If you want to have a successful business you need to take action, it’s that simple. To often business owners over complicate this simple principle. Now you can talk about taking action and you can think about taking action, but until you take action nothing will happen. There are three action steps all small business owners must take.
Step one: Set Basic Business Goals
Step two: Develop Business Systems
Step three: Understand Marketing Basics
Because these three steps are quite detailed I will be focusing on step one only in this blog article and will cover steps two and three in upcoming blogs.
Step One – Set Basic Business Goals
I think many people avoid setting goals because they over think the whole goal-setting process. Writing a few goals down shouldn’t be that difficult. For example, how much money do you want your business to turn over next financial year? If you’re not sure how much, look at what you turned over this financial year and decide if you want to turn over more or do you want to turn over less than you did last year.
Yes I did say less. Why?
Because I think most business people do not want to turn over less than they did last financial year, so if this is true, your first goal would therefore be to turn over more. So if you want to turn over more, how much more do you want that to be?
You can choose a dollar value or a percentage, whatever works best for you. If you choose to use the percentage method, pick a value. Is it going to be a 1% increase or a 100% increase, it’s really up to you, but once you select the percentage value for increased turnover, you’re goal is set, it is that simple.
Planning
Now comes the planning and breaking your goals down into smaller manageable chunks, this is more difficult, but without first setting the bigger goal, you’ve got nowhere to start.
Using sport as an analogy is a great way to explain goals and why we need them. Could you image a soccer field with no goals at either end of the field and all you had were ten men or ten woman running up and down for 90-minutes passing the ball to each other. I say ten because there’s now no need for a goalkeeper. How boring would this game become for the spectators if there was no score, and yes sometimes there is no score in soccer, but because there’s always the potential for scoring, this is what makes the game exciting.
Goals Give Direction
If soccer, basketball, football and many other sports all need goals to make the game worthwhile, then what makes you think goals are not important in your own life and business. Goals give you direction; goals give you something to aim at and goals help motivate you to do more than you normally would without goals.
As discussed, goals need to be broken down into smaller chunks and planned into your busy life and unfortunately it’s right at this point where most people give up, but you shouldn’t because you’re so close.
If you’ve found you’ve got to this stage before and stopped, get yourself a business coach, a mentor or a business friend who can help walk you through this stage. It will be very worthwhile.
Allocate Time
Time needs to be allocated on a regular basis to review your goals and research has proven that looking at your goals on a daily basis is by far the best strategy. I actually have my goals as the header on my personal Facebook page because I know I look at it everyday. If you don’t use Facebook, come up with another strategy.
When I sold my podiatry buisness last year for a record amount in Australia, for a single podiary business, it didn’t happen by accident. A lot of planning and goal setting went into my business well before I had even considered selling it.
“Goals should scare you a little and excite you a lot”
-Joe Vitale
If you need help with goal setting please email me or call my mobile 0408 671 966.