“If you fail to plan. You plan to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin
We are now in the second half of the year and in order to achieve our business goals, strategic business planning becomes extremely important. As business owners, we are buried in the day-to-day business routine that we often fail to stop and take a holistic or bird’s eye view of our business.
Taking a holistic view of your business is important because it allows you to assess if your business is heading in the right direction and helps you to get realigned with your business vision and purpose.
If you are waiting until the end of the year to assess your performance, then it may be too late to make the necessary changes to improve. While it may be best to assess the performance of your business on a quarterly basis, most small business owners do not. If you are not able to assess your performance quarterly, then you should at least be doing mid-year planning.
Mid-year year planning is all about measuring up against those goals that you set at the beginning of the year (if you did not set any goals for your business this year, you can start on those goals now). As the name suggests, mid-year planning occurs close to the middle of the year, and even though we have passed that point, we still have a few months to end the year in a better place. You will need to consider the following during your mid-year planning:
1) Where are you in accomplishing your financial goals for the year? Are you on track to meeting or exceeding them?
2) If you are not on track to meet or exceed your goals, you will need to figure out why and what you need to change in order to accomplish your goals.
3) What other (nonfinancial) goals do you need to achieve in your business? Please remember that your nonfinancial goals also play a role in your financial performance. For example, your productivity and customer service goals will impact your bottom-line to some extent.
I would like to encourage you to revisit where you were in your business at the beginning of the year. You will need to compare that to where you are today. Even if you are not where you want to be in your business, acknowledging where you are in relation to where you need to go, is an important first step to your success. I believe that you can do whatever you decide to do, but you will need to believe it too.
2017 is a very important year for my business, and I am sure that it is for you as well. I can wholeheartedly say that strategic business planning was one of the things that helped me to improve the performance of my business. One of my top goals was to have more time to travel and explore new places. In order to do so, I had to set the necessary processes in place.
Once I implemented the processes and assembled my team in the first half of the year, I was able to spend the entire month of July in Jamaica. It was a great feeling to know that my business continued even though I was away. While I was in Jamaica, I was able to continue my mid-year planning and enjoy the scenery, food, and people.
My hope is for you to be able to run the business and live the lifestyle that you desire as well. You can do so by setting goals and ensuring that you accomplish these goals by measuring your performance periodically and making the necessary changes to get back on track. I have created some videos on mid-year planning, so you can get in the game and take charge of your financial destiny. Click here to watch them now.
For more information on how you can implement these business planning strategies to help you achieve your business goals, schedule a free session by clicking here.