How To Create a Yearly Business Plan And Achieve Your Goals

As entrepreneurs, most of us have prepared a well-thought out business plan.
It is essential if you are looking for any sort of financial assistance when
starting up and will keep you focused while building your business. Having a
plan to follow will also increase your chances of success. However, a few
years into your business, is your original business plan still relevant? Probably not.

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.

How To Turn Your Intentions Into Reality

What does the power of intention mean to you? Do you use this power to achieve your goals? Does it work for you? How does it work? To me, the power of intention is simply a plan, a positive attitude and action and most importantly, it only works if I write my intention down. Here are a couple of examples of how it was worked for me and for others.

Recently, I added another line to my weekly schedule and entitled it “Goal”. I did this because I have had some big goals lately and haven’t been seeing enough progress towards those goals. I decided that I would take my own advice, and chunk those big goals down into smaller, more manageable pieces. In that new “Goal” space I wrote what my goal was for the day. As the week progressed my daily goal got moved to the next day each day, until Friday arrived. This was my last chance to complete my intended goal. I set aside an hour and completed it.

The next week I did the same thing and my ‘daily’ goal became my weekly goal. And that’s okay because I learned that a weekly goal is what’s manageable and what works for me.

Here’s another example. A long time client and good friend and I had a discussion around this topic some time ago. He began to tell me about his ‘will’ and I wasn’t quite sure where he was going to go with this. He explained that while unpacking after a move, he came across his ‘will’ that he had written several years ago. When he read it, everything he had intended had come to pass. It read: “I will…” and listed several of his aspirations in business. So you see, writing it down can be very effective.

Why does writing your intentions down work? I think it makes them more ‘real’. Your intentions are out of your mind now and there is physical evidence of them which makes you accountable. Want to give it a try?

Here are some simple steps to follow:

1. Identify your intention – keep it simple and brief and include a deadline, it will act as your guide

2. Write it down – write it somewhere prominent like an agenda you refer to daily or a white board with your to-do list, it will draw your attention and help you feel more accountable

3. Follow with actions – take steps towards your intention, this will demonstrate your commitment

4. Experience it – acknowledge that you did what you said you would, celebrate each achievement, they all add up

When you set an intention and then act on it remember to stay focused, be positive, be true to yourself and believe in yourself. This seems to empower the Law of Attraction leading you exactly where you want to go. Things will happen as they are meant to if you use this tool to turn your intentions into reality. It’s in your hands.

Out With The Old, In With The New

Professional Organizers recommend that for every new item you bring into your home or office, you remove an old item. This makes complete sense and I recommend that you adopt this rule. You avoid collecting clutter with this process.

For those of you that have already accumulated clutter, there’s no time like the present to purge and organize and gain greater control over your workday. If you tackle a pile a day or one drawer a day during time dedicated to this task alone, you’ll be back on track in no time. Taking it on in small bites makes it a manageable task and easy to maintain. For example if you set aside an hour a day or every other day, you will be making progress and still have time for your revenue generating tasks.

This ‘Out With The Old, In With The New’ rule is also relevant to our ways of doing things in our businesses. Consider your approach this past year. Did the methods you used help you to achieve your goals? If not, it’s time to ditch your old methods and try something new.

Here are a few points to ponder as you prepare for the new year and contemplate your goals:

• If you were always trying to do too much in a flurry of activity, try doing less and doing it better. The time you spend will be more focused and count for more.
• If you had a lot of goals and didn’t achieve them all, only have one achievable but challenging goal at a time this year. One main focus increases your chances of achieving the goal.
• Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades, master of none? If you had many new skills you tried to learn but only skimmed the surface of a few of them, try picking the one most essential new skill to your business and learn it well before moving on to the next. It is not possible to be proficient at everything but it is to your advantage to have a couple of key areas of expertise. Surround yourself with those that are specialists in other areas and work with each other.

In those areas of your business that didn’t quite go as planned, try doing things a little differently this year for better results.

“Success is not for the chosen few; success is for the few that choose it.” -Gary Keller

Perception Is Everything When It Comes To Time Management

Why is it that when we have to complete something in record time we are able to, however, when we have one week to complete the same assignment, it takes us a full 7 days? I came across an article lately discussing time management with a reference to Parkinson’s Law and our perception of time. Parkinson’s Law is defined as follows: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Interesting concept.

Time constraints are motivators that work for me both personally and professionally. Think about it and you can probably come up with a couple of instances where you were under the gun and performed brilliantly. With deeper concentration you can attain the same results or better in a shorter period of time. Try it:

• Block out some non-interrupted time to work on something. You can identify your most important tasks of the day and pick one or begin work on a long term goal.
• Make the goal achievable but challenging and schedule it into your calendar.
• You may need to set a timer to help you focus.
• Turn off distractions such as email and phone. One interruption can mean up to 20 minutes to get back to what you were doing.
• Aim for completion of the goal, not perfection.

Note: Never struggle with anything for more than 15 minutes. Take a break and come back to it with a clear mind.

By focusing all your energy on achieving the task at hand, you increase your chances of completing it. Single-tasking means you will be more focused, make fewer errors and achieve better results.

Do you have a larger goal you need to achieve? Break up your goal into smaller portions. For example, think how much closer to completion you will be if you write 5 pages of your ebook every day. As Henry Ford once said: “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

Make the time you spend working as effective as possible.

5 Key Focus Areas Of A Successful Home Based Business

A maze puzzle is symbolic to taking our businesses on the path to reaching goals. From start (building), there is no direct route (growing) to finish (your goals) but rather twists and turns and some backtracking along the way. Your schedule is like your plan through that maze. When you take the time to contemplate your route and map it out, you get through your ‘maze’ with less backtracking. It’s easier to stay on course and reach your goals with that plan.

To help you apply this approach you must divide up your time into 5 main areas when organizing your schedule. Here is the list and some of the items that fall under each category:

1. Client Work – or the area in which you perform your revenue generating activities. If yours is not a service business, this area may be Product Sales for example.

2. Business Development - time spent working on your website, preparing marketing materials, proposals, making phone calls, correspondence, attending networking events, planning, meetings, reading/audio/video (resources for business/training), writing (articles, submissions, ezine, blog), social media activity, participating in forums.

3. Home Office – tracking business expenses, filing, invoicing, record keeping, managing emails, scheduling.

4. Personal – build this into your day to remind you to break away from work, to eat lunch or go for a walk with friends.

5. Family – spending time with kids, pets and family activities. This usually comes only at the beginning or end of my work day, but I like to have it showing on my schedule.

How you divide up your time will vary from person to person, but it’s important to assign time to each category throughout the week and work with it until you find a good balance. If you neglect one area the others will suffer. Revenue generating activities have to be consistent obviously, as well as Personal and Family time, but don’t neglect Business Development and Home Office time. You have to incorporate these areas into your week in order to effectively grow your business and prosper.

And if you don’t want to make the time because you dislike these tasks and would rather be doing what you’re good at or taking some more personal and family time, then outsource. Most of the tasks that fall under Business Development and Home Office can be managed by a Virtual Assistant (VA). You don’t have to do it all yourself. Like the saying goes, “Do what you do best, then hire out the rest”.