Masterful Marketing » Business Strategy

Resolve to Achieve Your Goals

Debra — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:30:39 +0000

We’re two weeks into the New Year and I bet many people have already broken one of their New Year’s resolutions! Personally I stopped “resolving” to do things a long a time ago because for me, resolutions only resulted in some type of failure.

However, setting proper goals and aligning them with where you want your business to be in 3 – 5 years can help you achieve things you probably never thought you could.

Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T.:

S – Specific about what you want to achieve;
M – Measurable so you can track your progress;
A- Achievable;
R – Relevant to the target market you wish to influence;
T – Time-based, usually a short period of time (no more than a year).

Keep in mind the following tips:

Set no more than 3 goals at a time – Limit yourself to those that you truly want to achieve. We all have a lot of things to get done, but goals should make you reach to achieve, but if you set too many goals, you’ll put too much of a burden on yourself to achieve them.
Write them down – I use a chart (download a template) to create the plan for achieving my goals. Fill in the goal, the actions and the dates you will accomplish each action to get you there. Then print it and keep it visible to you.
Now, follow Chris Brogan’s advice on converting your goals into a keyword equivalent and keep focused on those words for the year.

Now I’ll share my goals with you via the following video clip.

Focusing Your Business

Debra — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:00:28 +0000

One of the hardest exercises for business owners is to determine where they should focus and what they should abandon. Whether it’s determining their ideal target market, outsourcing tasks that don’t drive revenue or eliminating processes that take time and add no value, we all are guilty.

In Valeria Maltoni’s post “What Would You Give Up to Get Back?”, she got me thinking about what I’ve given up to get back some time. When she says:

For your brand, it’s not trying to be all things to all people. Instead, being more focused on the personality it already has and potentially aspire to the one it can achieve.

Business owners are sometimes afraid to focus for fear of leaving money on the table. But to try to be everything to everybody, you never achieve your true purpose, loving what you do and working with those who appreciate what your offer them.

We all make this mistake, usually in the early days of your business. The good news for me is that I tend to be pretty good at turning off the distractions so I can get the client work done (it pays the bills) before I work on my social media marketing plan. So although I’m not turning off Twitter or other social media tools, I do need to work on other areas that by streamlining or eliminating can add more hours to my day.

Here are some areas where I’ve eliminated the clutter and distractions so far this year:

Eliminated formal contracts for an engagement letter. I recently converted my marketing services agreement to a client engagement letter. It covers the important aspects of my relationship with my clients, but it is much simpler.
Focused my service offerings by developing value added packages. By offering value added packaged services, you make it easy for clients to select what they need and simplifies the engagement process. In addition, I’m transitioning my business to more of a coaching / mentoring service with selective consulting engagements giving me more control over my time.
Reduced the amount of subcontracting through me. Sometimes you just have to subcontract out various efforts, but rather than invoice through my company, I’m trying to enable the subs to invoice the client directly. This will happen on a case by case basis depending on my working relationship with the other person. One of my differentiators is to not uplift other people’s rates for my clients, but this sometimes led to me invoicing a client where I didn’t make a dime.
Unsubscribed from many email lists. Sorry folks, but my inbox has been reduce substantially. Offer an RSS feed option to your newsletter so that if I thought it was worthy of keeping, I could convert it over. My goal is to make email primarily a communication vehicle between me and clients. That way I can check email regularly, but avoid the distraction of reading “news”. I schedule some time throughout the day for that.
Reduced in-person meetings with clients. Teleconferences work just fine for most of my client work. The value added service packages above are primarily delivered through teleconferences.

Share your suggestions about how you plan to recover a few more hours each week. The more the merrier because I need a few more hours available each week to work on my passion, get ready for the golf season and stay healthy and happy while doing so.

Small Business Marketing Review

Embracing Change to Grow Your Business

Debra — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:43:15 +0000

My business is in transition. And as I contemplate this transition, I realized that this evolution is the catalyst for growth.

The evolution will involve change. In a recent post, John Jantsch identifies change as the ultimate secret to business growth. And I couldn’t agree more. He provides five ways to intentionally get change into your business which include some great ideas. But before jumping into some of his tactics, I would do a simple exercise:

What’s Your Vision?

First you need to plan where you want your business to be and what it will take to get you there. Dream a little and reach for something challenging! Write your vision for the business as you want it to be, even if just for one year. Going out 3 years is better, but even looking out one year to determine what you want your business to look like and what changes need to take place will help.

Now you need to determine what changes you need to make to get there. If you are continuing to do the same things, you won’t evolve and you won’t achieve your vision. Changes in your business can involve:

Introducing a new service
Launching a new venture
Targeting a new market
Adding more value
Trying new ways of marketing your business

Now determine your goals that will help you realize your vision. The goals you set to achieve the vision need to force you to do things you don’t normally do, that are challenging and uncomfortable for you. Stretch yourself like never before.

Now employ the tactics or activities needed to achieve those goals. This is where John’s suggestions for change come into play.

Now get organized! Take your vision, goals and tactics and create a visual that will keep these things you need to do visible to you. This can be a chart or bulleted list or some other way that works for you.

Vision
- Goal #1
  - Tactics
- Goal #2
  - Tactics

Or:

Make what you need to do visible so that you evaluate all of your activities against them. Eliminate tasks that don’t help you get there if possible, delegate those that you can’t eliminate and focus your efforts entirely on those that help you reach your dream.