Most business advice about the new year sounds the same.

Set bigger goals. Push harder. Stay motivated.

This episode doesn’t do that.

Because the real problem usually isn’t ambition.

It’s follow-through.

Hi, I'm Mike Fox, host of this podcast, "Lone Wolf Unleashed."

In this first episode of 2026, I’m talking about why so many business owners quietly abandon their goals by February and what actually helps progress stick when you’re running things on your own.

We’re not talking about five-year visions or dramatic pivots.

We’re talking about systems. Accountability. And the small structural shifts that make execution possible when motivation fades.

I walk through a simple three-part accountability system built for solo operators.

Timestamped summary

00:00 Why most goals quietly fail

02:20 Friction, habits, and getting started

03:25 The three-part accountability system

04:44 Why running a business alone feels heavier than expected

06:30 Peer pressure that actually helps

09:20 Planning vs implementation

09:46 What I’m building in 2026 and why

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Good day.

My name is Mike from Lone Wolf Unleashed, and welcome to 2026.

Wow.

We are here already.

It feels like last year, most of last year just flew.

We've had a lot going on.

There's been a lot happening, and there's a very exciting things

that are lined up for this year that I'm excited to share with you.

So we'll get into that, uh, a little bit later in the show.

Thank you

Thank you so much for joining me.

. So today we're gonna talk about the goals of 2026.

It is the token first episode of the year.

You could say but you know, this is not another podcast or

a course promising 10 x growth.

We've done an episode on that number before, if you want

to go and listen to that.

From last year?

but this one is for the solo operators who want their life back.

And this year we're taking a little bit of a different angle

on that, and that is gonna be how do we actually get you unleashed?

One of the biggest ways that you can start to do that is by forming your own team.

And I know some of you out there are going, oh, but Mike, I'm listening to

this because I wanna stay solo forever.

Look, that is fine.

It's absolutely okay for you to do that as a strategy.

But one of the big things that you can sort of do to start to free up your

time is to give stuff to other people.

So what we wanna be able to do is we want to be able to create that

certainty that you're gonna get the results when you hand it off to other

people and not just you doing it.

you started your business a reason.

You know, freedom, flexibility, It is flexibility not just in terms of time,

but it's also in terms of location.

So if you're wanting to work from somewhere else or you're wanting to you

know, take a working holiday or whatever, to be able to enable that and you've

probably set some goals for this year,

I'd be really interested to hear what they are.

If you wanna.

Flick me an email.

It's, uh, mike@lonewolfunleashed.com.

Would love to be able to hear about what you've got planned for this year.

But yeah, most business owners they've already failed their goals

by February, and there's a bit of psychology behind that and I think

it's generally though that people don't think through what their goals are.

A lot beforehand.

And then they don't put in place the systems to go

about achieving those goals.

There's been a great episode of the Andrew Huberman podcast recently

with James Clear, where he talks about the, at Atomic Habits and.

There is a, an essence of the lowest friction Getting started

is the biggest thing that goes into achieving those goals.

And if you can get the lowest friction start, which makes it really easy for

you to start things, then you are going to see yourself following through more

and more consistently which ultimately is the thing that gets you the results.

but there's also been really interesting talking with people over the December

and their Christmas breaks with some people who are, are quite close

to me, who are business owners.

And one of the things that they really just want help in is just someone to keep

the finger on the button.

You know, in terms of, Hey, I have these plans.

How do we make sure that I'm still executing on those?

I think it's really a challenge.

people who are particularly on their own, to have that follow through.

And, that is what my program the pack is for.

You can join that for a quarter.

You can head over to my website to check that out, loan wolf unleash.com.

But yeah, today I am gonna walk you through the three part

accountability system that we're gonna be walking through here.

first part is public commitment.

So.

you tell others that you're going to do a thing.

there's a lot of people out there that say that, oh you don't

wanna share what you're doing.

'cause you know, if you fail, then it's not a huge big deal and you

won't have these people asking you about it, blah, blah, blah.

But the point is that you should have people asking you about how things went

It keeps you heading towards that goal.

If you know that people are going to be asking about it.

Now, there might be other reasons why you stop . It might not be because you're

lazy or because you lose sight of it.

It might be just because the strategy to start out with was not clear

or not that good which is fine.

It's really good to take learnings from that.

But to be able to tell other people what you're up to and to be able to tell

them, Hey, look, by, you know, March, I'm gonna have a 10% increase in sales.

What does that mean?

Well, it means that you've now set a target that's reasonable, that you can

start to work towards, and people might,

start to ask you about, okay, how are you going with that?

Oh, okay, I'm up to this amount.

Oh, I've got a little bit of work to do here.

You know, being able to have that public commitment, something that you

can follow through on and something you can share your journey with, because

it can be really hard and really

lonely as a business owner, particularly when it's on your own.

You, yourself running a business because you don't have those hallway

conversations where you get to catch up with people all the time.

being able to share these things and share your journey is

really,

really important.

The second one is peer pressure.

Now, in school you would've been told that this is a really bad

thing because, you your friends are gonna get you hooked on drugs.

At least that's what I heard when I was growing up.

when I talk about peer pressure, I'm more talking about the

good kind of peer pressure.

Hey, Mike, your marketing is not really that good.

If you try these things, I guarantee you're gonna see an uptick in leads.

Or, Hey, I've seen that you're operating this way, or you're doing this task, or

you're looking to improve this process.

