Have you ever dreamt of creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet you are no closer to realising that dream than when it first came into your mind.
You talk a lot and imagine what it could look like, and wouldn’t it be fabulous. Yet week after week, month after month, year after year, you fail to make any progress toward your dream.
Please do not fall into the trap of self-doubt. When you don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan you are always going to be stuck.
Start With the Long-Term
If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, ‘Where do you want to be this time next year?’ you might have thought it an odd question. But, as a business owner that just might be the most important consideration you can have.
Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there. You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month and year, you can check your progress to ensure you’re still on track.
If you are stuck teetering in the ‘could I’ or ‘should I’ mode of starting, then the ‘to do’ may seem overwhelming.
Google ‘start my own business’ and you‘ll be inundated with options. What happens is, you end up down yet another rabbit hole and more days, weeks, or months keep slipping by.
What you need, regardless of whether you are just getting started, in the hard trenches of doing all the things or trying to move past a business plateau, is a strong strategy.
Create Milestones
Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for getting there and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.
For example, if you want to be free to travel for eight weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can happen:
- Enough income to cover travel costs
- Passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working
- Staff who can manage the business while you’re away
After you have created this list, you can work backwards from your big goal and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $100,000 in order to fund your travel plans and right now you’re earning $30,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this:
- Milestone 1: $45,000
- Milestone 2: $65,000
- Milestone 3: $100,000
Having these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them – by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals. Try not to become too consumed with ‘time’. Just keep adding one more piece into the overall puzzle.
Create Small Goals
If you say to someone, you need to move from $30,000 to $45,000 – it may seem an overwhelming task. After all, it’s a 33% increase and most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as impossible.
But when you break it down as I have above, and then again into smaller steps, it doesn’t appear so daunting.
In the part of the plan we have outlined here, your income needs to increase by $15,000. If you break that down into 15 lots of $1000 it suddenly becomes much more achievable.
You can further break that down again: $1000 is 10 x $100 or 20 x $50. So what are you doing to create your products or services?
It may mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an additional $20 per month in Facebook ads or perhaps reaching out to one more affiliate. Perhaps the first step is just growing your email list. The point is reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than thinking about the whole.
So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable milestones, workable goals and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can!) then you can achieve anything in business and in life. Here are your steps again:
- Define the dream
- Break it down into bite-sized pieces
- Work out your steps for each of those bite-sized pieces
- Schedule them – daily and weekly
- Track-track-track! Tracking how you are going each month will give you confidence in what you are doing and how you are moving forward, or if you aren’t moving forward it will give you clarity to re-evaluate your actions and keep on going.
Inspired or stuck? Either way I can help you move forward.
Let’s be intentional . Here is a planning document to help define your dream and get you unstuck.
Book in for a free, no obligation chat.
Talk soon.
