So often, business owners have no goals—no place they want their business to get to—and so in reality, they have no plan for getting anywhere. Each day they struggle—chasing their tails, putting out fires—just to get to the next day where they repeat once again. Without a plan, the business owner will go around in circles, putting out fires and the business will suffer or fail completely.
Are you running your business or is it running you?
Do you have a plan that gives you control over your business—allowing you to run it?
When we work with business owners, we create a short, simple plan that is used to get them on the road to success.
Four steps to develop a plan that you can use as your roadmap to success:
1. Assessing your current situation to determine where you are now. Using our comprehensive business diagnostic tool, we assess your internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. This provides you with a reality check that forces you to focus on issues.
2. Keeping in mind the issue identified in Step 1, our planning session guides you through the process where you establish goals of where you want the business to be in 3 years, then set specific goals for the next 12 months. These goals need to be realistic and based on a good grip on reality because they will determine your whole business strategy.
3. Next, we work with you to determine your strategies or tactics for how you are going to make the goals a reality. This yields action steps to implement the strategy.
4. The most commonly neglected part of executing the plan is in the monitoring of progress. We meet with you monthly to measure the actual outcomes of your actions against the results you had planned on happening. After all, what you can measure, you can manage. What you can manage, you can control.
While the preparation of a plan may not guarantee success, the point is that without one you are taking a journey with only a vague destination in mind and without a road map on how to get there. Without any idea of a definite set of goals to be achieved in a given time frame you are just pushing the wheelbarrow – or as we believe, the wheelbarrow is pulling you – you have little control over where you are going.
But the core reason to have a plan and a business coach is that, with a set of clearly thought-out goals and ideas on how to achieve them, you control where you are going and increase the probability of getting there successfully.
Improve your profitability and gain control over your business! Book a complimentary discovery meeting today.