to be the right leader to run the systems and manage the people and lead your company to success. It all starts with mindset. We can learn. It's sad to me sometimes when I see the rooms packed with people that are all about the skill set, but they don't have the right mindset and they're never going to achieve or it's going to be harder for them to achieve their goals because. Because they don't have the right mindset. They're so focused on the skills, which are very necessary. But it's not the only thing. It's mindset time. Skill set plus the tool set. Like, okay, well, now how do we. What do we use to get all this accomplished? Equals the asset. So mindset is the first thing, it's so critical if you're not right. You know, if you're struggling with your marriage or you have something else going on in your life that is making you not in the right mindset. You're going to bring that to your, to your business to work, and it's going to infect your employees or employee or future employees. Like, you need to get your mind right. You need to have the right mindset so that you can actually learn a new skill set and then use the right tool set. So that's why I focus on that so much. And I'm going to be continuing to focus on that this whole, like, day and a half. So some more things, you can't make more time. Like I've talked about before, you can't make more time. That's why it's more valuable than money. You can't manufacture an extra hour. You can't negotiate with the clock. But every single day, your time gets assigned. Like I said, I really want you to understand this. Your inbox, like, your emails, your customers, your emergencies, your habits. You know, the first thing I do when I wake up, like, literally the first thing I do when I wake up, I mean, after I get out of bed and all that, before I do all the things that I just said, I read the Bible and then I look at my text notifications to see if there's anything from my family that's important. I mean, they should all be home, but if they're not, like, I'm looking to make sure there's nothing there. And then I check my emails to see if there's anything important there. I don't even go on social media. And then I move on to start the rest of my day right, get coffee, breakfast, start moving around, doing different things. And then I will start to, like, especially then, you know, I'll look at my agenda, I'll look and see what, what do I have to do? And then I will. If social media is a, is a priority on there, then I will definitely dive into that. But I'm just going to show you an example here. Like, you know, so like, this is how, where I would write all my stuff down. So like, this was, this was. Come on, here we go. This was yesterday. So just, you know, look at what's on the list. You know, obviously I was traveling, so there's not a whole lot of things. But I look at that and I'm like, okay, what do I need to do today? What's a priority? And get my wrap, my Head. I finish my day, right? I finish planning my day. Because the night before, I look at my day like, okay, what have I done? What haven't I done? What needs to get moved to tomorrow? What needs to be completed or deleted? And then in the morning, because sometimes, you know, you have to sit and let things. You have to sleep on it literally, right? You have to sleep on some things. So in the morning, you wake up and you're thinking about something different or you have a different perspective on something. So then I'll finish my day planning my day that way. Go back to my thing here. So that's how I start designing my time first thing in the morning. Like that. I don't just go on my phone and immediately get distracted with all of the craziness on your phone. I have a gazillion notifications on my phone all the time. And I could get lost. The whole hour could be gone. Me just scrolling through my notifications, right? So like I said, yeah. So I start, like, deleting stuff and unsubscribing to things. I'm constantly staying on top of that. You know, I'm just changing things up because I don't want all that nonsense going on. So I don't need all that noise because I want to. I want to assign my time by design and not just let it be sucked away by default. So. So again, so what. What are you guys. What. How are you guys assigning your time? So a couple more things. The first. First big lesson that I've talked about that I want you guys to learn more about is creating boundaries. Creating boundaries for freedom. Remember, I've talked about this recently in our calls. I used to think that micromanaging and time blocking and writing things down was annoying and a waste of time. But it actually creates freedom because like I said, for one thing, Parkinson's law will allow you to take forever to do anything. So if you give yourself all day to do one thing, it'll take you all day to do that one thing. So that's why if you list two to three priorities, anything beyond that, statistically I've read it makes you. You don't do anything. You don't get anything done. Like, people can get two to three good priorities done in a day, because then you have all the other noise anyway. It doesn't mean those are the only three things you're going to get done. It just means those are your priorities that have to get done and move the needle. Of course there's going to be phone calls and Fires to put out and, you know, family stuff. And maybe on the whim, you're like, oh, I want to do this or I want to do that, or I'm going to go out and grab something to eat, I don't have time to make dinner. Like, all that stuff doesn't have to be written down on the list. That's just going to happen. I get it. But if you write down two or three priorities and you make sure that that's a focus, at least you get those things done, you feel accomplished, and you're moving that much closer to whatever that 90 day or 60 day or a year goal is. And you can keep chipping away at that. So for boundaries, like, and a good example. Well, for one thing, a good author, famous author, Napoleon Hill, said in one of his books, riches do not respond to wishes. Riches do not respond to wishes. You have to put in the work. You have to be intentional, right? Like we said, like I said, where your intention is, your attention follows. So you can't just hope, you can't just expect money to flow. You can't expect success to just come. You have to actually be intentional. So that's why I say, don't prioritize your list. List your priorities. And creating boundaries for that is going to help. One of the ways to create boundaries is time blocking. And this is what I thought was extremely annoying at first. But I realized if I give myself an hour to do something, even if it takes me an hour to do that thing, at least I got that thing done and I didn't give myself all day, so I have the rest of the day to do other things. So you don't have to necessarily know exactly how long it's gonna take you to do stuff. Just like in our business, a new service or a new neighborhood or yard or whatever, you're not really sure 100% how long it might take. So you have to kind of play around with it and, you know, you have to guess and then you have to adjust and then you have it down pat. So it's the same thing with the tasks in your life. Like, you might not know how long it might take you to do a certain thing. So you just write it down. You give yourself an hour or 30 minutes or two hours and you see where it goes and you're like, how much that time did I waste? Like, could it have only taken me 30 minutes to get this done? Could it have taken me 15 minutes? Because we always wait till the end to get something done. Like, like I said, Parkinson's law, if you have an hour, I mean there are, over there, there are high achievers that can get stuff done immediately. Like my wife, she just wants to get stuff like done quickly and get it out of her mind. She doesn't want to have to deal with it. Right. But there are a large portion of human nature at different levels where you will add more. Oh, I have an hour. Okay. And then you just kind of add more things in there and you're like, oh no, I still gotta get this done. And you're struggling to get it done. If you wait all day now you're like sacrificing dinner, family, all that kind of stuff. So creating boundaries for freedom because so time blocking in the bullet journal, you'll see that. And then like you saw on my screen, you write down the times that you want to, what you want to do and how it looks. So I just wanted to show you another quick visual. When you guys, when, when you look at the times, however, whatever planner you're using, there's times here like hours, hour blocks. And if you write down what you're going to do in those hour blocks and you have a visual. I don't know about you guys, but I'm a visual person. So I look at these visual cues and I see, okay, how much did I have to do? Like, let me show you an example. Like so on the side I'll write down my priorities and then I'll schedule them like where they want to fit in there. Right. And then that's time blocking and you look and you keep track and it kind of gives you a sense of urgency to get stuff done so that you can actually get stuff done.
