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The possibilities are endless

At the beginning of this series, I said that growing your business can be like cooking up a good bar of soap. I hope you now see just what I meant. A simple business plan, your base, is really the first step to growing those fabulous businesses you’ve all so courageously started. Identifying the various elements we discussed in those plans will help build the foundation for your business to thrive. Then, building on top of those business plans with values and vision will give your business that ‘special mix of ingredients’ which make it unique. And the goals you set, and achieve, will continue to mold and give shape to your company for many years to come.

Growing your business, just like making soaps, is an enjoyable and rewarding process. What you want the outcome to be is completely up to you. And once you get started on these easy-to-do steps, you’ll find that the possibilities for growing your business even further are wonderfully endless, and quite frankly, an awful lot of fun!

Putting it all together with one last day of homework: You’ve done all the work already. Now is the time to arrange it in a coherent format by typing and ordering the last 8 days of homework. Arrange it like this:

Market analysis (the research you did on day one)

Ideal Customer Profile

SWOT

Unique Value Proposition

Your Values

Your Vision Statement

5 Goals for the Year

Your dream Advisory Board

Type it all up. Put it in a notebook and title it “Business Plan for XyZ Company, 2009.” If you ever need to go for a bank loan, all you’ll need to add is historical and projected financials and you’ve got everything you need to present. More importantly, you now have your roadmap for turning your business into what you want and need it to be.

I hope you enjoyed this series and found value in it. The entire series, complete with links to individual days, is below.

Part 1 – Defining Your Business

Part 2 –  A Simple Plan

Part 3 – A SWOT

Part 4 – Defining Values

Part 5 –  Using Your Vision To Inspire 

Part 6 –  Breaking Down Goals 

Part 7 – Put Your Goals To Action

Part 8 – Surround Yourself Well 

Building on yesterday’s post, something that goes hand-in-hand with ‘rule of five’ is the idea that you get what you focus on. An extremely successful friend of mine, Jody, uses this strategy. Every morning, she wakes up a few minutes early and spends 15 minutes thinking about her goals. Then, she goes to work on her ‘five things’ for the day after she’s focused on her goals. She is a good example of how useful focusing and the action-oriented ‘rule of five’ can be. Ruthless execution of both habits (focus coupled with action) has led her to be the owner of a multi-million dollar art and greeting card company. If you spend just a few minutes each day focusing on, or reminding yourself about your goals, you help keep them alive in your mind. This makes achieving your goals more likely. You tend to get what you focus on! So, why not focus on your positive future?

Another good way to keep your business aspirations at the forefront of your mind is to surround yourself with other goal-oriented, positive people. Hang-out with people who mirror your goals and the values you hold for yourself. Nothing will kill your dreams faster than being around people who constantly tell you that: ‘You can’t do it!’ So get around positive people with healthy, ‘goal-happy’ attitudes. Ideally, you’ll want to surround yourself with people that augment your weaker points, who absolutely stun you with their strength in certain areas and wow you with their talent every time you’re around them.

While goal-setting for your business is partly about identifying what you want, why you want it, and how you’ll go about getting it, it is also very much about keeping those goals alive by breaking them down into manageable pieces, and surrounding yourself with people who encourage you to achieve them. It’s easy to set goals! You can get started on them right away. And you don’t have to know millionaires or billionaires. Simply look around you – there are positive ‘goal-happy’ people everywhere. Look for them in your surroundings. Then, as each goal-setting time of year comes around, and more and more of your goals have been achieved, your company’s shape and mold will grow stronger and stronger.

Your homework for today is to make a list of five people in your town that you respect, admire and want to learn from. This will be your list to work off of for the rest of the year as you start to build either a Mastermind Group or a close group of positive business friends who can help inspire you to your highest success. Ideally, down the road, these same five people will turn into your unofficial Board of Directors or Advisory Board.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the final part of this series.

Looking for another part in the “Kickstart Your Business” series?

Part 1 – Defining Your Business

Part 2 –  A Simple Plan

Part 3 – A SWOT

Part 4 – Defining Values

Part 5 –  Using Your Vision To Inspire 

Part 6 –  Breaking Down Goals 

Part 7 – Put Your Goals To Action

Part 9 – Endless Possibilities

“Things may come to those who wait but only the things left by those who hustle.”

Getting your goals into action

The most difficult and most important part of goal setting is to actually put your goals into action. Many people go through goal-setting exercises, just to never even get started. Once you’ve set a goal you simply MUST get out there and do it! You need to go from goal setting to goal getting. If a goal was exciting when you decided to go after it, but now just seems too overwhelming, a really good trick is to break it down.

This means that, if you want to launch an online store, it’s a good idea to break that project down. Needing to set-up a website, develop more products, get shipping supplies and credit processing might just end-up seeming like a big, insurmountable hassle. But, if you break it down, and start with, say, picking the shopping cart for the website, then the overall task becomes much easier. Later, after you’ve dealt with getting yourself a shopping cart, you can then continue with the next part of the project, figuring out credit card processing.

