When you’re trying to grow your business in the midst of dealing with the day-to-day, it can be overwhelming. How do you think about the future when you’re fighting today’s fires?
Overwhelm often comes from a lack of clarity. In fact, Clarity is the #1 solution to eliminating overwhelm when you’re growing your business. When you have clear, measurable goals and objectives, you know where to focus so you can make a bigger impact by serving more customers.
To get started today, here is the process we use with clients in our Millions By Design system to get clear on your target objective.
1. Setting Future Targets
In the Millions by Design system, we start by looking at what you want for your business growth. In this step, we want you to imagine that it is one year from now. You are looking back over the past year and you’re really happy about your results. What would those results be?
In this step, we focus on 3 significant metrics for business owners and entrepreneurs: gross revenue, net profit, and time spent working.
- Gross Revenue: What would you like your business’ gross revenue to be in one year from now?
Imagine yourself looking over your business’ finances, one year from now. What number would make you happy to see on that top gross revenue line? This is your target revenue.
- Net profit: What do you want the business’ net profit to be one year from now?
Pro Tip: When doing this activity, keep in mind that this is only for your reference – you don’t have to share this with anyone. So write down the numbers you want. There is no right or wrong answer. This is to simply clarify where you want your business to be.
- Time: How much time you would like to spend working each week?
Have you ever asked yourself this question? As a business leader, you have many different responsibilities, but studies prove overworking leads to burnout – and you can’t run a business if you’re burned out. You don’t have to suffer through overwhelm to grow your business. You can actually grow your business and work less if you want. (It’s OK if you want to work more too, as long as it doesn’t create burnout.)
2. Where You Are Now
Next, we want to paint a clear picture of the current state of your business. To align with your goals, focus on the same 3 factors as in the last step. To complete this, pull up your current financial records and answer these questions:
- Gross Revenue: What’s your gross revenue over the past 12 months?
- Net Profit: What’s your net profit?
- Time: How much time do you currently work on average?
Pro Tip: Try to be as accurate and honest as you can be when answering this. Dig in and validate your assumptions. As we’ve seen with our clients, it’s not uncommon to overestimate or underestimate this number.
3. Bridging the Gap
This next step is really simple. We want to figure out how far you are from your target objective. To do this, we use simple subtraction. Just subtract your current state from your target objective for your Gross Revenue, Net Profit and Time. This is the gap you’re going after in the next step of the Millions By Design system.
Now you have clarity about your current situation, your target objective or goals for where you want to be and the gap to fill to get you from here to there.
What do you do now that you have this clarity? FOCUS!
In the next step, we narrow your focus on the gap between where you are and where you want to be. You can’t focus on business growth if you’re doing too many things that don’t get you to your goals. When you have clarity on your objective, you can more effectively problem-solve and eliminate the roadblocks standing between you and your vision.
If you are serious about growing your business with less stress and overwhelm, take our FREE online training and Millions By Design Assessment.