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Right.
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So list, prioritize and execute is really what it comes down to. But the more I do that, the more I did that and do that, the more I get done and the more organized and complete I feel.
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Well, I hope that was helpful for all of you that, that are listening and whether you're challenged with time management or not, hopefully there was still some insight that you got that maybe you can improve your time management a little bit. Again, like I said in the, in the intro, whether it be me or Eric Triplett, two different levels of experience with time and business sizes, we're all still growing, we're all still learning. We all still want to, to be the best at whatever it is that we're doing in life. Business, family, all and both, both, you know, all the above. So, so like I said, hopefully this was helpful for you. The, the, I Recorded this for my Inner Circle so it's not anywhere and you can't get this information anywhere other than whatever I can share on the podcast like that's going to be beneficial. You know, all the, all the visual stuff was of us breaking things down on the board and everything. It's, that's, there's nowhere for anyone to see that unless you're in the Inner Circle. So. But I mean I'm sure I'll clip some, I'll be planning on looking for stuff that I can clip up, some little sound bite things, you know, like maybe some of what you heard on here and just clip that up for, you know, social media video clips and everything. But as far as the full length, all of that was recorded for Inner Circle so that they can re watch it and anyone you know, new that joins that obviously wasn't there in person, they can watch, watch that training as well. So they can still benefit. That's the whole goal there. Anyway, so I hope, hope you enjoyed and I look forward to seeing those of you that are planning on coming to the Profit Accelerator live this June in Richmond, Virginia. I'm super excited to host you My Hometown and I mean I'm originally from the state of New York, but I've been in Virginia for so long that it's, it is still, it is my hometown and I know a lot about it and Richmond has a lot of history. It's beautiful, especially in the summer. And it's a really nice place that I booked for us, the Omni Hotel, which Omni is everywhere. It's a really, really high level hotel. They're really going to treat us, treat us well. But ultimately it's the networking, the connection, the community and the connection and networking with the high level people that are going to be there, the speakers, myself and what you're actually going to take away from the experience at Profit Accelerator Live like you're literally going to come away from there with a plan or a solution. You're going to actually have have us get a solution there or a plan to put into place to stop underpricing your jobs, improve your route density, closing more bids to fill your schedule with more profitable jobs instead of just a bunch of busy work. And honestly to stop sacrificing so much of your time for a little bit of your of money. Like so many of us feel like just working, working, working more jobs and more jobs is going to fix the problem. Whether we're in debt, we're trying to get out, we're going into debt, we Just want to pay our bills and support our family, but still have a life that gets all convoluted, especially in the spring rush. It's easy to get caught up in that trap of so much work and you end up taking on the wrong work, non profitable work, PETA work. Right. Pain in the. You know what work. Just a lot of, a lot of issues and it can really stress you out and burn you out before you're
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even halfway through the season.
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Then you get into the summer, the dog days of summer, where it's super hot and now you're physically exhausted. You're already mentally exhausted from the spring rush. If you didn't really get through it. Excuse me. If you didn't really get through it in the proper way. So coming to the Profit Accelerator Live in the middle of the summer, you know, after the spring rush, before vacations really take off, before it gets super hot in August, especially here in Virginia. It's a great way to kind of recap, come with your notes, come prepared, come with your challenges so we can literally show you how to work through it, how to come up with action plans that you can implement right then and there or right immediately after you leave Profit Accelerator Live and just, just finish the rest of the year, you know, the second half of the year strong and win and not have to struggle. If you are already struggling and even if you had a great spring rush, we can celebrate you and maybe you can share and network with others too. And. But I guarantee you will still learn a thing or two, if not three or four while you're there. So. But networking is also huge too. You never know who you're gonna meet and that one conversation you're gonna have that's gonna change your business and life. So I hope to see you all there again.
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The link is in the episode description.
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Thank you all for listening and thank you to tutorial company for sponsoring the LCR Media podcast. And until next episode, this is Nail Artagliaferro signing off.
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This has been an lcr media and Mr. Producer production.