NOT A GOOD TIME

For many small business owners the last two weeks of the year appear to be a good time to relax and enjoy the Christmas season. Another frequent occurrence happens the last few days of the year and that is the taking a few minutes to come up with a few New Years’ resolutions.

A better plan is to take this coming week to finish up the year, thank your current customer base and develop a detailed action plan for 2018.

Using income (bottom line income) for your business, select a financial goal. Setting such a goal is only possible if you a have a budget.  If you don’t know where to start, make a list of all the expenses you incurred in 2017. This will give you a base figure to start with. If you are still working out of a check book, then start using Quick Books.

Review your expenses for 2017 and make sure that your salary is included as well as a marketing budget and a contingency reserve.  The combination of these expenses will give a base for your 2018 income goal. (Note, I did not itemize all the possible expense items).

With a solid income figure to work with, now is the time to create a list of what you have to do to earn that income. Include in this list the number of products/services you have to sell and the number of potential customers you have to see to close the number of sales you need.

Now it’s time to create an action list, month by month, as to what you personally have to do to reach your goal. I recommended a week to work on this; you can’t complete this process in an hour.

With your monthly financial goal and an action plan to reach that goal you can now use your Accountability Tracker to further break down your action into a weekly event. The Accountability Tracker will help you define a weekly goal. If you list three things to complete each day, you will achieve your goal.

Perhaps I should have titled this blog, “Discipline for Success” because that is exactly what you have to have to make 2018 your best year ever.

If you are having trouble creating your action plan, send me an e-mail or call me.

It’s going to be hard, but hard is not impossible!