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How to Make Next Year Your Best Year Ever

Nov 18, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning

First, you need to define what “Best Year Ever” means to you; you have to know what you want in order to achieve it. Your ability to get crystal clear about what a successful year looks like will help you make the leap towards that ideal year.

What is your personal strategic plan for your life next year? You can follow these three simple steps to make sure you have the best year ever in 2021.

Step 1 – Be Extremely Clear On What You What. Know what you really want in life and in your business. Know what goals and outcomes you would like to achieve by the end of next year and know exactly what you don’t want. Create a list of personal goals and business goals for the next 12 months. The fact of life is none of us is going to live forever and we don’t know when our number is up so it is so important to get clarity around what is most important for us to achieve. We need to remember to create goals for personal health and well-being and spend more time on our most important relationships. You should also pursue that special hobby or interest you have been putting off. Take time out of your busy schedule before January rolls in to recharge, relax, and reenergize with powerful and meaningful goals for next year. Get the pen to the paper right now and start mapping out your future.

Step 2. Review & Execute. After you create your goals schedule an appointment with yourself every week to work on the action steps to move your goals forward. Our lives are built on the foundation of these six major areas of our wheel of life: Family & Home, Financial & Career, Mental & Educational, Physical & Health, Social & Cultural, and Spiritual & Ethical. These areas are the pillars that you will build a totally integrated life on. Make sure you are spending at least one hour a week in your plan of action. Your personal plan of action is the master plan for the rest of your life. Your planner should contain a master list of priority business and personal goals. The world is infested with distractions and noise designed to take us off our goals program and put us on someone else’s goals program which is why we have to continue to be intentional about setting aside time to work in our plan of action on a weekly basis.

Step 3. Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing. Develop a relentless focus on what really matters most, what is most important and significant in your personal and professional life by setting up ironclad boundaries so you are not interrupted with the tyranny of the urgent which usually isn’t really important. Focus on what you want and not on what you don’t want. For everything that is not a high payoff activity for you – figure out a way to simplify, eliminate, delegate or outsource the activity. Take massive action on your goals – make this a daily habit.

Remember, “It’s hard by the yard, but it’s a cinch by the inch.” Concentrate daily upon doing the little things that eventually will help you accomplish the big things. You create and maintain an environment that is conducive to ongoing motivation. Create a work environment that energizes you and always surround yourself with positive, goal-directed, self-motivated people. It is true what they say – you are the company you keep.

The Right Questions Lead You to the Right Vision

Nov 10, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Strategic Planning, Success

How has your vision changed for your business and personal life over the past few months? Have you taken the time to think about how the current pandemic and economic turmoil has impacted this vision? Is it the same as it was before or completely different? Hellen Keller once said “The only thing worse than being blind is having no vision.” Even though we cannot completely know what will happen tomorrow or even five minutes from now, it is important to have a detailed image in our minds of what we want to achieve in the long-term. This may change and this is ok, too. But we must always be able to imagine how achieving our goals will look to us and the world around us. We might also imagine how it might feel to achieve those goals and how we might benefit the people in our communities.

A business vision is a crystal-clear image of the future we wish to create. It describes what our company aspires to be and how the world could be impacted, hopefully positively, by our company’s actions. If we want to consistently move toward our vision, we must know what it is, inside and out. We can ask ourselves questions to better understand this vision and in doing so, we can gain clarity on how to achieve it.

There are two main types of questions we can ask, inward questions and outward questions. Inward questions allow us to discover information about ourselves and our business. Some examples of inward questions include:

What do we do best?

 What are our strengths?

What is an ideal organization and how can we be that organization?

How do we want to influence the world around us?

Outward questions lead us to uncover information about our industry and customers. Some examples include:

How is our industry changing?

What is our competition doing in response to market changes?

What are we hearing from customers about their needs?

If you answer these questions you will have a solid jumpstart on developing a vision for your business that takes into account today’s reality and consumer needs. If you want to continue building this vision and begin designing a strategy to achieve it, join the FAST TRACK Challenge beginning November 16th. Click Here for more information.

3 Great Questions to Help Drive Your Strategic Plan

Oct 23, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Strategic Planning

Most of us are driven by operational inertia and default to doing what we’ve done previously. However, you already know that to get a different result, you need to do something differently.

In the case of strategic planning, the strength of the plan is determined by our current level of thinking and we are often inhibited by our cognitive blind spots. We need to do whatever we can to break through our self-imposed limitations! When working on your strategic plan, you want to think outside the box by creating new and innovative action steps to achieve our most desired goals.

All progress in our lives requires that we go against some kind of “gravitational” system. Gravity in this sense means the forces that hold us in place. Basically, inertia keeps us doing the same things over and over again.  There are forces, especially our current thinking,  that prevent us from moving or changing our position. But it is important to remember what Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our current problems with the mindset that created them.”

What drives our current thinking? Ironically, the answer is QUESTIONS! People think by asking themselves questions and giving themselves answers (or finding answers for those questions). Ask a bad question and you’ll get a bad answer. People say there are no bad questions, but in strategic planning, you have to ask yourself specific questions that will lead you to the answer you want to achieve. If you want to have a great plan, then you need to ask and answer a series of great questions.

The quality of the questions we ask ourselves and our teams accounts for virtually 100% of the quality of the answers we receive.  The brain is a brilliant servant and it will find an answer to any question you ask of it.

Ask yourself and your teams empowering questions like these:

  1. “What could we do to disrupt to our industry?”

