I am often asked what comes first, the desire or the means? The question of the chicken or the egg springs to mind.
It is a fact that the lifestyle you want, that new house, new car, gym membership, holidays or the other choices you desire, depends on the business that you build. As your business and therefore your income grows, your desires may grow too – you can begin to dream bigger.
Although, having said that I also believe our dreams shape our action and our motivation to execute!
Your personal and business goals need to align if you have any chance of achieving the lifestyle you desire and the one your hard work deserves. For example, if you want a new car, then your business has to generate the profits and cash to make that happen.
In my December webinar on cracking the plan for 2024, we looked at the question of what’s stopping you from upgrading your lifestyle to the one you desire?
The answer is your business!
If you want a different lifestyle, then you often have to change your business strategy, model and execution to help make it happen.
But how?
It begins by you becoming a leader in your business rather than a practitioner. You as an individual have a finite amount of time and resource to put into your business, if you are the practitioner, then your business has a finite amount of growth.
Stop compromising
We often get more of what we tolerate. If you accept missing the school play, or constant long hours then you have no drive to put a stop to it. Say ‘no’ to the shiny thing that’s distracting you from your aim, extend deadlines to give yourself more time. It’s your business, run it how you want to.
Stop trying to do everything
You probably started your business as a ‘technician’ with the desire to bring your service or product to market with greater skill, care, quality than others. To grow your business into a vehicle for the lifestyle you want you have to step away from trying to work IN it and doing all the marketing, sales, strategy and customer service, and start delegating, automating or outsourcing the parts you don’t want to do.
Become proactive rather reactive
This is a tough one, and a problem I come across in a lot of the businesses I work with. Firefighting and paying attention to urgent problems often take your attention away from the things that will have a bigger and more positive impact on your business.
Preparing for potential obstacles and having trigger points in place should help you move on quickly and get back to developing your business.
Also, remember to give yourself permission to do the proactive things and not the things you’ve previously associated as the most important. It’s a habit change!
Get systemised
If your systems, processes or plans are in disarray then it stands to reason that your progress will be too. Get into healthy business habits that follow a rhythm to help you stay on track. Make sure you’re accountable to someone other than yourself, be they a mentor or a family member to help you stay focused.
Review and look ahead
This simple tool will help you look at what happened last year and what you learned from it, so you can move ahead with greater clarity. Download your copy here.
Put some numbers on it!
Consider what your dream life could be. What would it look like? Then cost that out and establish how much your business needs to provide for you as an income to give you that live. Then using your current numbers, revenue, profit, number of customers, number of leads, conversion rates etc, then calculate what numbers your activity needs to deliver in the year to give you that lifestyle. I have a one page spreadsheet that I’m happy to talk through with you if it helps you work out your numbers. I hope these thoughts have been helpful to you. The webinar on this topic ran for an hour and we got into much finer details of what income you need and what it will take to get it. If you’d like to hear more, then let’s have a conversation.