P-P-P-P-P-P

What’s with the title you might be thinking? It stands for Proper Planning Prevents P*ss Poor Performance! It’s a saying I have been aware of for some time, since I was maybe 15 and doing my exams in school!

I may have been aware of it, but I NEVER put it into practice. Not until last week anyway. As part of Module 1 on of Alex Jeffrey’s coaching I had to go ‘Forward to basics’. It’s often a part of business which is overlooked. People see their destination, but they have no idea how to get there! Would you go on a long journey without a map to ‘plan’ your route?

Running a business is exactly the same. You need to have an idea of where you want to go and what you want to achieve, then you can start working towards how you intend to do it!

Imagine trying to shoot a target…if I blindfolded you, spun you round and told you to hit the bull’s eye, could you do it or would you call me crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazier, if I took the target away and told you to hit it!

Now apply this to business. If you have no targets, how will you get anywhere? I may be boring you by now, but these are the basics to being successful, so stay with me, and I guarantee you will gain something for the few extra minutes you keep reading!

Start by doing what is called a ‘braindump’. You write down all your ideas and goals. These can be things you want to do personally, like buying yourself a Ferrari or going to a place you have always wanted to visit, entrepreneurial goals or business goals. Entrepreneurial goals are skills you as a person want to learn, and you can take these to any business. This may be something like copywriting, and this skill can be used in any business you are ever involved in. A business goal might be to obtain 500 sales of your new product or get 1500 subscribers on your mailing list.

This braindump can be organised into a mind map. I recommend using some free software called Mindmeister. It’s really easy to use and best of all, it’s FREE!

Once you have completed your mind map, you need to prioritise the tasks you have written down. So high priority tasks will be A, less important tasks will be B and the rest will be C. In my case, I need to get a blog set-up this time last week, so in my column A I had my blog as my first priority. I also needed a header, but it wasn’t necessary for me to run a blog so that went in column B. I hope you’re seeing how your plans and goals start to take shape to start forming your ‘map to success’.

Once you have your columns, you need to prioritise again. So you number all the tasks in order of importance. This is now a list of every task you need to complete, in order of importance. So all that you need to do is get working at it, cross it off and move on!

Now I’m not saying that this is the plan and you have to stick to it. It’s completely flexible. When you did you initial plan, you couldn’t predict what would happen in the future, so we need to be able to tweak things. It might be that you hit an obstacle, so what you would do is plan how to overcome that obstacle, and then you have a new path to your original goal. I recommend reviewing your plan at least once a month, at the start, maybe even twice a month. It won’t take you long, but it will keep you on track.

I really didn’t used to like the idea of planning, but now I can see it is essential if you want to success and grow your business. So…get planning and move forward!

Feel free to leave any comments, I love listening to what people have to say, and if you can add anything to what I have said, or even disagree then let me know!

Thanks for reading

Dave

Tagged as: Alex, Braindump, Business Goal, Business Goals, Copywriting, Entrepreneurial Goals, Ferrari, Free Software, Long Journey, Map, Module 1, Poor Performance, Running A Business, Ss, Subscribers, Target, Targets