Why You Have To Write Down Your Business Goals

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You’ve often heard me mention the importance of writing down your business goals. That isn’t just because it’s easy to forget. There’s a lot more to it and there are some very important reasons why you have to write them down.

I though in today’s blog post, I’d share my thoughts on this and hopefully inspire you to write down your own goals going forward. By the way, this works for any type of goal, not just your business goals.

The simple act of setting a goal, even if it’s just in your mind, doubles your chances of success. That’s a pretty big deal in itself, isn’t it? If you take it a step further, and actually write those goals down, you’re 10 times as likely to succeed. Read that last line again please. That’s right…you can increase your chances of making it by 1,000%. That’s mind-blowing.

There are a few different mental and psychological processes going on here that start to give us a glimpse into why it is so important and effective to write our goals down.

The first is that it’s a lot easier to remember something that we’ve written down. You’ve experienced this first hand with your grocery list. When you make a mental list of 10 or 15 things, you’re likely to forget about half of them when you get to the store. If you write out the list on the other hand, and then end up forgetting it on the counter, you will remember the vast majority of the items you needed. This is explained through the fact that information has to be moved from one area of the brain to another to turn it from thoughts into written words on a page.

A process called encoding is also involved. All of this helps you retain and store the information better. It’s the reason we’re asked to take notes during lectures in college.

Last but not least, when you write down your goals, you have something you can review regularly. This adds another layer of cognitive processing and increases your chances of success even further.

Sadly, only a very small percentage of people make the time to regularly review and evaluate their goals. The ones that do are some of the most successful and highest achieving people out there. In other words, it’s something we should do as well.

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To recap, here are the three steps to massively boost your success in achieving your business (and other) goals:

  • Start by setting smart goals.
  • Write them down in as much detail as possible.
  • Set aside some time to review them regularly. This could be weekly, or even daily.

Give it a try for this coming quarter. Set yourself a goal. Be specific. This could be something like finally creating that first paid product or adding an extra $500 to your bottom line. Decide on a deadline by when you’ll reach your goal and how you plan to get there. Write it all down and look at it every morning.

You might even like to use the 12 Week Sprint Planner that we use in my coaching program, to help you reach your big goals in a sprint!  Check it out here: https://kmginfo.link/12week  It’s one of my most popular and useful products.

This will help you stay on track and make time in your busy day to work on making progress towards your (written down) goal.

 

Categories: Business plan format, Success

How to Figure Out What You Should Be Working On In Your Business

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Are you ready to take your business to the next level and watch some explosive growth unfold over the coming months? Great.

Before you start to plot and plan what you want to do to make that happen, it’s important to stop and look at where you are at right now. 

Business planning for future success is all about data. You can work most efficiently and spend your time and money most effectively if you know exactly where you are starting from. By recording data, you can start to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends are starting to play out. And it all starts with recording where you’re at right now. 

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Let’s take a look at some of the things you want to record. First though, you should decide how you want to record this information.  You can write it down by hand in a notebook, open up a word document to do it digitally, or use a spreadsheet. If you use a spreadsheet you have the option to have it calculate fun additional information like weekly and monthly averages and even map it all out in graphics to help you get a clearer picture. But if spreadsheets scare you, just use a notebook or word processor.

Traffic

To grow you need to expand your reach. That means getting more traffic, but also engaging the people that come to your site by encouraging them to click around and read more. Good things to keep track of are total visitors, unique visitors, bounce rate, and of course where the traffic is coming from. 

Email List / Subscribers

Your next goal is always to get these people on your list. Here you want to track total number of subscribers, conversion rates for each of your opt-in forms and pages, open rates for your emails, and also unsubscribes. As you start to collect and review this data regularly, you’ll get a much better picture of your subscribers. 

Customers

Subscribers are great, customers are better. Start by keeping track of how many total customers you have and how many purchases per day, week, and month. Other good numbers to look at are total lifetime value of your average customer, repeat purchases, and refund rates. 