 

  1. “What could we do that would make a real significant difference between us and our competitors?”

 

  1. “What are the unintended consequences of our current strategy that we should change?”

Perhaps you have been busy working in your business, but now realize it is time to work on your business. If you have not done a strategic plan for next year, right now is the right time. Join the Fast Track Challenge beginning November 16th. Click here for more information.

 

Clarity is the Antidote to Uncertainty

Sep 23, 2020 | CEOs, Goal Setting, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Success

We are living in crazy times and the levels of uncertainty are at an all-time high. Then, throw in the media blast telling us that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and our situation seems much worse than it is. I am not minimizing the pandemic or the challenges we are being presented; however we have to take charge of our lives and look for the opportunities we can capitalize on. We CAN come through this storm BETTER than where we started.

I was just reading about Rockefeller in his early days in business –  the economy was in a recession and he took advantage of opportunities all around him. In every adversity there is an equal or greater benefit to be found. What are the obstacles that you are facing in your business today?  Have you met with your team to brainstorm ways to overcome the obstacles?

All of our decisions are based on assumptions/beliefs. Have we checked those beliefs against current reality  to see if they are real or not? Two business owners, facing similar obstacles, different decisions. Why? Because their beliefs/assumptions are different. So, whenever you’re facing an obstacle, one of the smartest things you can do is challenge your assumptions. Ask yourself why  you believe what you believe.

What’s the Cost of Doing Nothing? In general, most of the business owners I’ve met aren’t very good at calculating opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is involved in every decision we make daily because whenever we’re saying, “Yes” to one thing, we’re saying, “No,” to something else. This is the number one reason you want to have extreme clarity around your strategy, your BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, Jim Collins, Good to Great), your purpose and your core values. Once you have clarity around these issues you can start to make better decisions.

One of the ways of solving any problem is to get a different perspective. As soon as we ask questions of ourselves and of our teams our brains will go to work and come up with an answer. One of the best ways to ask that question is to imagine that you’re someone else and then ask how you think you (being that person) would solve this problem. For example, if you were Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Thomas Edison, Elon Musk, Howard Shultz or Sheryl Sandberg.  Pick the person and ask: “If ______ were in my Shoes, how would he/she solve this problem or overcome this obstacle?”

Most strategies fail because of lack of execution, being driven by the tyranny of the urgent, being pulled by the inertia of daily operations.  Don’t let that happen to you.

How Important is it for You to Get the Next 6 Months Right?

Sep 17, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Goal Setting, Leadership, Leadership Development, Strategic Planning, Success

In light of everything that has happened so far this year, what your going to do intentionally to ensure that the next months of 2020 are a success for you and your business? Do you have a clear and specific, written plan of action? Are you ready and equipped to thrive in the months ahead instead of simply surviving from crisis to crisis?

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable.” Creating a plan and leaving it on a shelf to collect dust, never reviewing it or adapting it to changes in your market or the current economy is absolutely useless. Plans are meant to be revisited and refreshed and often your goals may need to be realigned. We are certainly not able to predict everything that is going to happen but if we are committed to planning, we will be more likely to thrive regardless of what happens.

Our plans are the framework for success. Even if we have to rewrite them, they will keep us on track toward achieving our core purpose. Lewis Carroll said, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” So, know where you are going and be willing to do what it takes to get there. Are you willing to set the time aside you need to plan for the future? Are you willing to do this routinely? How important is it for you, really, to get the next 6 months right? Do you have the team to help you get there? Are you developing your leaders? Are you working on your own personal and professional development?

The time is now! Don’t wait any longer!

If you are ready and willing to do what it takes join our Fast Track Strategic Plan Challenge beginning September 21, 2020 at 12 PM. Spaces are limited, so sign up today by clicking here.

5 Steps Toward Business Success

Sep 10, 2020 | Business Growth, Business Owners, CEOs, Leadership, Strategic Planning, Success

When running a small business, you face new challenges every day and your greatest resources are stretched and limited: time, effort and energy.  Business leaders who want to be successful need to rise above the urgent and focus on what’s most critical: the tough, strategic decisions that will drive your business forward and grow it faster. The more your business grows the more time you need invest in real quality think time.

 

Are you ready to finally have the freedom you want to focus on what really matters most in your life and business? You can start by following these steps:

  • Create A Strategic Plan: What is your vision and how are you going to achieve it? Without a clear vision, a well-defined purpose and a specific plan of action – you will be like a hamster on a wheel running in circles and never reaching a destination.
  • Share – Involve Your Team: Inspire your team with your vision and provide them with the information they need about your plan on a consistent basis. What is their role, what are their individual goals and how are you going to support them in achieving those goals? Solicit feedback and listen to what your team is saying. You want them to know that they are valued and important and what they say matters.
  • Track — Create Key Performance Indicators and monitor progress toward your goals. Remember to communicate this progress with your team.
  • Execute – Meet with your team in person or remotely on a regular basis. Meetings are where you drive execution, create accountability, and identify and resolve issues that are standing in the way of success.
  • ​Repeat — Quarterly Strategic Planning: Quarterly Strategic Planning is where you review your progress. Talk about what worked last quarter and what did not work. After evaluating the previous quarter, adjust and re-align your goals and plans if needed.

Are you ready to find clarity and have laser-like focus on your goals to get the results you want?  If so, join My Fast Track Strategic Plan Challenge. Click Here for more information.    +