What’s Your Plan?

As you will have noticed from my last post, I’m serious about this business plan thing.  Your business plan thing.

  In my women’s business coaching practice, I am finding that far too many women who are starting businesses are doing so without creating a clear and well-defined plan.  (BTW, I find that men do the same thing, but I’m not talking to them right now – let them find their own coach). 

I’m talking to you, and I really want you to know that I am in your corner and here to help you succeed, and to do that you need a plan!

What makes a good plan?  Great question – glad you asked!

Here are the essential components of a great plan:

1.    Clearly defined end goal, in detail, with specific end results occurring in real time (Where are you going?)

2.    Clearly defined current circumstances, including financial and personal resources, skill sets, network resources, knowledge resources, etc.  (Where are you now?)

3.    Clearly defined gaps – identify what is missing from where you are now that you will need to develop, find or create to get you to the end goal (What’s missing that you need?)

4.    A strategy for addressing the identified gaps, including specific action steps to address each specific problem or gap (What’s the best way to get there from here?) 

In this post, I’m just going to look at the first component in some detail.  Each and every component is critical, and each one provides us with so much more than we can realize until we actually do the work of creating it.  (BTW, I know that you all know this, you’ve all done this in one area of life or another.  I just want you to look at where you aren’t doing it now, where it would make a huge difference in creating the life and business you want!)

So, the very first thing you need, in order to create a great plan, is to decide where you are going.  I don’t just mean something like, “My goal is to create a successful business,” or “My goal is to make $100,000 a year from my business,” or “My goal is to improve people’s lives by helping them to… (your product or service here).”

What I mean when I say a clear goal is way, way more detailed than that.  Something like this that I’ve created for On Track and On Purpose:

My Goal is to become a trusted expert in the field of business coaching and a well-known, inspiring and respected authority on female entrepreneurship.  My goals include:

·         Personally coaching hundreds of women entrepreneurs to create and fulfill their own vision of success

·         Mentoring and coaching others to become excellent business coaches and consultants

·         Creating a wealth of inspirational and practical resources for my target audience, women entrepreneurs who value success in business equally with success in every area of life

·         Creating a solid referral network of business coaching clients

·         Passive affiliate income from my website and blog, in addition to my income from coaching services

There are more goals, and with time frames for achieving them, but this will help illustrate what I’m talking about.

Can you see that having those goals gives me a very clear view of what to do with my time as I build my practice?  Much clearer than if my goal was simply to have X number of clients?  Having fleshed out my goals like that allows me to create a strategy, as opposed to just taking actions that seem like they might be a good idea.  It has me blogging, it has me networking with women entrepreneur leaders, it has me learning how to improve my skills, it has me building my email list, and so forth.  It’s those actions that led to me finding myself on the first page of Google for my target audience – just doing direct marketing to potential clients would never have had that result!

Here’s something else that having those detailed, big picture goals provides in the heart and soul of my business – the coaching conversations I have with clients and with prospective clients.  If I only had a goal of having more clients, in the moment that could cause me to be focused on “making the sale” when I talk to prospective clients.  But having the goal of being a trusted expert in the field and an inspiration to other women entrepreneurs keeps me focused on being a great coach, it holds me to a higher standard, and it has me doing the absolute best job I can with each and every person I talk to.  Because I’m focused on the big picture, on being a great coach, I end up being hired by a high percentage of people who I do a complimentary session with – a much higher percentage, I am sure, than would hire me if my focus was on signing them up rather than being a great coach for them.

And perhaps the most important benefit of creating our big end goals clearly and in great detail is this – it’s inspiring!  It gives us a prize to keep our eyes on, it pulls us forward, it brings out the best in us!

I have my coaching clients create not just a plan but a vivid, multi-sensory description of their vision of their life five years from now.  It’s not just a list of what they have or do, but a full “Day in the Life” of the life they’ll be living in five years, the life they will create with their plan.  It’s so cool to hear them get excited about this life they will be creating!  Whether they are really struggling right now or they have a life they love already, there is always so much more they want to create and explore and do and be, and the first step for all of it is to create and declare it in language and start looking at what it will take to make it happen.

So here’s my question for you:  whether it is your business or some other area of life, where do you have dreams and desires and some goals but, if you are honest with yourself, you would have to say that you don’t really have a great plan?  Hmmmm? 

I invite you to take it on, one step at a time.  All there is to do at first is to start creating your “big picture” goal.  I suggest a time frame of 3-5 years.  Take some time and start writing down all the different results you want to create, have fun with it!

Next post, I’ll be looking at the second component of a great plan, and then, if you want, you can take on that as well.  But start with this.  It’s your future, so why wait?

 

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