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Are You Limiting Your Income In 2010?

Written by: Laura Posey

Article Overview: It is planning time again! This time of year many of us are looking back at the past year and deciding what we are going to do for the next year. It is a time of reflection as well as a time to get excited about what the future holds. I spend a lot of my time in December helping clients get strategic plans for the coming year in place. Each time I work with a new client, I am surprised at the way many of them have been to taught to plan and how those teachings keep them earning far less than they are capable. Here is one of mytop suggestions for planning for 2010.

Are You Limiting Your Income In 2010?

It is planning time again! This time of year many of us are looking back at the past year and deciding what we are going to do for the next year. It is a time of reflection as well as a time to get excited about what the future holds. I spend a lot of my time in December helping clients get strategic plans for the coming year in place. Each time I work with a new client, I am surprised at the way many of them have been to taught to plan and how those teachings keep them earning far less than they are capable. Here is one of mytop suggestions for planning for 2010.

Planning your business properly is much like planning a long car trip. If you were headed out on a long vacation, the first thing you would do is decide where you wanted to go. That is, you’d look far out into the future and pick your destination.

Sadly many business people have been taught to plan based on where they have been rather than where they are going. To determine this year’s sales goals, they look back at last year, add a small percentage of growth to those numbers and declare the new number to be their goal.

The worst part of this type of thinking is its crushing blow to creativity. When you look backwards to plan your growth your brain starts to think, “well, all I have to do is a little more of what I’ve done and I’ll hit the goal.” There is no need to be creative, to think of new avenues for revenue generation. You can simply work a little harder and make your numbers and your brain knows it.

If you want to grow significantly, you have to look out five, ten or even twenty years and figure out where you’d like to be, then work backwards from there to determine next year’s goals.

For example, I was working with a client a few weeks ago who has a million dollar company. When I asked what he thought he wanted to accomplish in the next year he said $1.3 million in sales. After going through an exercise and determining that he really wanted to be a $10 million company in the long run, he decided he wanted to do $2 million in sales in 2010.

What is interesting about this process is that once you set a high goal for the next year, your brain immediately starts to work on how it is going to get there. New ideas suddenly pop up and your creativity really kicks into high gear. You see opportunities that didn’t exist with the smaller goal. Your brain is a problem solving machine and if you give it a big enough problem, it will access all of its resources to solve it.

If you are starting your planning process now, begin with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey says. Look forward and choose your ultimate destination, then pick a point somewhere along the road to shoot for this coming year. You’ll be amazed at the results you can achieve if you strive for them.

If you need help with this process, check out the upcoming webinar on this topic.

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Article Tags: marketing, motivation, sales, sales tips, small business



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Re: What are your success criteria? - [quote="DwayneGarrett":1igrdgib]Out of curiousity, what has to be present for you to know that your business is a success? The top three things for me are: 1. Maintaining a 6 figure income year in and year out. 2. Creating and promoting my own products. 3. Income not solely dependent upon my personal effort. How about yours?[/quote:1igrdgib] I would have to say mine were: 1. Monthly Residual Income that exceeds all expenses by 110% 2. Free time to create and promote my own products (relies on #1) 3. 5% of all revenues generated by my team going to feed starving kids Now that is "feel good work".
Re: The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity - Hi Evan, Thanks for a great article and video on 'The 3 Factors That are Limiting Your Productivity'. I think that no matter whether you are self employed like myself or a CEO with staff, it is so important to manage your time so as to maximize the benefit to your business. Your expression Eliminate; Automate; Delegate is easy to remember and will certainly stick in my mind. There are many good business ideas out there but they will ultimately run into difficulty without proper planning and execution so these tips will certainly help. I have also left this comment on the article and will place a link to it on my blog. regards, Mal.
What are your success criteria? - Out of curiousity, what has to be present for you to know that your business is a success? The top three things for me are: 1. Maintaining a 6 figure income year in and year out. 2. Creating and promoting my own products. 3. Income not solely dependent upon my personal effort. How about yours?
Internet Marketing Conference on SLife - I've been trying to log in but it keeps crashing.. anyways.. a friend of mine in BC plans on holding Internet Marketing Conferences on SecondLife and have the same top internet marketers that would normally be in Live Internet Marketing conference speak. Income will be generated from admission charges, product sales during breaks, sponsor tables, etc etc.. Just to get the ideas flowing in your head that anything you can do in the real world can be replicated in SL. There is no planned date as of yet for this conference.
Re: Did you reach your goal this year? - So what can we do to help each other to achieve our goal in year 2010?


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