goal planning

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#21 - Aligning your time with your goals

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What are you spending the most time on in your business? Are you spending time working on tasks that will grow your business, such as sales and marketing? Or are you busy working on mundane tasks that are preventing you from growing your business.

Kelly Roach is a coach who helps entrepreneurs all around the world make six and seven figure leaps. She also helps people build businesses around systems. Kelly joins me on the podcast to discuss why systems are so important in entrepreneurship and how focusing on the right tasks can make all the difference when it comes to reaching your goals.

Systems are important

Aligning your time with your goals

Entrepreneurs tend to push back against systems, but systems can create freedom in your business. Systems don’t have to be hard. Systems are the things that hold and bind your business together and keep businesses running like well-oiled machines.

Systems are the core-principles or the automatic things that run a certain way to keep things moving each day. They are executed a specific way to generate a specific result and that could be your marketing, people management, product or service delivery, etc. If productivity is important to you and you want a freedom-based business, then you need systems to create the fluidity that can give you freedom.

The sooner you create your systems, the sooner you will grow and achieve your goals. Many people think of advertising or outsourcing as something that happens when you reach a certain level in your business, however the sooner you put systems in place for these things, the sooner you can do these things and reach your business goals.

Entrepreneurs do not necessarily enjoy sales and marketing. Because of this they are working more hours then they need to be on many areas in their business that make them feel busy, but all the while they are not working on anything that is going to produce a specific result.

Assess your time

Track and measure how much time is going toward sales conversations (online and in person. Also measure how many webinars you are doing, etc. Measure everything you are doing to get more clients. Many entrepreneurs can free up time if they focus on systems that will get them more sales, that will make you more money – because that should be your priority.

Most entrepreneurs probably only spend an hour or less a week on prospecting, when they should be investing a lot more time interfacing with their target audience. This can be via email, webinars, and networking events. If you’re not closing sales it could have something to do with where you are spending your time. You need to be making enough offers to be able to close more offers.

If you are in the new stages of your business, then you need to spend a lot of time outward facing and getting in front of your target audience. Sales are the driver of everything in your business so it is where your attention needs be.

Figure out what you need to make hourly in order to make the income that you want to make. Then sort out the tasks that you spend your time on each day and see which of those hours are profit producing – everything else should back into those tasks. Separate your genius work from the mundane tasks and then believe in yourself! Hire someone who can do the other tasks so you can focus on what you need to do to build your business.

You cannot build a million dollar business trying to piece together $10 an hour tasks. It doesn’t work. Trust the mundane tasks to someone else so you can focus on your genius work.

Get uncomfortable

None of us get into business with the intention of stressing over their financial situation. This is why you need to get uncomfortable… so you can do more of what you want to do, such as taking more vacations, home renovations, etc.

You need to be growing your audience, and this means getting in front of them and as uncomfortable as this may be for people – it is necessary. In order to do whatever it is you love doing, you also need to become a great marketer because if no one knows about you then it doesn’t matter how great whatever you are producing is, you are never going to get to do it and make money.

Free is valuable

People have thousands of choices every week so new, fresh content on a regular basis is necessary so people can vet why they should work with you. People are buying through your teaching and the content you are sharing versus through a direct sales pitch. So if you are not strong in sales, think about where you are strong – can you use your podcast to show your audience what you have to offer and how they can take it to the next level?

If you’re an entrepreneur then you know you can make income for yourself. You should also know you can earn extra income to pay for a virtual assistant, etc. You need to invest in your business so that it can grow, you can’t wait for your business to grow before investing in it.

Be honest with yourself with how much time you are spending having conversations with prospect. This will enable you to release the work that is keeping you busy and that isn’t growing your business. 

Remember: Your time should not be diluted on 100 different things that is not growing your business – align your time with your goals.

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#14 Why goal setting and planning suck

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I hate planning - I really do. I'm the kind of gal who likes to fly by the seat of her pants; who likes to let inspiration take hold and GO GO GO!

There are so many reasons I hate it - any of these sound familiar?

  • I don't have time

  • I'm not ready for planning

  • Planning stifles my creativity

  • I'm doing fine without it

  • I don't follow the plans anyways!

  • It's all in my head so I don't need to write it down

If you've thought any of these things, let's keep talking and I'll tell you why I DO plan, even though I still think and feel these things on a regular basis. 

I don't have time

This is never going to go away - you're always going to have too much to do. You need to book in the time.

If you don't COMMIT to the time, you're not going to get things done. You need to figure out how to commit - do you need a coach? Do you need an accountability partner? Do you need to book a day out of your office somewhere to work on?

If you don't stop and think about your business, you end up missing all the places you have money you can be saving or making, all the places you can be saving time, or all the places that need re-evaluating.

You might be amazed how much extra time and money you find just stopping for a day and thinking about what you're doing and why.

I'm not ready

There are so many times when I'm talking to people and they tell me they aren't ready to work with a coach or stop and work on planning because they don't know what they want to do next.

I get it, you don't want to waste time working on the wrong thing; it's easier to stick with the status quo for now.

HOWEVER, if you don't stop and try to figure it out, if you don't talk to a coach or go through a workbook on planning, you're never going to make the time to get ready and you're going to keep running on that hamster wheel indefinitely. 

Don't let 'not feeling ready' stop you from taking the next step in your business. 

It stifles my creativity / I won't do it anyways

This is a BIG one for me. I never know what I want to do next. I don't want to be told what to do. This makes wanting to sit down and decide far in advance what will be happening next extremely unappealing to me.

The important thing to remember here is that we need to set realistic expectations when it comes to the results of our planning. Not every single thing we plan is going to work out. Not every single plan is going to be the right decision for us. We need to be ready to learn, explore, and experiment. If we make plans and decide in a month that we made the wrong plan and need to change it - that's OK. It also doesn't mean that the time you took planning was a waste of time. You learned a lot from making the plan and then figuring out what about that plan isn't something you want to do in your business.

Here's the other thing - when you think about planning that doesn't work for you, maybe you're thinking about the wrong kind of planning!

Not every method of planning works for every person. If you balk at the idea of step-by-step plans with dates attached, maybe you need to be more flexible with the way you plan and come up with ideas. Be willing to experiment and play to your strengths.

It's all in my head and that's working fine!

Getting things out of your head so you can look at it from a different angle is so important. It's really hard to get a true picture of everything when it's in your head. Things get forgotten, and you can't think of every possibility. You need to see things from other perspectives. 

While a lot of the times we can easily talk ourselves out of doing the planning because we're so busy, we don't feel ready or we feel it's going to be a waste of time, the truth is that it IS worth the time and effort to stop and re-evaluate. I challenge you to commit to some planning and goal setting for your business in the next month and see what happens!

What to do next

1) Book time to work on your business

2) Bring someone else in to help support you: a coach, a friend, or take a course. Find a person you can talk things through with.

3) Don't be afraid of planning - there is a system for each style of thinking and way of working - you just need to figure out what the right system is for you.

4) Set realistic expectations - if you think that you're suddenly going to make 100% more profit once you do some planning and it doesn't work, you're going to be really frustrated. Know that a lot of this is all about just spending time thinking - not every idea of plan is THE best one, but the act of doing the planning will help you in the long run.

5) Stop keeping everything in your head - talk it out to someone and get their feedback, voice record yourself and listen back to it, or just write it down. Take the time to see what things look like when it's more than just ideas floating around in your head.

If you're looking for more support you can:
 

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