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Goal Setting and Planning for Business Success

Every person who achieved extreme success , in any business enterprise, almost certainly said defining their goals played a big part of their success. But often the person stating these words isn’t stating the whole story. They forget to tell you the other half that achieved their goals .

Emotions need to be considered. If your emotions aren’t congruent with your goals you will never reach them.

Let’s look at an example of what a typical small business owner would like to achieve as a goal.

Let’s assume this business owner wanted to improve their total income by 40% in 10 months. The next step is usually to break that goal down into smaller sizes . We could break it down more to say we want to increase our sales by 4% every month from the existing monthly level.

We’ve now specified our goals.

This is where the myth part comes in!

No matter how many times you say your goals out loud , your unconscious mind and emotions are really saying – ‘I don’t feel its achievable, I’m not sure I can do it’.

What’s missing is a PLAN of how to achieve the goals.

Let me give you a scenario to explain what I mean…

Let’s suppose you set a goal to cross a river in 24 hours where there was no bridge, without getting wet, and without using a boat or water vehicle including floating objects. This is like setting a goal, wanting something greater but not knowing how to go about achieving it.

In the example of crossing a river you could write it down as a goal to cross it and put a time frame on it of 24 hours. You now have a properly written goal.

You could break this goal down into daily goals by saying you will place big rocks in the water to build up to become stepping stones and do this every day to try to achieve your goal. However, even with the stepping stones in the water (consider them smaller goals) you still have an apprehension about getting wet as you need to hop or jump from rock to rock and you may fall in.

This is goal setting. We have broken the main goal into smaller goals. However like crossing the river, in real life you still have your doubts about reaching your goals.

What we need here is a bridge so you can easily cross the river, without getting your feet wet. With a bridge in place you would have very little doubt of achieving your goal as you can “see” your way forward with clarity.

The bridge in this example relates to your business success, which is reached by having a detailed PLAN of how you will achieve your goals using strategies.

So getting back to our example of growing the person’s business, by increasing sales by 40% in 10 months, we need a PLAN that supports the achievement of the goals.

In the example to increase sales we need to break this into getting 4% more customers every month. How do we achieve that becomes the most important question and our PLAN.

First of all we need to understand that monthly income is made up of the number of new customers purchasing in addition with existing customers coming back to buy .

Let’s keep it simple and in this case we will not rely on getting existing customers to come back more (even though you should be focussing on this in real life business practices).

That means we need to get our 4% increase from new customers.

Now, getting new customers breaks into 2 steps. The first step is to improve the conversion rate (if we know what it is), to see if its possible to increase it by 4%. The other way is to increase inquiries from potential customers by 4%. This step again breaks down into smaller steps where one step is to improve existing promotional material to improve it from better advertising design concepts.

The second part of this breakdown is to look for new ways to promote the business. This could be by using a proactive referral system, a strategic alliance, a host beneficiary, direct mail letters, industry newsletter ad, piggy back invoice mailing or similar strategy ( most of which are greatly under utilized.

Now we have 3 major ways to achieve our 4% increase and when you look at the most likely area to work with, which is often conversion rates, you can quite easily achieve not just the 4% growth per month, but substantially higher rates of growth.

From experience an offline business can increase its’ conversion rates by 20% quite easily, if the figure for it is under 50%, and it’s possible (and readily achievable) to do it in under 30 days.

You can easily increase your conversion rate by using written guarantees as part of your advertising as well. In fact there are dozens of ways to increase conversion rates!

By instigating this planning process, achieving your goals becomes much like taking a walk across a river on a bridge. It’s simple and straight forward, but it takes good planning. With propoer planning (and sometimes an expert in small business management) any realistic business goal can be attained in relatively short time frames.

By using this this process with over 180+ small business owners over the previous 13 years my company has witnessed over a good number of clients double their income in only 30 days with this planning process.

Let me leave you with a quote from Napoleon Hill that reinforces what this is all about, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve”.

The true power comes from “conceiving” of the idea, (often with using an expert business training service provider) that helps to clarify and support the well thought out goals. When you do this properly you “believe” you can achieve, and so you do!

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