Income & Expenses

Last but not least, look at your bottom line. This is your typical accounting data. You want to keep track of your income as well as your expenses. With those two sets of numbers, you can easily calculate your overall profit. You might find it helpful to look at profit for the month, but track income on a daily basis. 

Yes, you can look at most of this data in various different places. Google Analytics, your shopping cart, and your autoresponder service, for example. But it’s important to have it all in one place. This makes it much easier to connect the dots and see the relationships between the different sets of numbers. 

The email service I use and recommend is Aweber (sign up for a free account here) which gives you lots of data about your subscribers. 

My shopping cart is ThriveCart which I highly recommend for its extensive features,  comprehensive business data and analytics and exceptional service and support.  

Now that you have your initial data collection set up, make it a habit to update the numbers regularly. This way you can see what’s working, what isn’t, and how much you’re growing as you move through the coming months and years.

And, most importantly, you can easily see what you need to be working on to improve your business into the future. 

Categories: Strategic planning, Your own business

Building a Business You Love by Planning Your Success

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Do you set time aside regularly to plan what you want to do in your business? 

If it’s not something you currently do, I strongly encourage you to embrace it now as well as for the year coming up. Setting aside time to plan out what I want to do and more importantly what growth I want to achieve in the coming year has been crucial to my own success.

Over the next few articles, I want to share with you some of what I’ve learned in my own business and what I’ve found helpful in my years of working with many different businesses. 

Let’s start off by taking a look at why business planning is “the secret” to success. 

There are a few different factors that come into play here. The first is efficiency. 

Planning Boosts Efficiency

When you go in with a clear plan, you can focus on what’s most important. Instead of spending time trying to figure out what you should be working on, what pieces of the puzzle are missing from your product funnel, or what you need to do to break through to the next income level, you know exactly what needs to come next if you have a clear plan to build your business. 

With a clear goal in mind and a plan for the year, it becomes easy to walk backwards to create effective and efficient daily to-do lists.

Work on what needs to get done each day and you will reach your goals. 

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Next, setting a big goal for yourself helps you think outside the box. 

Planning Interrupts Habitual Thought Patterns

If you don’t believe me, try it. Decide on a big income goal for the coming month. Write it down. Keep it in front of you and focus on it. Then get to work and start to notice what happens next. You start to think of things that didn’t occur to you before. You come up with creative ways to get more traffic. You decide to run a fun promo that adds dollars to your bank account. 

The same happens when an important deadline comes up unexpectedly. Think back to when a report was suddenly due, or the last time your in-laws told you they would stop by later in the day. You got very creative about writing and cleaning respectively. 

Last but not least, let’s talk about your subconscious. 

Planning Enlists Your Subconscious

So far we’ve been focused on what we are actively doing to make progress by making a plan, setting goals and following through. There’s another dimension to all this and that’s what’s going on in our subconscious mind. While we are busy plowing through our to-do list, cooking dinner for the family, and even sleeping, our subconscious mind is working towards our plans and goals as well.

In short, planning and setting goals is important because it helps you grow faster. That means you end up with that business you love while spending less time slaving away at your desk. 

If you want to make the next 12 months your best year ever check out my planning template Your Best Year Ever! It will guide your business planning to ensure you focus on the key elements and don’t get distracted by things that aren’t central to your success. 

http://kmginfo.com/go/bestyear 

Categories: Strategic planning, Success

Mistakes, Failure, Success

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You might be surprised to hear that mistakes and failure are important ingredients of success. It sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Who wants to put in all those hours of effort, all that investment of energy and enthusiasm, and then to fail? Surely success is the name of the game? 

But stop and think about it for just a minute. Sure, everyone wants to succeed, everyone wants to achieve the goals they set for themselves. After all, that’s the whole point! 

However, if you look back over your success and failures, how often did you make a mistake? How many times did it take before you mastered a new skill? Sure, there were probably a few occasions where you got it right first time. But the key thing here is that when you made a mistake or even failed, you didn’t give up. 

Here are three ways that mistakes and failure can fuel your future success:  Click to Tweet

Here are three ways that mistakes and failure can fuel your future success: 

  1. Failure encourages innovation

Thomas Edison famously had more than a thousand failures before he invented a light bulb that worked. But he didn’t see those thousand attempts as failures. He saw them as useful discoveries. He knew a thousand ways to make a light bulb that didn’t work. 

