Simple Goal Planning and Strategy For Your Small Business

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm majoring names today I'm gonna be sharing with you some simple goal planning techniques to help you succeed in your business. I'll also provide you with five value-based questions to ask yourself when strategizing. This is helpful whether you're a veteran business center are just starting out. But first, a little background about my experience. I owned a design studio focusing on branding, graphic design, and web design. I'm also a surface designer. This is where I license my artwork to companies for their products all over the world. Worked 12 years and the services marketing industry, specifically on branding and business planning. Ironically though, when I started my own business, I found the task of business planning to be incredibly overwhelming. And that's because plans can typically be tedious, long and incredibly involved. Now, there's a place for that, but I find that small businesses gain better traction when you have a simplified goal planning and strategy process. In this class, I will walk you through setting up a simple plan comprised of short and long-term business and that I implemented in my own business. And we'll help you thrive in yours. I will also walk you through a sample strategy session that will help you think about your business in its engagement with your client and customers. You will learn why goal planning is important for your business. How to gold plan and make it your best friend. And simple strategy for both rookies and veteran business owners alike. After this class, I hope you'll walk away with the action steps you need to start achieving your goals today. So maybe in the next video we'll get started. 2. Why Goal Planning?: You may wonder, is gold-plating really that important for my business? While in case you need to hear it, the answer is yes. The y, simply PUT, planning out your business schools sets you up for success. It holds you accountable to your goals and nothing feels better than putting a check mark next to something you set out to accomplish. Although goal planning may sound overwhelming, it really does help paint a clear picture for your business. It clears your head of all the clutter and allows you to focus on the tasks at hand that will ultimately help you get to the finish line. And finally, it allows you to look ahead and edit your goals as needed. So next is the way pop quiz. One. Should you review and revise your business goals? At the beginning of the year? We sat them be only at the end of the year to see how far you've come or C at the beginning and end of the year. That was a trick question because the answer is all the time. You should really check back on your plan periodically and think of it as your guide. Also things in life change. So remember to be flexible and edit as necessary. We'll cover this more in depth in the later videos. Speaking of, let's actually get started gold printing. Meet me in the next video and I'll show you how. 3. Simple Goal Planning For Your Business: Cleaning out your business goals can be overwhelming. But the good news is it doesn't have to be. In fact, it can become your new best friend because when you break those goals down into time milestones, it becomes much more attainable. I'll show you what I mean. We start the process by stating your big picture plans. This is a statement of where you want your business to be by the end of the year or the end of your planning year. If you're wanting to, let's say, start a new business, that would be your big picture plan. If you're an existing business and perhaps want to start on a new service or product line and to add a new revenue stream, those would be your big picture plans. We'll dive into an example shortly. Next would be listing the action items that will make your big picture plane happen. We break this down by what I like to call time milestones. You'll lists these items on paper to help lay out a picture of what you need to do in order to reach the finish line. You'll revisit these goals periodically throughout the year and edit them as necessary. These templates can be found in the resources section and we'll go over it in your class project. Okay, so first step is going to be the long-term milestones. These are the larger projects that you know, you'll need to succeed in that big picture plan. They're the furthest goals on the timeline to accomplish and may not be the clearest, but it's important to get them down on paper and out of your head. They also helped lay the foundation for the other milestones you're gonna list. Next one would be identifying those midterm milestones. This supports the long-term, which eventually is going to support your big picture plan. The third step would be your short term milestones. These are the steps that will take you the shortest amount of time to complete their going to support the midterm, which in turn supports the long-term, which all works towards, you guessed it, The big picture plan. So finally we break down this time milestones and to task that you'll accomplish daily and weekly. Not only is it a great deal into checkoff those action items, there also small steps you're taking and progressing towards success. Now, let's look at a real-life example. As mentioned in my introduction, after many years and working in corporate marketing, I decided to start my own branding and web design business. Here's a snippet of my year one goal planning process. This truly helped me in launching my business and avoid that parallelizing overwhelm that comes with the changes. So let's walk through this. First my day picture plan was to start my own branding and design studio catering to mid-size corporate clients. For my first year, I only had this one big picture plan because while it was a big one, so I gave myself a full year to get this all going. Next, I needed to list those long-term milestones that would support the big picture. Two of those