At the beginning of the year, we spend time dreaming, planning and goal setting for the coming year. If you’ve worked with me, you know that involves mapping out each of those goals and what it’s going to take for you to achieve them. You also know that we follow that up with assigning deadlines spread throughout the year in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly increments.

It may sound like a lot of work at the outset, but it’s instrumental to the overall health of your business. It ensures that you always have a complete roadmap to refer back to and keep you on track as you go along your way balancing these goals with the demands in all the other areas of your life.

But even with all the planning and road mapping in the world, we all know that life can still creep up. New opportunities can present themselves that, while beneficial at the time, take you a smidge off course from your goals for this year. Detours may need to be called as an unexpected roadblock jumps into your path. These things happen!

And, knowing that these things happen, I encourage all of my clients to book a check-in with themselves and their business at the end of each quarter. By getting these sessions into your calendar in January, you are making a commitment to your business to check-in on your progress and make sure that the goals you’ve set happen.

So what do you do in this session? As we go into the last quarter of the year, here are the three steps I want you to take:

Check-in and assess where you are

The big question to answer here is: Where are you in relation to your plans for the year? How far have you come, or strayed, from the goals you set out to achieve in January?

• Sales are the lifeline of our business: Are you at least 75% of the way towards your revenue targets? If you aren’t, do you have some solid sales initiatives in place to get you there? Are there any natural busy sales season for your industry that you are planning on capitalizing on this quarter? Without sales, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby, which is why this is a MUST area to check-in on during your session.
• Spending time planning and taking on goals that will level up your business is critical to its growth and ongoing success: Where do you stand on these goals? Was this the year you were going to create an online course? How is that coming along? Maybe you wanted to implement systems to help you streamline the administrative side of your business. By this point in time, you should be executing the system you’ve designed, and thinking about what kinks need to be worked out in order to finalize.

 

Evaluate your efforts so far

This step is all about answering the questions: What have you been spending your time doing? What’s worked? What has fallen flat? What do you need to do more of or stop doing?

• You can network every day of the week: Are you networking in places and at events where your ideal client are? If you are, then you should have a healthy sales pipeline that is full of prospective customers, right?
• Before people will buy from you, you have to effectively market your business so they know about you:  Are you marketing yourself where your ideal clients are? Is your sales copy speaking their language? Have you chosen graphics that are visually attractive to them?
• The fortune is in the follow-up: How are you following up with your prospective customers? After you meet them, what is your next move? How are you moving the conversation along to the ‘Ask for the Sale’ point?

 

Plan for the rest of the year

Once you know where you’ve been, it’s time to make some hard choices. What do you have to do to get you to your goals for the year? Some of the answers may push you outside of your comfort zone, and maybe that’s why you’ve been reluctant to ask these questions. But the hard truth: is that by not asking, it’s likely you’ve been holding both you and your business back.

Take the answers to these questions and start outlining what your next steps need to be. Break those tasks down, map out the steps to complete them, and assign deadlines in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly increments.

And, most importantly, do these two things: Put a system in place that works for you to consistently TRACK YOUR EFFORTS, and book time in your calendar to FREQUENTLY CHECK-IN on your progress.REMEMBER: You can’t change what you don’t know about or lose sight of. That’s why we track.

Samantha King is a busy mompreneur and homeschooler with two young children and a couple of businesses at home. When Samantha’s daughter was diagnosed with autism, she had to learn how to keep her priorities aligned within her family, while operating her business at the same time. She is excited to share her knowledge to empower entrepreneurs by giving them the tools they need to do something they love while building sustainable, profitable businesses.  

Contact Samantha:

Tel: 416-885-6841

Email: samantha@fempirebuilders.com

Facebook: @FempireBuilders

Twitter: @FempireBuilders

Instagram: @Fempire_Builders