Alexander Fleming ‘discovered’ penicillin by making a mistake. He forgot to follow his laboratory procedure and left Petri dishes unattended for two weeks, allowing fungi to colonize them. We’ve all forgotten things in the fridge. But on this occasion that mistake and failure led to antibiotics – one of the most revolutionary contributions to modern medicine!

  1. Failure encourages learning and experimenting

Both Edison and Fleming learned from their mistakes. They weren’t paralysed or crushed by what looked like a failure, and they didn’t fear failure. They were curious and investigated further and experimented to see what would happen. And by doing that they changed the world. 

If you take the personal element out of failure, the moral self-punishment, you can reframe mistakes, errors, or failure as information to use in trying again and again. 

Mistakes allow you to recalibrate, adjust your strategy, to work out what’s preventing you from moving forward. 

Mistakes are proof that you’re trying!

  1. Failure builds resilience

Have you watched a small child learning to walk? Over and over again the toddler will fall over. At the beginning they make no progress at all, they crumple up. But little by little first one step then two, the infant learns to balance, to shift its weight from one side to the other, to master the skill of walking. 

Edison did the same in his quest to invent the electric light bulb. Every failure was a stepping stone to success. Every mistake or misstep gives you a clue as to how to reach your goal.

No one likes to make mistakes or fail, but the difference between staying defeated and becoming a success is not to see failure as an end in itself. Mistakes, ideas that didn’t work and flops are all evidence and teachings to help you build a sure foundation for success in the future.

Something to think about…

What is the best mistake you’ve made in the past 12 months?  And what did you learn from it?

Categories: Strategic planning, Success

Do you tend to overthink things?

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Old, dusty round gear wheels from an antique erector setSo you now have just three months left to achieve your 2019 goals! Are you on track? Or still overthinking your plan for what needs to be done?

One of the most dangerous things that you can do when you’re planning and actually going down your path to success is overthinking things. Overthinking is a very common problem for many people. And it’s also one of the most destructive. 

It can lead to you falling off your path, doing things poorly, and even giving up on your goals and dreams as a whole. There’s nothing worse than thinking about something so much that you actually end up doing it worse than you would’ve before. 

When does overthinking occur?

Overthinking occurs when you worry so much about something that you spend too much time thinking about it.  You end up getting it stuck in your own head so there’s room for nothing else, eventually leading you to make poor decisions and fail. 

If you are like this, you will get so caught up in all the semantics and little things that you tend to forget the bigger picture.  You start to stress out about things that barely even matter. 

Chances are, if you just make a plan that is flexible and adjustable, things will work themselves out. 

You may be actively making things harder on yourself by being so worrisome that you stress yourself out over too many little things. 

A part of this whole concept of overthinking comes from a desire to be perfect and not ever make mistakes. However this isn’t a realistic goal to have. 

Everyone is going to make mistakes along the way.

It’s only natural. Instead of wasting your time and energy worrying about what might happen and freaking out about the possibility of something going wrong, accept that things might go wrong, and that’s alright. 

Mistakes are perfect opportunities for you to learn, develop, and grow. 

Everyone learns through their mistakes, whether they’re big or small. At the end of the day, you’re still going to be OK, and you’ll have a great deal of newfound knowledge that can help you improve in the future. 

What GEAR?

The concept I teach my coaching clients is to ask yourself ‘What GEAR do you need to operate in for this task?’ GEAR Stands for Good Enough / Accuracy Required.  

Ask yourself if this is a task for Accuracy Required (brain surgery would be an example) or if Good Enough will suffice (almost everything else would be an example)? 

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I’m not saying don’t do a good job.  In fact I do want you to get better and better by doing a Good Enough job as often as you can. But don’t overthink it.  Do as good a job as you can, learn from it and do even better next time.  But don’t chase pointless perfection unless you really are working on an Accuracy Required critical task.  

