Take Charge of Your Business – Step 2: Planning

Now that you have a handmade business vision, of course you'll want to make a plan to make that vision  reality.

Now I'm not going to pretend all this stuff is easy.  It's simple but it's not easy.

The difficulty comes from within ourselves, doesn't it?  It feels uncomfortable.  It feels yucky.  Both visioning and planning bring up all these thoughts and feeling we'd rather not have.

That's why before we even go any further and talk about different ways to plan, I want you to do something first.

Let's Make The Difficult a Bit Easier:  Exercise for Power and Confidence

Have you ever wanted to feel awesome at will?  Cool.  Here's how.  Try out this NLP exercise for feeling powerful and self-confident in 5 minutes or less.

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Next, lets talk about Goals and Planning.

How do you make those visions and dreams come true?  Well it's not by wishing, that's for sure.

As you may suspect (but fervently hoped was not the case), you need to plan and execute said plan for things to happen.

There are a bunch of different methods, but here are three of the biggies

3 Killer Strategies to Make Visions a Reality

In the real world, successful business owners tend to mix and match these strategies to suit the purpose, and you should too.

Here are the 3 strategies that seem to make the most sense of most people:

1. The Backwards Planning Method

The backwards planning method is based on a simple concept.  All you do is work backwards from your desired end state and map out what needs to happen in order for that end state to become a reality.

Essentially you:

• Develop a clear understanding  of where you want to go.

• Map out the steps to get you there.

Learn more about the Backwards Planning Method

2. The Grand Vision Method

I'm not sure whether this goal achievement method has a "real" name but I just call it the Grand Vision Method.

The Grand Vision Model, like the Backwards Planning Method, focuses heavily on strategy and action, but less on formal "planning".  By this I mean that there is a lot less laid out up front.  For those who aren't really sure how to get where they are going, this method may be easier to handle (at least at the outset).

Learn more about the Grand Vision Goal Achievement Method

3. The Kaizen Method (or the Continuous Improvement Method)

Kaizen was created in Japan following World War II. The word Kaizen means "continuous improvement". It comes from the Japanese words 改 ("kai") which means "change" or "to correct" and 善 ("zen") which means "good". (source: what is kaizen)

Kaizen is even less of a planning method than the Grand Vision method and a lot less exciting and inspiring, but is a great method for results you can quantify, and because you test small things, and make small improvements that add up over time, Kaizen is a wonderful goal achievement method to add to your arsenal of jewelry success strategies.

The way I use Kaizen is to test and observe results from changes to different elements of my website and my marketing, and based on the results, I make tiny incremental improvements over time.

How to Kaizen Your Way to Goal Achievement

Here's a simple kaizen split-test you can use to improve a webpage or marketing strategy

• Choose a goal
• Look for a way to achieve that goal
• Create an experiment using a control and a test
• Evaluate results
• Set up a new test using the winner as the new control and devise a new test

Here's how to use this split-testing method in practice.

So there you are.  Three methods for goal achievement that can be mixed and matched to any business whether big or small.  What do you think?

About the Author

Related Links and Resources:

Simpleology: The Science of Getting What You Want -- The first place I came across the backwards planning model
Backward Planning is not just for military people -- cute post on Life Lessons of a Military Wife
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity -by David Allen
The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life -by Leo Babauta
One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way- by Robert Maurer

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Possibly Related Posts

1. Take Charge of Your Business – Step 1: Vision
2. The Backwards Planning Method for Goal Achievement (for Jewelry Makers)
3. How to Make Your Goals a Reality the Easy Way: The Grand Vision Goal Achievement Method