A yearly plan for an established business is an essential organizational tool
if:

* you’re looking to grow your business

* there is a lot of activity going on in your business every day and you
tend to bumble-bee, jumping from “flower to flower” not knowing where to
focus your time

* you don’t have a clear plan and consider different options every day

While there are many templates and varieties of business plans available on
the web, your yearly plan does not need to go into as much depth as your
original. Here are the 5 main areas you will need to cover when planning for
the year ahead:

1. Where are you now? List the services that you are providing, the
products that you are selling, the number of hours you work in your
business, and the number of hours you work on your business.

2. What are your goals? List the goals you wish to attain. We all have a
financial goal so write your specific money goal for the year and the
top 2 or 3 priorities that will get you there.

3. How are you going to get there? Work backwards from your financial goal
and identify the steps necessary to achieve it. For example, if your
goal is to make $75,000 for the year, how many clients do you need, how
many products do you need to sell, how many workshops do you need to
conduct and what do you need to charge for these things? Break these
goals down monthly and then weekly and tweak until you have reached a
realistic and attainable financial goal and plan that sync.

4. When are you going to do what’s needed to achieve your goals? Take your
monthly and weekly goals to create your action plan. This will
determine the number of clients you will work with and when, what
products and programs you will create, how many you need to sell and
when etc. The action plan can be transferred over to your weekly
schedule.

5. Who do I need help from to achieve my goals? List what tasks you can no
longer continue to handle. Consider outsourcing things like your
accounting to a bookkeeper and your technical and administrative tasks
to a Virtual Assistant to free up your time for the profit generating
tasks.

Going through this process helps you to identify your intentions and forces
you to paint a realistic big picture plan for the year. Each small step
taking you towards your bigger goal. This strategy may be the one business
activity that helps your business to grow more than any other.

When I get approached by newbie or wannabe VA’s, they want to know how to get started, how I got started and if I need help. I think it’s great that the VA profession is becoming more widely recognized. If you’ve read my bio you have an idea how I got here, but to elaborate on that, here’s my story.

Like the majority of emails I get from those looking to become a VA, I did my research on work from home jobs and found the Virtual Assistant profession to be a perfect match for my many years of corporate experience as an Administrative and Executive Assistant. And like most of those looking to get into this type of work, I also investigated the alternatives to taking the big leap to Entrepreneur.

Telecommuting seemed the perfect fit. Why not? I loved my job and what I did in the office could easily be done from home. The ideal solution to rushing baby out the door to the sitter every morning and I to work and repeating everything in reverse come 5:00 pm. After presenting my superiors with a formal proposal detailing the specifics of how I would work from home, they agreed it was a fantastic idea. They knew my work ethic and trusted me enough to give me the go-ahead.

Little did I know our office manager had other plans. This was new territory for the company and she wasn’t willing to let me go there. The week prior to my telecommuting launch, the office manager vetoed our plans for fear it would cause too much animosity amongst my co-workers. I was crushed!

A few years and another baby later, I knew that launching my VA business was the way to go. Life was busier and I was tired of working on someone else’s schedule. Things weren’t the same at my place of work and I knew in my heart that changes were impending. During this time I started putting the pieces together for my business in whatever free time I had. I enrolled in a web page workshop and learned enough html to build my first website. I created templates for client agreements, gave my company a name and designed a logo. Progress was slow but sure.

The day I was called into the office and laid off due to a company restructuring, was the opportunity I knew I needed to pursue my entrepreneurial dream full time. From there I enrolled in a very supportive small business start-up program which helped me to finish getting everything set up to launch my business 4 months later in July 2006. When one door closed, I opened another and have never looked back.

If you are considering either working with a VA or starting up your own VA business, I highly recommend it. A VA will provide a different level of assistance to that of a traditional in-house employee. As business owners ourselves, VA’s understand the day-to-day challenges and demands of operating a business. VA’s and clients work together because they choose to enter mutually beneficial working relationships that often become long term partnerships. It’s a win-win! I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you do the work, entrepreneurial dreams can and do come true! What’s your dream? Do you have a story to share?