Have you ever been stuck in an overthinking loop? Add a comment below and tell me what you think…

PS.  Want some guidance for planning the last 90 days of 2019? http://kmginfo.com/go/90day-action-plan

Categories: Strategic planning

There’s something special about 90 days

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Lots of the people I coach struggle with their grand vision for 5 years ahead – or 3 years or 1 year…  It’s something we work on.

For them it just seems such a huge commitment to think that far ahead.  And I understand.  For some people that’s a struggle.

But there’s something special about planning 90 days ahead. 

There’s a reason big corporates work on a quarterly timeframe.  While your vision and strategy should extend long term, when you plan your goals out for 90 days, as opposed to one year, five years or ten years, it is much easier to be totally clear on where you want to go and how to get there.  

90 Day Action Plans work! And if you aren’t using them you probably aren’t achieving all that you could. 

http://kmginfo.com/go/90day-action-plan 

If you have stuff you wanted to get done this year, it’s September already!  In 90 days time you’ll be distracted by end of year tasks and Christmas celebrations or the like.  That means NOW is the time to set a clear 90 day action plan and set to work on achieving it.

Do it now, or you’ll discover that another year has passed and you haven’t achieved the results you want and need.  There’s so much to gain for such a small price!

Need some help? Get it here:  http://kmginfo.com/go/90day-action-plan 

Categories: Strategic planning

Getting Started video summary

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I recorded a summary of my simple three-step Getting Started System on video for you here:

You can download the Getting Started Worksheet here.

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Getting Started System

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Take Action - get startedWhether you are starting a new year, a new quarter, a new job or a new role, a new project or just a new day, getting started is something that a surprising number of people struggle with.  And yet it is a common situation we all face constantly.

If you establish an effective system for just getting started properly you’ll be amazed at how much easier it becomes to ‘get it done’ and achieve rapid results.

Your system for getting started properly will, of course, vary somewhat in scope and detail for larger more complex projects or longer timeframes, compared to getting started on that unwanted job that has been sitting on your desk for weeks now.

If you are getting started on the whole future strategy for your organisation you will probably use a formal facilitated strategic planning process to most effectively get started and build team commitment to the process.  If you are in a senior position and still struggle with getting started a good coach will guide you in implementing a system for getting started such as the simple Three-Step System I will share with you now.

Most of the time for most people, this system will be all the impetus that you need to get started on small and medium projects – and then get them done.

 

Step 1 – Context

Just as in any full scale and formal strategic planning process, your first step should always be to clarify your Context.  In strategic planning we do this through a thorough exploration of the organisation’s vision, purpose, mission and values.

For smaller projects all you need to do is clarify your answers to the following questions:

  • What do you want to accomplish? (Your mission)
  • Why do want to do this? (Your purpose)
  • What three or four goals achieved would equate to success with this project? (Your vision)

And that’s it! While complex corporates and large projects deserve a full and formal strategic planning process, your personal projects or daily tasks just require you to be clear about these three aspects of the Context in which you are working.

If you can’t answer these three question quickly and easily for all your projects, you are either wasting time doing useless tasks or you desperately need a coach to help you focus and operate more effectively.

 

Step 2 – Commitment

Once you have identified the context in which you are operating, your next step is to commit to the series of tasks required to achieve each of your 3 or 4 your goals that describe what success looks like.

For each goal draw up a list showing the following items:

  • All the specific tasks required to achieve the goal
  • The person responsible for each task, whether it is you or someone else
  • The time or date a task is due to be completed
  • The amount of time that will be required to complete it (or any deadlines or time constraints)
  • The resources that will be required to complete it (or resource constraints)

Now is the time to drill down to the detail of exactly what you must do to complete the project.  Not the things that you would like to do if you had time, or the things that have always been done before.  Just the essential tasks required to achieve each goal.  That’s it!  Nothing more.

If there’s time you can always come back later and add frills and extras, but for now all you need to commit to is the minimum essential tasks to achieve your goals.

One of the common reasons why people don’t get started is because every time they think of starting, they think of all the additional things they could do to improve the project or outcome and each goal grows bigger and bigger and requires more and more effort and it all just gets too hard.  Don’t let this happen to you.

