Canadian Small Business Women

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3 actions to take today to make the last quarter your best quarter yet

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?

 

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

Don’t give up before the miracle happens!

Uchechi

 

So, we’re now entering into the last quarter of the year. If you’re like most people, you started off the year with specific goals and list of accomplishments for 2014. And like most people, you probably either have given up on your goals and vision, or you’re struggling to achieve it. If you’re at the stage where you feel about to give up (or have given up), this post is for you!

At some point in our lives, we come across times of frustration and disappointment. This is especially the case as a business owner. You’ve worked hard, followed the rules and taken steps to create your dream business… however nothing happens. The change you want to see does not seem to be transpiring, and you wonder if you can ever have or create the business that you want. It is at those times that you want to give up and quit.

One of my favourite authors and manifesting teachers, the late Florence Scovel Shinn writes, “Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.” This is a favourite quote of mine, and one that I go to when I come across any setback in my life or business.

The thing is, we will all experience times when we want to give up on our goals. This is particularly the case if you take on something big, that’s outside your comfort zone. The first thought when you come across obstacles is to quit and go back to what is safe and comfortable. However, we all know that staying in our comfort zone does not give us the growth and expansion that we’re meant to have. It’s quite ironic that as humans we resist change and find comfort in what is familiar and what we know. However, we are built to have a need for expansion and to reach beyond where we are. Thus, comes the struggle of life, the need to change and grow, but then resisting that change and growth.

One of the best ways of overcoming this is to stick with the change and work long enough for it to materialize. It’s just a matter of holding on to your vision and doing the work long enough for the miracle to happen and for your dreams to come to fruition. You need to be persistent and cultivate the right mindset to sustain your efforts.  Look how many times Edison attempted to invent the lightbulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” See your journey and ‘set-backs’ as just another step towards the attainment of your dreams.

So, if you’re about to give up, I want to remind you that your miracle is just around the corner. Can you hold on long enough to experience it? Let me know in the comment below.

 

Uchechi Ezurike-Bosse is a Business & Lifestyle Strategist, Speaker and Writer, but most importantly, a proud Mother and Wife. Uchechi is Founder of My Empowered Living (http://www.myempoweredliving.com) a website aimed at helping women shift their mindset and live their passion! Whether it’s starting and building their dream business, or helping them create a lifestyle they crave, Uchechi is the modern woman’s secret to success! Visit Uchechi at www.myempoweredliving.com to get her FREE online video training series The 4 Keys to your Business Success! This free 4-day business training reveals her 4 key strategies needed to build a profitable and successful business, and how to put them to work in your business!