examples were to build a list of ten corporate clients, and the other was to build an email list of potential clients. Then I chose the midterm milestones that would support the long-term. Those were to build a website and sign up for social media platforms. And also to write a library of articles creating value for my email list subscribers. So you'll see that those midterm milestones do indeed support the long term. Building a website and signing up for the social media platforms was gonna give me exposure and credibility to market to those potential clients. In writing that library of articles would be content that I'm going to send out eventually to my email list. So next was to choose the short-term milestones that would support the midterm. These were items that I could accomplish in the shortest amount of time. So for me personally that year, this took me one to three months to complete those. We're choosing a business name and researching potential corporate clients and email platforms. So there was, there were other milestones that were listed for these, but these are just examples to show you. So now that my time milestones were listed, it was time to put them into daily and weekly tasks. So every week for me personally, that was Sunday evenings, I would fill out my planner with daily tasks that I would that would actually contribute to my time milestones. So here's a snippet of some daily tasks that supported those. Remember how I mentioned it's important to be flexible though. Well, this goes for your daily and weekly tasks as well. Things happen, days get derailed by unplanned circumstances. And I'm here to tell you that it's OK. Just re-evaluate every week and adjust as needed. Keep moving forward little by little and you will get there. So also included in your packet is a quarterly planning sheet, which I found really helpful in my first planning year and I continue to use it because quarterly planning helps you evenly distribute those projects so that you can avoid overwhelm and arrange your personal life. And also it's just really simply taking those time milestones and laying them out on a quarterly calendar. Now, if you notice, I do not mention timeframes for milestones because every business is different. So in this example, this is my first year planning. It took me a year to skit that business up and running. So I broke my milestones once I had them all written down. I broke them down by quarter. And you'll see, for example, January through March or my short-term milestones. So those are the shortest time to complete, all the way down to quarter four, which were by long-term. So the point is, every business is different and you may have a big picture plan that would like that you would like to accomplish in about six months. Or you may have to Big Picture plans and one's gonna take longer to establish than the other. So the way that you chart your milestone timeline is up to you. 4. Strategy Questions: Whether you're starting a new business or running an established one, it's paramount to know Your Brain value e, and your audience. There are in-depth business plans that really dive into your brand's persona and your target clients. But since we're on the topic of keeping things simple, I'm providing you with simplified value-based questions for your business. Just five questions to help you think about your brand's personality and who you want to attract, as in the clients or customers that will ultimately purchase your products and engage your services. Answering these questions will also help you hone in on your marketing and advertising strategies for the future. This would actually be a good exercise to go through before you start your goal planning. Because it helps you align those goals as it relates to your brand's value and ideal clients. So here's an example of a few notes that I jotted down for my own business. I revisit this sheet once a year and have edited it based on interesting opportunities that arose and how my goal's evolved from the past year. So you'll see that questions 125 formulate your company's position. You can also repurpose this verbiage and the About sections or mission statement on our website and social media platforms. Questions 34 really helped guide who you advertise to and where. Because these questions help you think about your target audience. So for example, if you sell handmade items on Etsy and your ideal client is a quilter. There are probably more inclined to see your work and products on visual platforms like Instagram or Pinterest, rather than a corporate platform like Linkedin. This helps you focus your efforts on one or two channels versus trying to be everywhere to everyone. Okay, so now that you have the tools, let's review your class project in the next video. 5. Class Project: Congratulations, you made it through the class. Now it's time to put all of these resources and to action for your business first into the brand value questionnaire. Remember, this is useful to both new and veteran business owners. Next, write your own plan using the simple goal planning packet. Refer back to the goal planning videos for help on structuring your plan. All of these templates can be found in your resources section. And finally, posts a sample or your progress to the project gallery so I can cheer you on and provide you with feedback. Once you complete your goal planning, I promise that you will feel weight lifted when you can sit back and look at your map to success. 6. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking my class. I hope this leaves you ready to take action in your own business. And remember, this is splitting does not have to be overwhelming. Just take one step at a time and use those goal planning sheets as your trusty guide. If you enjoy taking this class, please consider leaving me a review and following my page for future classes and updates. You can also follow my graphic design and surface design studios on Instagram. Best of luck, and I will see you soon.