It’s almost the middle of February now, the excitement of the new year is well and truly wearing off.
The kids are back to school, the traffic is back to normal and you are back in your creative space.
photo credit: Christmas w/a K
There are no more excuses as to why you haven’t done what you need to do for your business. You need to have a plan for 2011, because without a plan you have no idea how close you are to succeeding. It’s like a train timetable, if we didn’t have them we would have no idea how late the train was.
If you are a small business or want to be one, you need to have a plan. A start, a middle and an end. Things change and you can’t always stick to the plan, but you need to at least know what on earth it is that you want or I can tell you from experience, you ain’t never going to get it.
Write it down. Look it over. Scribble it out if you have to. And write it again.
Plans put you ahead of all the other people who couldn’t get around to writing it down.
You need to plan your money too. We hate doing this. But we need to know where we are right now and what we are spending.
If you have been doing this a while you will know that you can get sucked in to buying supplies for your business. If you’re new, learn from me: don’t. You do not need to buy anything until you work out how you are going to get it out that door again into someone else’s home. Don’t make your life a giant storage container. It’s no fun.
Make a plan for your supplies. If you can’t think long term a one month plan will do. Supplies can suck your business of cash so fast you won’t know what happened. Learn your limit and start to stick to it.
I’m sure I sound like a meanie, but it’s the truth. Get honest with yourself – know your numbers and remember that it’s a real life business that you’re running not some make-believe trial run.
You want 2011 to work for you. I want 2011 to work for you. So let’s do this thing.
Don’t pretend you have no time, make some. It is what your business needs from you.
If you don’t have a business plan and are not sure how to make one Tricia McKellar is offering a fantastic workbook if you sign up to her mailing list. It’s been really helpful to me. It’s not an affiliate link, just a really useful document.
Have you got your plan sorted for 2011? Or do you need to get serious and get on it? Tell me in the comments.
Hahaha … uh … er … guilty. I still haven’t written out my budget and even though I’ve got my official LLC papers, I can admit I don’t have it all together yet. I have been teaching myself HTML/CSS and a bunch of other stuff, trying to catch up to everything I felt I missed while working for an agency the past 3 years, but, still. I don’t have much of an excuse.
At least you’re honest about it. I think it’s when people ignore it that we get ourselves into trouble. I still have a ways to go with my planning too.
I just keep getting ideas.
:)
I need to write things down more than I do… I seem to think I can store all this information in my head, which means important information is forever lost in a feeling of being overwhelmed.
Thanks for your reminder. Tonight I will certainly sit down and be sure to write my plans and my goals for my business.
And I laughed when you mentioned, you can be sucked into buying supplies… I am a lot better than I used to be, but I totally agree. Supplies can suck the life out of your business. A statement that hit a little too close to home. =)
I got so sucked into supplies, you just wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff I had for sewing!
Enjoy writing down your goals and ideas, it’s nice to get them on paper. :)
I write things down a LOT, so when I read the heading – ‘now is the time to get honest’ – it made me think that I need to be honest about how much time I have. So far this year I’ve found myself writing ridiculously unrealistic to do lists each day and then feeling like I’m drowning in unfinished tasks. I need to be realistic about what I can actually fit in to my waking hours, and I need to FOCUS, yes I do.
Oh yes, and supplies. Guilty as charged. Something else I need to work on – don’t buy it unless I’m going to use it. Not ‘someday’, but in the next week.
Thanks as always for the honest, no nonsense, thought provoking post!
Thanks Emily! I’m trying to be honest with my to-do list too. It can be so easy to see a short list as too short but they are not always quick tasks. :)