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Lesson Info

Identify and Align Your 12-18 Month Business Vision

Start with that singular question that I just posed, what would feel like a breakthrough to you if you were able to create it in your business or if you were able to shift your business um in the next 12- months, so you may want to set that as a revenue target, You may want to set it as some other kind of change. Some people may set, I just want to actually stay in business and be profitable. I want to be able to keep all of my employees, I want to whatever you or whatever would feel like a breakthrough to you. And I will say many entrepreneurs, even in this season Are still wanting to set goals around increasing revenue in a 12 or 18 month timeframe. So don't judge whatever comes to you as the answer to that question, just let let yourself have the inner experience that you're having, what would feel like a breakthrough to you now? Why? That's the next question is why would that feel like, why do you want that? Why would that feel like a breakthrough to you? What would be possible for...

you? What would be possible in your in your life if you were able to actually create that result That you've set as an intention or desire for 12-18 months out now, I want you to take this document that you just created. I want you to print it out and I want you to read it every morning. I want you to every day before you start working. Okay? So I want you to sort of in this moment as you do this exercise. Let your mind wander and paint this really high energy inspired Sort of visual dream of the way that your business could look and feel and play out 12 to 18 months from now. And I want you to let yourself just be immersed every morning before you start working the energy of how that feels. Even if it's not a super specific, do this, do that action plan yet. All right. So then what do you do? What actions do you take once you've created this beautiful vision for where you want your business to be a year, year and a half from now, I'm gonna give you a couple of different tools and I want you to just try them on, see what works for you. We all have different personalities, different wiring, see what works for you. So one tool is something called a six by six and here's all it is, is every six weeks you put an hour on your calendar to set six priorities, six initiatives, six areas of focus in your business that you know, if you focused on each of those areas for six weeks, it would measurably um, significantly move the needle on your business to get your business closer to what that 12 to 18 month vision looks like. So you kind of have to be the judge of where, of how zoomed out or how specific That you're. The six items on your list are like one item, maybe actually like create a new website, um, one item maybe, you know, uh collect new, encourage new yelp reviews or encourage new reviews and testimonials. Um, one item maybe actually, you know, every day emailing um past customers to ask them who they know that should be working with you. Now, if you have a service business, You have to decide what the items are, but it should be something that you can focus some energy on an attention on every week for six weeks and you believe if you had that focus and kept that focus, it would move your business forward. So that's a six x 6 and every week in my own personal business planning. Um As I list out the things that I have to do that week, my to do list my task list my delivery bubbles for the week, at the top of every week's list, I put my six by six just to make sure that I can um that I'm actually allocating the time that I need. That, the way I'm actually spending my time everyday aligns to those six areas of focus. So the six by six is one really powerful tool for helping you determine what actions should I actually take? What things should I actually be focusing on if I want my business to start matching up with that 12 to 18 month vision um Another tool that I often give them, I ask my clients when they have like the vision, but they're not really sure what exactly to do next, what to do next. Um is this I just ask them to answer and to ask themselves over and over and over again. This one question, what feels like the natural next step? What feels like the natural next step? Right? So many of us think that we need some extraordinary strategy that we've never heard of, but really the people who are making great progress in their business in this season are the people who are able to just focus on and do the natural next step. That's, you know, often not secret or surprised or even necessarily a new strategy trust that you actually have the inner intelligence to know what those steps are, just take the natural next step. Now the power of this question in this tool is that it deactivates some of us have a real tendency to over think things and to over plan things and yes, you can actually over plan your business, you can actually over plan your business if your plan for your business is so detailed and so rigid and so long. Um, two things happen. Uh one is all the inspired energy that you had when you were setting vision kind of dissipates in the nuts and bolts. And the second thing that happens is overwhelmed. You can kind of start to feel the it feels really big, it feels like a lot of work. It starts to feel like you don't know how you're going to do all that stuff, but the reality is you don't have to do everything that it's going to take to get your business from where it is now to where you want it to be in 18 months. Have to do all of that today, right today, you just take the natural next step for this month. You just take the natural next step for this week. You just take the natural next step. And just that invitation to yourself that all you have to do today is take the next step prevents some of that overwhelm and that paralysis of analysis and that inner critic thinking that allows sort of fear