OK - January is Done.

So, 8.125% of the year is DONE

For many companies, January is a slow month - holiday hangovers, lots of planning, everybody easing back into “regular life”. But the month is done…so where do you stand regarding your 2025 goals?

I know that this is like thinking about losing a baseball game in April - it doesn’t matter - it’s a long season, whatever. Lots of businesses are OK with things starting slowly. And maybe this is just a me thing, but my ADHD tends to let slow starts turn into stagnant quarters and lost opportunities. Thinking that you have lots of time to hit your plan is fine - as long as you are the sort to pay attention to the plan and adjust as the days tick on by.

On January 1, you had 246 business days to hit your annual goals. Now you have 226. If your goal is $1,000,000 in new biz, you your daily new revenue goal just increase by 8.125% - or about $400 a day.

I’m not trying to make you maniacally track your goals - but don’t make things harder on yourself by not paying attention to them because December is far away.

Two Things To Help You Hit Your Goals

Here are a couple of things available that might make it easier to hit your goals.

News and Notes

Parakeeto Fundamentals Sale: Agency Inner Circle profitability super star, Marcel Petitpas has a great “agency finance fundamentals” program. Because it’s the end of his fiscal year today (Jan 31, 2025), he is having a 50% off sale. This is worth every penny at full price and twice as much at half price. Use code FYE2024 at checkout. Expires at midnight on the 31st.

Did Deep Seek Just Ruin OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok & Llama? Deep Seek, the Chinese AI upstart that generated a frontier LLM at about 0.03% the cost of other LLMs has the venture and AI worlds “shook” as the kids say. Does this mean that AI is now cheap and easy and anyone can do it? Well, no - and yes. OpenAI seems to be the thing that DeepSeek used to train itself - so maybe a little cheating happening there. And DeepSeek is full of security and privacy issues. All of that said it is clear that AI will get cheaper and better over time. So if you aren’t exploring how AI can make your agency better, what are you waiting for?

Tariffs Coming Your Way: Thank goodness that Colombia and the US put their spat aside and avoided a 25% tariff on coffee. Because if coffee got any more expensive, I am pretty sure that I would just lose my s#!% CONSTANTLY. But it does seem that the Trump administration is going to put the screws to Canada and Mexico tomorrow. Listen, I am not an economist, BUT I can guarantee that this isn’t going to be good for those of us who work in advertising. With the Fed keeping interest rates steady, and likely higher prices on all sorts of stuff, the US consumer may have to take a deep breath before spending more. Any dip in consumer spending means a slow down in ad spend and a pull back in marketing. So stay alert, comrades.

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