Yesterday I was trying to encourage you to think of planning. Think of possibly setting some goals and easing your way into it but today I’m going to talk about what is worth planning.
I hinted about it yesterday — that some things are not worth your time setting as goals or projects or plans but other things are.
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The way I do it and as I explained yesterday, I’m not perfect, far from it. If you want to know what’s wrong with me, you have to email in because there’s no time to tell you in a ten minute podcast to go through all my faults and what I have done wrong.
I get things wrong every single day by the way. So in my journey of goal setting and planning, I have adjusted things and I have improve things that have changed things all the time.
I am inspired by people such as Chalene Johnson, and her 30 Day Push, which is a fantastic talk. I am a member of Strategic Coach and Dan Sullivan is a genius on this kind of stuff.
I have also followed people like Brian Tracy, and other inspiring people like Michael Hyatt, Todd Herman who’s got a product out at the moment.
Chalene’s 30 Day Push is probably one of the best free goal setting tools that you can use and try to ease your way into it.
What things are worth planning, and what aren’t? One for example — a sales turn over — it’s called in England, which is your gross, that is something worth tracking and goal setting on.
Now you don’t necessarily need to increase it. If times are tough or if you are reducing staff, you may be downsizing, you may be reducing the number of products or services you offer so you may wish to consolidate or hold your current sales numbers.
That is a worthwhile goal because that is significant to the business. And by the way just to remind you I am talking about business goal setting.
I’m not talking about personal or spiritual or health or fitness or diet or things like that because you know how to do those things I’m not going to tell you what to eat. What do I know?
If you can see down here, Christmas, yeah pumpkin pies, turkey, don’t want that. Ill set the goal for the next gym visit maybe.
Now if you are going to grow sales then be realistic. If you’re going to set one year goals and then a ninety day one for it.
For example you may think that you want to double sales, but is that realistic? You may want to increase by fifty percent and that is difficult.
If you’re in a business that is in that growth stage, fine knock yourself out and if that’s easy go higher. But for most of us a sales growth of say ten percent or fifteen percent or twenty percent in over a twelve year period is pretty good.
Say you are looking for fifteen percent over that period, call it sixteen percent and you can divide it by four then perhaps you might want to aim for four percent growth in the first three months.
Yes I know about compounding and it doesn’t work but just make it easy for the math’s so it does divide sixteen by four.
If it’s ten then you can go for maybe twelve percent and pick one percent every month. Make it simple.
So write down what it is now and write down what it needs to be then figure out what you need to do to get there.
Perhaps its email subscriber list growth. Now building an email list is probably the most important thing you can do in your business to protect your future and make the future growth of your business very simple and more automated.
If you don’t have one, now is the time to start or in fact yesterday was the time to start but it’s not tomorrow, it’s now. This is very simple.
If you just hop onto the website here you will find all kind of articles that will give you some advice on how to start them and how to grow an email list.
But you need subscribers, you need people who are interested in you, that is something you can grow.
If you are starting from scratch, you may want to get your first two hundred subscribers or perhaps with thinking three months, ninety days perhaps you could divide it or you could say 180 and that means you need two per day.
Perhaps you’re going to say that you are only posting on weekdays so figure out how many week days there are, Monday to Friday and then divide it by that and so you decide — I need three per day then go for it.
Speak to three people every day and ask them if they want to subscribe to your list. Email three people until you get those three, make it a goal and then break it down.
From this three months, break it down to weekly or daily, break down these things. That creates significance.
Once you’ve got to 180, you would have developed that, you’ll think once you’re doing three, the next quarter you think okay I can do that it’s quite easy maybe we should be going for five, five a day this time, and then just set it up.
But there are things to consider such as staff communication. Communication with your team is something so make an effort to speak to every single team member maybe once a week for at least ten minutes, record it, write it down, track it, see how you get on.
This will improve the communications, it will improve your relationships with your staff, and it will improve the staff and the company culture.
Think about the things that are worth tracking, okay. There maybe services, you may track complaints, you may have returns, you may send packages out, you may have returns.
Reduce them. How about finding out what they are and then trying to reduce it.
There are many things but all of these are geared towards the improvement of the business. Either in growth in sales which enables more profit, more investment, and pay rises, better salary for yourself, all those kinds of things, better machines for your computers, more systems, more staff, all those things.
Improvement, things that affect the customers, all that kind of stuff so think it through, make sure those goals and those plans are important ones and not just ordinary. We don’t like ordinary do we?
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
It’s Tuesday, it’s time for a toolbox tip. Today, this one isn’t free — well it’s free to you but you’re going to have to pay if you want to use it.
Let me explain. It’s called LocaPhone. I use this myself since I travel around the world and I need to phone people. My dad lives in Australia, my kids are back in England, etc.
I need to phone people wherever I am. LocalPhone can be used on landlines so if I am at a house here, you just enter the number you are going to be dialing and it will give you a local number to use from the local phone that will be included within your minutes.
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So you then only pay an ongoing fee and they are dirt cheap like one cent a minute. So imagine an hour of talking for only 60 cents. No brainer huh?
And it’s got all the prices from wherever country to wherever. You can use it on your mobile or on your cellphone and that is just genius.
Go to the website, its explains it. You put some money up front, you can put five dollars on account, ten, fifteen, and then just eat through it, there’s no monthly fees, nothing like that, and it just sits there until you use it.
Honestly that genius, it’s so simple, I have no idea why more people don’t know about it. Go check out local phone. I’ll have more for you tomorrow.
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What are you wasting time planning??