For now commit to just the essentials – and nothing more.

 

Step 3 – Clear the Decks

Some people use tidying up their desk or office as an excuse to avoid actually getting started doing anything!  But if you clear the decks as Step 3 of your Getting Started System, you will find it clears all the mental and physical space you need to start quickly and finish easily.

Get rid of distractions.  Do what you have to do to prevent any interruptions for the next hour or whatever time you have allocated.  Divert the phone, turn off your email, contact anyone who may need to speak to you before you start.  Shut your door.  Make it known that you are not available until your chosen time, absolute emergencies excepted and there had better not be any emergencies!

Just as you gather the physical resources you need to undertake any project, set things up so you have the time available to get started and work solidly for your allocated time.

And that’s pretty much it.  Now that you’ve cleared the decks it’s time to get started – and get it done!

 

Follow this simple Three-Step System for Getting Started and you will be amazed and delighted at how your productivity and effectiveness explodes.

Download your   Free Getting Started System and Worksheet 

 

For details of Kerrie Mullins-Gunst’s Business Coaching Services and Group Facilitation Services visit our website at http://kmgconsulting.com.au

 

Have you got a system for Getting Started?  Share your system and your feedback on my system by leaving a comment below.

Categories: Strategic planning

Finding opportunity in a crisis

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Issues, critical incidents and crises can present many opportunities for the organisation that is open to learning. Meyers and Holusha (1986) identified seven potential advantages or gains which can arise from a business crisis:

  • New leaders or heroes may be born
  • Organisational change may be accelerated
  • Latent problems are faced
  • People are changed
  • New strategies evolve
  • Early warning systems develop for future issues
  • New competitive edges appear.

During a crisis it is vital that actions are oriented to each of the following:

  • containing the crisis
  • fixing it
  • communicating with the authorities and all other important stakeholders, and
  • learning from the crisis without focusing on laying any blame.

The organisation which does not attempt to learn from a crisis or critical incident is foregoing a major opportunity. Many organisations which accept the challenge to learn from a crisis or incident quickly discover the potential of a proactive issue risk management program to limit their future exposure.

If you would like to learn from the experiences of others without personally undergoing such a crisis, contact KMG Consulting for details of how we can help you develop a crisis preparedness plan or issue risk management program before it is too late.

Categories: Crisis communication, Strategic planning

Achieving Great Results

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To consistently achieve results, effectiveness is vital. But there is a difference between effectiveness (doing the right things) and efficiency (doing things right).

Cranes In The Sky.

As with so many simple observations this has profound implications. You see, it doesn’t matter how well we do something, if that thing is not what we should be doing.

Of all the factors which make an organisation effective, doing the right things is the most fundamental. Whether it be in your marketing program, individual projects, or across the whole organisation, effectiveness is the key to success.

A few organisations may be fortunate enough to do the right things by accident, but for most of us achieving great results means planning.

Planning is one of the most important aspects of winning results. Planning is central to success for individuals, groups, associations, and for businesses whether large or small. Yet repeatedly we hear just how badly planning is done.

Eighty per cent of small businesses do not have a business plan. Eighty per cent of small businesses fail within three years.

And little has changed, even for larger businesses, since the Karpin Report identified them as having difficulty planning, stating: “the main Australian enterprises and their managers have too short-term a focus.”

Despite the evidence of how hard it is to plan well, some people still claim planning is simple. If that were completely true, surely we would all be better at it? In fact, effective planning may not be hard, but it is difficult to do without help. Even those of us who help others plan for a living, appreciate external input for our own plans.

Effective organisations (like effective individuals) plan. Their plans are always written down, but rarely set in concrete.

Good plans are dynamic documents, subject to regular review and evolving with circumstances. As General Eisenhower said “It’s not the plan but the planning that counts.”

The power of planning lies in its capacity to focus our attention beyond the distractions of the journey, on our purpose and objective. Plans remind us of the forest when we are deep in the trees.

Remember, failing to plan is surely planning to fail.

Categories: Business, Strategic planning - Tags:

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