and hesitation and self doubt to come in. When you start to be like, I can't pull all that off, you don't have to pull it off. Just take the natural next step. One of my favorite tools for entrepreneurs who are trying to make a big shift in their business. Like you are right now is something I learned from my time in Silicon Valley. It's called lean start up methodology. But you don't have to be a startup to take advantage of this tool. So if you think about business, you know 30 or 40 years ago, companies used to have a vision for a product or change. They wanted to make spend millions and millions of dollars on R. And D create a perfect product and only you know, do all this market testing and then they would only put it out in the market when the product was pretty close to perfect and then everything road all you know the ability of the business to succeed or fried road on whether that product was successful or not, it seems really risky, right? And that can be how we feel about making shifts in our business too. Well, you don't have to feel that way. So the way that tech companies tend to work is they don't do, they don't create a perfectly baked, perfectly fully cooked product before they launch they create something that we call a minimum viable product, they create a small kernel of the change that they want to make or the new product they want to launch or an imperfect version of it. And in fact, we even have a saying that if you if what you launch is perfect, you waited too long to launch it. So the idea here is that imperfection is the goal, is the goal to put something to put your shifts and changes that you're making your menu, your new menu, your new services, your new offerings, whatever the new way you talk about what you do to put that in the market, um, before it's fully baked and before you've spent a ton of ton of time and energy and money on it. For this reason your whole goal is to put it out and actually get customer feedback right? What you want is to know from your customers whether this new thing that you're doing is viable, whether they like it or whether they might like you to make some changes to it before you spend a ton of time of time and money, you know totally retooling and re changing your business. So I invite you to like try that on. Can you roll out a test menu to a, you know a special group of V. I. P. Customers. Can you get on the phone with a few customers? I do this in my business all the time. I'll just send emails to pass customers and get on the phone with them, check in with them, see where they're at in their lives, which they love. But also tell them about a product I'm thinking about building. Um and give them some of the verb ege that I'm using around it before I ever build the website. Sometimes I'll go so far as to even pre sell it. I'll literally offer them the opportunity to enroll in a product That I haven't built all the way yet and they know I haven't built. You know, it's very honest, they're usually getting a discount on it for that reason, but it allows me to engage in a meaningful conversation with my actual real customer with real money on the on the table um about the viability of the product. So by the time I've had five or six or 10 of those conversations, I can go into putting the website for that product together with really clear understanding of what customers want to hear, and often even of their own language around the problem that they're having. So I can use that in the marketing. Um The last so, so the last tool that I'd like to invite you to use as you start taking, you know, inspired action toward creating this, inspire next season of your business. It's to identify whether there is one essential action that if you took that action over and over and over and over and over again would almost inevitably cause your business to be successful. All right, So maybe it's having, you know, having sales call, doing sales calls, if your service business, um, whatever it is, if you can identify that essential action that you could do over and over again, And if you did it over and over again, it would almost certainly guarantee your success at reaching your 12-18 month vision. Um I want to invite you to do what I ask my clients to do, which is to put one hour every workday on their calendar. We call it success our just put one hour of every work day on the calendar to do that action. One hour to do that action. If you're a restaurant tour, it might be, it might be we actually work with your team or work on your menu, it's different for every business, but once you identify it, um put actually put things don't exist until you put them on your calendar. Um That's how days and weeks and months go by without us actually making the real changes that we know we need to make right. And this crisis is offering us a really specific opportunity to make those changes that we need to make for the long term sustainability and profitability of our business, but also for the fulfilment we want to have and the impact we want to have. So that's what I invite you to do. I invite you to build out your to understand what your 10 reasons are for making these business changes right now, to flesh out and build out this beautiful sort of dream version of the vision of your business that you want to have in 12 to 18 months, and I want you to spend an hour on that exercise, write it out or print it out and make sure that you have it someplace handy to read and get back in that energy of inspiration. Get back in that reminder of why you're doing what you're doing before you start work every day, and then use those tools that I just shared with you for taking for consistently taking every day, imperfect action to bring the business that you have now into alignment with, the business that you envision having 12 to 18 months from now. Um, and just and keep in, you know, like NEmo said, keep on going, he just keep swimming. Just keep swimming and don't dig your seed up too soon.