How To Achieve Your Financial Goals In Business

The second part of the SMARTER-life-GROWTH approach is about creating a plan to achieve those SMARTER goals.  And it goes like this:

Goals

Reality

Options

Way forward

Tactics

Habit

Example Plan

Goals

We’ve already worked on creating your goals in the previous section – if you haven’t done that yet, I’d advise going back and working on your goals before getting going on this section.

Reality

This is about establishing where you are right now in relation to your goal.  Try to line it up with some of the aspects of your goal:

“I am earning on average £1400 per month and my average order value is £300.  I am attracting about 5 potential customers into my group each month, but they don’t seem very engaged”.

Options

We want to see what options we have that will help us achieve our goals, and this is a two-step process.  The first step is to perform a SWOT analysis – if you haven’t heard of it before, don’t panic – it’s really not too difficult to get your head around.  The second step is to use your SWOT analysis to identify several options that will help you achieve your goal.

SWOT Analysis:

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  So, all you need to think about is your personal strengths and weaknesses when it comes to doing business, and any opportunities and threats there may be to your business, the industry, the economy (for example whether or not we are in a recession…or a global pandemic). 

The next stage is to come up with several options based on what you wrote in your SWOT analysis.

For example: I could focus my efforts online and leveraging my abilities with Facebook (based on a threat of not being able to network in person because of the pandemic as a way of gaining leads)

Way Forward

At this stage, we look at the different options we have in front of us, and decide which will be the best/fastest/cheapest/most likely to succeed.

Depending on the type of person you are, a simple pro & con list might be the best way to decide.  Or go with your heart, one option will seem exciting and motivating, while another will make you feel tired before you even start.

Tactics

Way forward is big picture, strategy – the direction you are going to go with your business.  Tactics is more about creating a step by step plan to make that happen.  This part will also help with your reflections at the end; if you have written down your step by step guide, then you can use it as an aide memoire to help you identify any weak areas of your process.

Flesh this out in as much detail as you can, I’ll put a superficial plan below, but you will want something much more in depth for your business.

1. Create a Facebook group and update my profile to include a link to my group, make sure there are some public posts that would display my bsuiness and change my cover photo to something that supports my business.
2. Post to my group twice daily, and over the week, the split of posts will be 5 sales posts in every 14 posts.  The other posts will be either sharing other people’s interesting content, creating tutorials or little images with quotes or pretty pictures with the aim of increasing engagement.
3. To acquire more group members, I will share some tutorials etc into Business and Selling groups on Facebook with a link back to my group.

etc…

Habits

Any part of your plan that involves repetitive actions will be MUCH easier if you create a habit around doing it.  

For example, if you plan to post to your Facebook group twice every day, then choose an activity that you do twice a day, that will act as a trigger to remind you to post.  It could be brushing your teeth; brush your teeth and it reminds you to go and open your laptop and post something interesting to your group.  Or if you’ve already pre-prepared your images, you could sit on the toilet after you’ve done your teeth (with the lid down…I’m not suggesting anything else…although you can if you want!!) and post from your phone.

Have a look back at your tactics plan and see what repetitive items you could create a habit around.

Here’s a link to an article about habit forming that I think is just brilliant:

How to Build a New Habit: This is Your Strategy Guide