What I shipped in 2016

Posted by Adam Franklin

This post originally appeared on Adam Franklin’s personal blog.

Each year (or at least most years), I share publicly, what I’ve managed to “ship” aka get out the door and share with the world. I share what went well and what didn’t go according to plan and where I’d like to improve.

Business

2016 was always going to be a different kind of year for Toby and me at Bluewire because Tobes decided to take a full time contract with one of our bigger private clients.  This shaped up to be a great experience for him, and also left me focussed on the two parts of the business that energise me the most. They are speaking and education programs.

Professional speaking

For my speaking component for our business, this was a record year. I did 24 speaking engagements and really enjoyed them all. All but two were paid and they were to support industry events.

A photo posted by Adam Franklin (@adam_franklin) on Mar 3, 2016 at 6:15pm PST

One of the highlights was the international keynote I did in Koh Samui in Thailand for a group of hair dressers and salon owners.  And the biggest event was to 850 mortgage brokers on the Gold Coast.

Education programs

The other main ‘arm’ of our Bluewire business is education via in person and online programs. Toby and I ran an ‘oversubscribed’ Web Marketing 2 Day Bootcamp in March (42 tickets). We thoroughly enjoyed it and we were able to validate the content we delivered, with a view to using that training material in the next iteration of our online course.

After quite a bit of procrastination when it came to actually executing the online course, I was lucky enough to have two very fortuitous meetings. The first was with Andrew, a friend and performance coach, who kicked me into gear and made me realise all I needed to do was ‘do it’. The second was a meeting with Rachel who gave me the confidence that “we” could do these videos!   I locked in daily accountability calls with Toby and this helped enormously.

Prior to that I was feeling overwhelmed and a bit anxious about it all. However with this help, and within 30 days, I planned, recorded, shipped and launched the entire 35 training videos that comprise the Web Marketing That Works Online Course 2.0.

Plus I released my first bloopers reel!

As for our book, we surpassed total sales of more than 4,000 copies.

Mastermind

Again after a year or two of talking about I finally joined forces with a friend to help get a 10-12 person peer mastermind together. We had a pilot event on the Gold Coast and after a unanimous decision to continue we ran our second meeting at Bondi. We will continue to meet once a quarter.

Personal

Family

I’ve been lucky to see my niece and goddaughter grow into amazing 2yo girls. Seeing them is always an absolute joy.  Plus my nephew was born into the world and my brother and his wife were kind enough to make his middle name “Adam”.  Such an honour!

Travel

I did a 5 week trip during our winter.  I went to Europe for a mate’s wedding outside of Munich, then a 10 day stint in a Croatian villa on Hvar, a stags party in Austria and then flew home via Thailand for 10 days.

I did a 2 week stint in Bali with my room mate and coach, Sean in April, and another 2 week stint in October with my mate Tom.  I was able to surf some of the best waves of my life, so was very happy with this.

A photo posted by Adam Franklin (@adam_franklin) on Apr 26, 2016 at 8:12pm PDT

Health

I started the year at a respectable 80.5 kgs but finished the year up over 85kgs. The second half of the year was certainly full of a lot more parties, indulging, and not as much exercise.

It’s a good excuse to get back into a decent training and eating program once the new year’s celebrations come to an end.

I also tossed out a lot of old clothes, got a shorter haircut, got some guidance and new clothes from a stylist, and generally made myself look and feel more respectable, and confident!    In 2017, the physique will need to follow suit.

Plans for 2017

I’ve got my full goals documented for private reference but the short version is this.  I think 2017 will be the year of video marketing so I aim to do more Facebook lives videos and do more webinars.

And from a personal point of view, I want to spend a month living in each of these places — Bali, Portugal, Switzerland and USA.

Happy new year and thanks for an amazing 2016!

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About Adam Franklin

Adam Franklin is the bestselling author of Web Marketing That Works. He is an international social media speaker and CEO of Bluewire Media.  His blog was Australia's #1 Business Blog and his podcast was #9 on the top marketing podcasts in Entrepreneur magazine. His work has featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Huffington Post and iTunes. Download the popular Web Strategy Planning Template which has been used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His weekly 'Bluewire News' email goes out to over 32,000 readers.

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