I like to break my big goals down into what’s called ‘the rule of five’. This means, you break your big goals down into five easy things that you can do every day. While those things are small, and you simply do five of them each day, over time, they move you closer to the goal, without seeming so overwhelming.

This year, Bramble Berry is working on a High End (Type) Perfume Line with all the top names for fragrance types (Chanel No. 5, Cashmere Mist, Happy etc…). All in all, the testing to start with 35 high end duplications means working with over 280 initial fragrances and then going back and refining the best of those fragrances. The time to do all the testing, all the refining and all the sourcing is daunting. Even though it’s easy to get overwhlemed, I’m using ‘the rule of five’ to break it down. Each day, I test five fragrances and make an action choice about the five. And I’ve been doing this for over a month. There are more months of testing before we finalize the line but by breaking it down like this, I am able to do a little bit each day, and after several months, I will hit the goal.

Your homework for today is to look at one of your goals (just one!) and break it down into the first five steps that need to happen. Then, do the first one today. The second one Tuesday. The third step Wednesday until you’ve completed all five steps by Friday. Bonus points if you do this for five of your goals so you’re making five small steps on all your goals, every single day. But, trying this idea out on just one goal for this week might be more than enough for you so start where it’s comfortable for you.

Looking for another part in the “Kickstart Your Business” series?

Part 1 – Defining Your Business

Part 2 –  A Simple Plan

Part 3 – A SWOT

Part 4 – Defining Values

Part 5 –  Using Your Vision To Inspire 

Part 6 –  Breaking Down Goals 

Part 8 – Surround Yourself Well 

Part 9 – Endless Possibilities

Tomorrow’s segment will talk about additional support mechanisms to make sure you can accomplish your goals.

How to set goals

You determine what the coming shape of your business will look like by setting, and achieving, business goals. Every November, I do this by taking some time out to think about what I want to accomplish in the following year. Generally, I find that November is a wonderful time for doing this because I’m in a great mood. Cash flow is good and there’s lots of time with family. So, I sit down and decide what I want to achieve overall for the coming year. Then, I break those goals down into smaller, more manageable targets by quarter, month, week, and day. If you’ve never done goal-setting before, you’ll be surprised at how easy and fun it can be. I’m hoping that you’ve done goal setting before since we just went through a great New Years Resolution phase on the blog where over 55 of you set resolutions (AKA goals) here, here and here. But, if you haven’t done your goals for the year or you’ve always just raised your eyebrows and thought “Goals are for other people,” this is your chance to learn more about goal setting and perhaps, set some goals to make 2009 great.

The first part of goal-setting is to brainstorm things you’d like to accomplish. You have to decide where it is that you actually want your business to go. Do you want to double your sales? Do you want five new retail clients next year? Do you want to open an online store? There are an awful lot of goals to choose from! So,

first decide what you want to do. To see real results, sometimes you need to set the bar a little higher.

Once you’ve decided on a goal, state a reason for it. Ask yourself: whyis this my goal?

For example, if you set a goal to add two new local retail stores to your client list each year, for the next five years, your reasoning might be that you want to become the leading soap supplier in your town. The reason for your goal (that you want to become your town’s leading soap supplier) helps make your short-term goal (gaining two new retail clients per year) more motivational. Remembering the why, helps create a powerful force that keeps pushing you forward when times get tough.

Once you’ve identified what you want to achieve, and why you want to achieve it, you’ll need to identify how you’ll achieve your goals, or what tools you’ll require. If, for example, you decide that you want to open an online store, what will you need in order to do this? Well, you’ll need to have a website. And, you’ll need a selection of products to put on offer. You’ll also need shipping supplies, and you’ll probably need to be able to process credit card orders. And, depending on how well your sales do, you may need a person to handle all of the new orders.

By working through these first three steps, you should start to see a plan of action emerge:

If you said,

“I want to open an online store” (the what)

Then you said,

“To double my sales” (the why)

And then refined it further,

“I need a website, a selection of products, shipping supplies, credit card processing, and a new employee” (the how)

…you begin to see your next steps for action!

We’ll talk more about the “action” concept in the next part of the series.

For tonight, your homework is simple: If you’ve done your goals for the year already, refine them. Come up with the “whys” or the emotional hook behind your goals. If you haven’t done your goals for the year already, read this post and get to work on 5 goals for the year. Write down 3 measurable, time oriented, specific goals for your business and 2 for your personal life.

Looking for another part in the “Kickstart Your Business” series?

Part 1 – Defining Your Business

Part 2 –  A Simple Plan

Part 3 – A SWOT

Part 4 – Defining Values

Part 5 –  Using Your Vision To Inspire 

Part 7 – Put Your Goals To Action

Part 8 – Surround Yourself Well 

Part 9 – Endless Possibilities