Have you thought about doing these other ways?

You really should look at doing it this way because we've tried these

other ways that it's just not that good and we really think you'll get

better results off this, Being able to adopt different ways of working through

the way that other people are doing it and other people are recommending

is really a good way of doing it.

There's no reason to reinvent the wheel here, You're running a business,

A lot of businesses, they don't operate in the innovation space.

You might think you've had a good idea, and that's fine.

the ultimate thing about running a business is there's

already a proven model, right?

You need marketing, you need finance, you need ops, you need delivery.

Consumers act in a certain way.

They're not going to suddenly change the way that they behave

just because they're interacting with your business versus others.

it's really good to be able to take in other people's experience

and to take on the types of things that they're talking about.

Types of things that they're recommending that you do, uh, to be able to do that.

So that's what I mean by peer pressure.

The third one is regular check-ins.

Now this one seems like it's a, oh, you know, I join the call every week and,

oh, it's just more time than I could be doing other things and blah, blah, blah.

Look, I hear this a lot.

but it really is the essence of.

Being able to check in, see how you're going with things,

see what you're blocked on.

are you making progress on something?

If you're not, how do we move forward?

all those sorts of things.

you might have escaped corporate to get away from that that's okay.

Some managers aren't really good that good at doing that.

however, I will say that having someone watching, someone watching what you're

doing, someone seeing that you are actually moving towards the things

that you said you were gonna do.

Is really, really important.

if there's no accountability there, you just won't act and you're still

gonna be stuck working those 60 to 70 hour weeks, 12 months from now.

And the goal that you set yourself is gonna be the same, the one

that you set for this year, right?

So we really wanna make progress in that.

And having those regular check-ins, having those touch points to be able

to say, Hey, how are you getting on?

It doesn't have to be long.

It just has to be a, Hey, are you stuck?

Is there a piece of advice or is there something that you need to work through?

Those types of things.

Now, participants in the pack do get that there's two calls that we do every week.

They're not all compulsory.

There's the Monday check-in, what are you working on through the

week, how are you going with things?

And then there's the Wednesday office hours where people can come in,

they can check in, maybe they're working through a problem when

they're working on their business.

Maybe they're putting in place a, a new platform or they're working

through how to organize their tasks, all those kinds of things.

They might just pop in for 10 minutes and pop their head in and go, Hey Mike, do you

have any suggestions about how to do this or, I'm putting together this procedure.

Can you just look over it and gimme some advice about what

I've missed, that sort of thing.

So those regular check-ins are really, really useful.

I like going to the office.

I do contracts with some larger businesses and I like to go to the

office because I get to have those hallway conversations with people.

And you get to have those bright sparks and those bright ideas about how things

might be able to be done better that you wouldn't have had if you were sitting

at home in your own office by yourself.

those are

the,

three parts of the accountability system that I was gonna walk through today.

I'd like you to think about how you do that in terms of the concept of

implementation rather than just planning.

planning is really, really good, but a plan means nothing unless you start to

act towards implementing it, So there's a lot of planning that happens in December

and January because of New Year's resolutions and all those sorts of things.

what I would really like to challenge you with this week.

Is, what are those practical steps that you can go and do now to start to

implement your plan that you've done?

How are you going to move the needle on achieving those goals that you've

set up for yourself this year?

And if you really do feel like you're gonna have trouble doing

that, please reach out to me and we can have a conversation.

I've got a plan for this year and it's a bit scary, but I've already

started building the systems around it.

I have high confidence that we can pull this off because.

those systems are looking pretty good.

And I think this is, you know, this is why we do systems, right?

It's, it's, so, it can give us the capability and the consistency to be able

to act in confidence and to be able to act boldly to keep that consistency going.

So, that's very exciting.

So, number one, you're gonna hear a podcast every week this year.

I'm very excited about that.

It's gonna be every Tuesday.

gonna launch a new one.

and it's gonna be about 10 to 15 minutes per week that you'll get

to hear me talk about, how you can build better systems so that you can

switch off sooner and live larger.

there's also some really exciting things happening in and around Brisbane, so.

Uh, I am based in Brisbane, so if you're based in Brisbane or you want to come and

visit I'm gonna be running an event every month from February through November.

That is gonna be on the second Friday of every month.

And the events are gonna be very specific in nature.

So I, I held my full one day workshop.

There's gonna be content coming out about that soon.

You can check my different channels.

Particularly YouTube but also that covered off my five P framework.

But these different other workshops are gonna be very, very specific.

So the first two are gonna be around your first AI agent.

So setting up your LLM tool of choice in custom projects to be

able to manage specific tasks.

And the second one of those is gonna be around.

Automatically generating your first documents through one of

those projects which is very cool.

I've had a lot of people sort of ask me about all of that works.

And then, you know, based on what people request and things like that,

different types of tasks that are looking to automate in their businesses.

I'll be doing more workshops throughout the year on those different subjects.

So really get, uh, an opportunity to get in the weeds and the detail on how to

really start to execute some of these.

Automation things in the business

That's gonna be all for this week.

I thank you so much for joining me today.

You could have been doing so many other things with your time, but.

decided to hang out with me and learn about how an accountability system

works for achieving your 2026 goals.

Check out my website, lone wolf unleash.com.

You can sign up for my newsletter there, and I look forward to sending

you some more information and talking about some of the things that are

happening in the events this year.

As we move through, thank you so much and I'll see you next week.