And so this is January. And what have you done? Another year over, And a new one just begun.
Yes, I borrowed some of the wisdom from the great John Lennon and appropriated it for a new year in business and life.
Back in October I wrote a blog suggesting it was a good time to plan for the upcoming year. Most do not. Year’s are quite arbitrary. They can fade out like a great tune at the end of an album. They can roll in like the morning tide on the Gulf. But they can also be used to help us motivate ourselves to achieve our dreams.
Personal Inventory
Inventory is an important theme for Simply Reliable this year and we will be discussing this quite a bit when we meet online, in emails, on social media etc. But today, inventory takes on a slightly different meaning. Don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t write the quintessential book of your life goals. Few do. Take a few hours. Create an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses, your goals and aspirations, your fears and your doubts. Put it all in there.
Some will write a letter to themselves from next December. This letter will congratulate yourself on the things that you accomplished this year. Others will create an outline and perhaps different segmentation such as work, personal, spiritual, financial, etc. As many of you know, my passion is helping people achieve a great work life balance. It’s a big reason why we invented smartOFFICE.
Just Do It!
Whatever methodology you use. Just do it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But, just get started. What would you like to accomplish this year? What is the most important thing to you this year?
Write it down. Put it up on your wall where you see it every day. Visualize yourself already achieving this goal.
Now how do you get it? How do you know if you are moving the ball down the field to achieve your goal? Create a list of milestones. Perhaps they are 90 day milestones. For instance, let’s say you wanted to increase your sales by $500K in the next year. That is about $40K per month in new sales. How many proposals do you write to close one? What is your average proposal size. How many people do you meet with, I call them “SUSPECTS” , where you discuss perhaps doing some work with them but for whatever reason the conversation does not progress enough to cause you to create a proposal?
Break It Into Steps
Let’s say your average project is $25K. You convert 50% of the proposals you create to a paying customer. Three out of four suspects become a good prospect for you so development proposals for them. To create an additional $500K in sales for the year you will need to close 20 more proposals. Which means you will need to write 40 more proposals. In order to create those proposals you will need to prospect and meet with 54 new suspects. Think about it, that is a little more than 1 per week. That is achievable, right?
That’s just an example of one goal and how to work out the steps necessary in order to achieve the goal. What is important to you? Don’t let another year go by without defining what YOU want. You deserve to be happy. You deserve success.
