What does winning look like?

Lesson 1: What does your life look like 1, 3 and 5 years into running this business? What does our daily routine look like? What tasks are you delegating? How many hours are you working? How much $ are you getting each month to live on? What are you doing, working on and spending time on outside of your business? How does that feel?

Lesson 2: Does your vision have you working in your business every day like a self-employed business or are you a business person working on your business, with other people handling most of it? Do you start other businesses with your extra time or spend more time with family, hobbies, traveling, helping other people, etc?

Lesson 3: What is the limit to how large you can grow/scale your business? Can you replicate it by franchising or licensing? Can you teach other people to do the same business and support them in it instead of running them all yourself? Would you keep adding new horizontal or vertical segments to your business or would you start new and un-related businesses so they were different and less boring? Would you employ people or partner with other business people?

Lesson 4: What’s your life look like after you retire or sell your business? Can you picture an exit strategy? Would that be in 5 years so you can move on and do something else or would you keep it until retirement? Would you have your family/kids run it one day to leave as a family legacy? Would you one day sell it to your employees or managers? What would you do once retired? Would you coach/mentor others? Would you focus on giving back financially or with your time? How would it feel to finish well?

Lesson 5: It so good to see and feel what it will be like when we accomplish certain things, it helps us to stay in the game, it grows our faith like a muscle and it keeps us focused. The unfortunate reality, is that 80%+ of people fail because they didn’t plan, they just winged it, fake it til they make it, like driving in a new town without a map and too stubborn to stop and buy one or ask directions. But even if we do make time to plan and use strategy, that’s still no guarantee of success. We still need to learn tactics, implement them, learn from our failures, rinse and repeat. The faster we can go through that cycle, the faster we can fail and learn from it, the faster we can get to where we’re going. We can get there winging it, but it will likely have taken much longer and cost much more to get to the same place.

Assuming you think you’re ready to become/stay a business owner, that you have business model that can work well and that you’re committed to working it all the way through…the next step is to move into Strategy and Planning. By the end of that phase you’ll either know your initial business idea/plan is viable or you’ll be looking for one that is to replace it. The format and primary focus of this phase is the creation of a detailed marketing plan. It will be a solid starting point, but never perfect, more of a living document/process that you’ll modify and correct again and again, like a sniper siting in a rifle between missions. If you keep at it, you’re as likely as possible to hit our business target.

Click here to check out our next training program designed to help you do your first marketing plan well, and in doing so, design your building plans for your business and future. This 4 weeks has gone fast, and so will the four weeks learning about and working on your marketing plan. When you’re done, you’ll hold in your hand/computer something that 95% of business owners never accomplish…a sharp and completed marketing plan!