Every person who succeeded at a high level, in any business venture, probably said goal setting played a big part of their success. But often the person speaking these words isn’t telling you the whole story. They forget to tell you the other half that made their goals a reality.
Your emotiona need to be considered. If your emotions don’t support your goals you will never achieve them.
Lets look at an example of what a typical small business owner would like to achieve as a goal. Lets imagine this person wanted to increase their revenue by 40% in 10 months. The next step is typically to break that goal down into smaller pieces. We could break it down even further to say we want to increase our sales by 4% every month from the existing monthly level.
We’ve now defined our goals. Now you may think I am going to say the person needs to write them out so they can say them every day out loud to themselves.
This is where the myth part comes in!
No matter how many times you say your goals out loud or read them 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, in a simple way.
Let’s imagine you had a goal one day to cross a river where there was no bridge without getting wet, and without using a boat or water vehicle including floating objects. You could write that as a goal with the other side being the place you want to be and put a time frame on it (1 week). You now have a correctly written goal.
You could break this goal down into daily goals by saying you will drop rocks into the water to build up stepping stones and do this every day to try to achieve your goal. However, even with the stepping stones in place (consider them smaller goals) you still have an apprehension about getting wet as you need to hop, step or jump from rock to rock and you may fall in.
This is goal setting. We have broken the main goal into smaller goals, much like putting stepping stones into place. However like crossing the river, in real life you still have your doubts about achieving your goals.
What’s needed here is a bridge so you can simply and easily cross the river, without getting your feet wet. With a bridge you would have very little doubt of your achievement of your goal as you can “see” your way forward with clarity.
The bridge in this example relates to your business success, which is having a good PLAN of how you will achieve your goals.
So getting back to our example of growing the persons business, by increasing sales by 40% in 10 months, we need a PLAN that supports the achievement of the goals.
In this example to increase sales we need to break this into getting 4% more customers every month. How do we do that becomes the most important question and our PLAN.
First of all we need to understand that monthly revenue is made up of the number of new customers purchasing combined with existing customers coming back to purchase.
Let’s keep it simple and in this case we won’t 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, we break down getting new customers into 2 steps. The first step is to increase our 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 work on existing advertising or promotional material to improve on it with better advertising design concepts.
The second part of this breakdown is to find new ways to promote the business, that its currently not using. 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 that is relatively unknown and therefor 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 their conversion rates (percentage from inquiry to sale) by 20% quite easily, if the number if below 50%, and its possible (and readily achievalbe) to do it within 30 days.
You can increase your conversion rate by introducing written guarantees as part of your advertising as well. In fact there are dozens of ways to icnrease conversion rates!
So by following this planning process, achieving your goals becomes much like taking a stroll across a river on a bridge. It’s easy, straight forward, but it takes good planning. With the right planning (and sometimes expert assistance) any business goal can be attained in relatively short time frames.
By doing this exercise with dozens and dozens of small business owners over the previous 8 years I have been a Professional Business Builder I have seen over 8 of my clients double their revenue in just 30 days with this planning process!
Let me leave you with a quote from Napoleon Hill that explains what I have written, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve”.
The true power comes from “conceiving” of the idea, with expert planning that supports a well thought out goals. When you do this properly you “believe” you can achieve, and so you do!
Want to learn more about this article? Go to www.bbms.com.au
Tim Stokes is one of the best business coaches and business builders in the world. He was awarded “Worldwide Coach of the Year in 2000″ from hundreds of candidates both in USA, Australia and Asia.
Tim’s results speak volumes for his abilities and knowledge. He measures his clients growth results in double to triple digit percentages over months, not years. Tim’s most impressive result was helping a service business to grow by 1000% in just 5 months! This story was written up in “My Business Success” magazine in June 2002 in an article called, “Is Coaching the New Business Miracle?”
To learn for yourself how easy it is for Tim to grow your business go to http://www.bbms.com.au or read more of his articles at http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Tim_Stokes
