Pt 1: 6 Steps to Boosting Your Small Business

Whether you’re just starting out, beginning a new campaign, or just wish to breathe some new life into your small business, there are some easy, ‘right-now’ steps you can take to push your business to the next level.

1. Define Your Goals
Set down with a piece of paper and brain-storm about everything you want to achieve, in your life, your business, your family; everything. If possible/relevant, do this exercise with your partner as well; it’s almost impossible to beat a couple working together towards the same goal. You can have as many as you like, the more the better; make them personal, professional and possessive – Who do you want to be; what do you want to be; where do you want to go; what do you want to have…

There are hundreds of platitudes about goal setting, but a couple of my favourites are:

Once you have written out what you want to achieve, determine when you want to achieve it. Go back to your goals and write one of the following time-frames next to it: 6 months; 1 year; 3 years; 5 years; and 7 years.

After you have decided when, decide why – prioritise. Choose up to 10% (but at least 3) of the most important goals from each time frame. These are the things you most want to happen, or feel you have to do, in order to feel a proper sense of accomplishment.

And finally, establish a plan of how you will achieve each of your prioritised goals. Start by brain-storming, just throw down ideas – it’s all good at this point, don’t ‘poo-poo’ anything at this stage; eventually you will feel the ideas beginning to flow. Write everything down, organise it – lay it out in a sequence you can follow; one step after another (If you need any help with this let me know as I have some exercises that are quite good and I will gladly pass them your way).

There was a famous study carried out at Harvard University in the US (thank you Brian Tracy for bringing it to my attention), where an entire graduating class were surveyed. It came out of this survey that only 3% of the entire class had set goals for the future, with plans on how to achieve those goals. 20 years later, the class was surveyed again, with the conclusion being that the 3% with targeted, planned goals had achieved more, and were earning more, than all of the other 97% put together. That’s a pretty powerful corroboration in my books.