What's Your Plan?
Posted On: 2015-11-20
Friday ... oh how I love Fridays ... they are the gateways to two days of doing stuff out of the office. I can sit here with a cup of coffee on a Friday and plan two days of doing things that I want to do.
I can dream of going places, wineries, cafes, the beach, the markets and all those places where I don't have to think about websites or marketing or clients who want to give me crap and expect me to turn it into something special.
Unfortunately this Friday, as I sit here with a cup of coffee, my planning and thinking is about welding. Yes ... welding ... I'm sure there is something exciting about welding that my partner and I can conjure up to keep a new client, on an extremely tight deadline, happy.
That's what we will be doing over this weekend, trying to get excited about welding.
Hopefully your weekend will be full of more interesting and exciting things but in case it isn't then let me suggest something that you should be doing this weekend.
I know that you are probably very busy, not only have you got all your porn work to do but it's getting closer to Thanksgiving and Christmas so you are probably helping someone with the preparations for those festivities but there is something else that you should be doing.
Planning ... that is what you should be doing in any spare time you might have this weekend. You should be planning for next year and you should be committing that plan to paper.
Committing those plans to paper is not like setting them in concrete. You are not committing yourself to a course of action that you have to follow for the next 12 months without a single deviation.
Committing those plans to paper is merely giving you a snapshot of what you are thinking right now and where you hope to go in the next 12 months. If you carve it into a block of concrete then I guess that it is set in concrete but if you write it with a pencil it becomes infinitely adjustable.
If conditions change in a month or two then a little bit of eraser here and another little bit of eraser there and your plans can change completely but by committing it to paper you will always have a clear idea of what your goals are for the next 12 months ... and that is very important.
But what should you be planning? The obvious answer to that one is that you should be planning on expanding your business. Long gone are the days when a business that stayed the same and never changed could survive. These days a business that doesn't expand is little more than one step away from drawing its last gasp and none of us want to see our business die.
So, how are you going to expand your business? What more can you do by yourself to grow your business? What areas are you going to expand your business into? What will you need to grow your business and tackle the challenges of those new areas you want to reach into?
You may not have the faintest idea of how to answer most of those questions but once you sit down to plan for the future your brain will begin to focus on those challenges and give you some hints and suggestions on what you need to do and how you need to do it.
Your sub-conscious absorbs far more than you realise. There is a wealth of knowledge and solutions to your problems locked up in that part of your brain and it can come out when you sit down to plan and dream about what comes next.
Directions that you might want to go in could look as though they are littered with insurmountable problems but just give your sub-conscious a chance to become a little more conscious and you may see that there's nothing that you can't overcome.
Just try it, you might be surprised at just where you can go and what is achievable in the next 12 months.
On the other hand you could do no planning at all and just go on doing the same old thing day after day and week after week but you know what that will lead to even if you won't admit it to yourself. It doesn't matter what business you are in, when you don't change and don't grow you start going backwards.
So be brave, be bold and do some planning this weekend and see where you can go in the future.