Your Secret to Success for Next Year: Business Planning

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Do you set aside time 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 for the remainder of this year as well as the one coming up. Setting aside time at the end of the year, 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.

I’ve crafted a helpful seven-post series for you: Business Planning to Rock Next Year. It breaks down what I’ve learned about how to make a business plan for the upcoming year. Let’s start off by taking a look at why business planning is “the secret” to success.

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.

As we’ll explore in a future blog post, 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.

Setting a Big Goal for Yourself

This helps you think outside the box. Even if you’re skeptical of this step, I encourage you to give it a try it!

1. Decide on a big income goal for the coming month.
2. Write it down.
3. Keep it in front of you.
4. 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 on that time in college when finals rolled around, or the last time your in-laws told you they would stop by later in the day. You got very creative about studying and cleaning respectively!

The Subconscious

Ah, yes. Last but not least, let’s talk about your “background brain.”

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 those goals as well. Nurture this part of your mind (and sub sequentially, your mental health as an entrepreneur) by getting adequate rest at night, practicing stress management techniques, and harnessing the power of visualization and mediation or prayer. Set those intentions to reach for the stars!

In Conclusion

In short, planning and setting goals is important because it helps you grow faster. That means you end up with more money for yourself and your loved ones while spending less time slaving away at your desk.

Ready for more? Read the next post in this series: Use the Current State of Your Business to Determine Growth & Future Projects