Before embarking on any kind of journey, especially a business transformational one, you need to get your plan together. The whole point of going into business is to build yourself a better life, with more money, more time and more control. That’s why step one of The Masterplan is Your Life Plan…
There are three key actions in setting your life plan:
- Define your T.E.R.M.S
- Create your life plan and numbers
- Manage your time
And we’ll look at each of these individually…
Define your terms
T.E.R.M.S is an acronym and different for every business owner because they depend on you and you alone. Digging into each one will determine your high pay-off activities for each day and give you focus when you might get distracted by the next shiny thing… They will also help you determine how far you’re willing to go. This is what T.E.R.M.S stands for:
Time
How much time are you going to invest in running your business? This includes working IN it and working ON it – do you want a four-day week? Do you have family commitments you need to be available for? Do you work best early in the morning or later at night? When will you exercise, eat, network?
Start with calculating how much time the essential non-negotiable things take and figure out how much you have left for business.
Effort & Energy
As business owners, we seem to get more of what we tolerate, whether that’s late paying customers, or doing tasks we don’t enjoy. What tasks, or even customers, can you either eliminate or delegate so as to remove that drain on your energy?
Can you automate or simplify anything to further reduce the energy expenditure and boost your productivity?
Resources
What resources do you have, or can you get to put into your business? Can you work from home, or must you have an office for example? Do you need a partner or employee to fill the gaps in your skills or knowledge?
Can you identify any constraints on your resources? For example, how much money can you put in right now? Is your time limited for any reason? Is your workspace limited?
Money
How much money does the business need to generate to provide the lifestyle you want? Money can be looked at from two perspectives:
- Money Now – what you can take out to fund your lifestyle
- Future Money – what you can invest to make more money down the line
The idea is that the invested ‘Future Money’ eventually generates an income of ‘Money Now’ so you can stop putting the hours in.
Sanity
Sanity can also be viewed as compromise. How much hassle grief and missing out are you prepared to go through?
Ask yourself: ‘If this is going to take a year, am I prepared to put everything into it?’.
What if it takes two years, are you still prepared to do whatever it takes? What if it takes three years? This can help you determine where your sanity line is drawn.
With your T.E.R.M.S defined you know what compromises are coming your way and for how long you will have to compromise for, if at all. Remember, these are your terms and what you get out of them depends on how much you’re willing and able to put in.
Create your life plan and numbers
Next, comes your WHY. You can choose:
- Everything you want to BE,
- Everything you want to DO, and
- Everything you want to HAVE in your life…
…over the next five, ten, or even fifteen years. You can choose what success looks like to you. We’re talking vision boards, goal setting and we’re talking aligning your life plan with your business goals.
Creating the numbers side of this plan is what we call your T.E.R.M.S number and that can be worked out by putting a cost to all those things in your life plan you identified earlier – how much does your mortgage cost, private school, club membership, holidays and so on… This is how much money your business needs to generate to reach what you defined as success.
Manage your time
You’ve heard the saying, ‘you can always make more money, but you can’t make more time’. Time is a limited resource so let’s make sure you’re using it to the best advantages.
If we can’t make time, our next best option is to control it. Ask yourself:
- Are you control your on time, or are you distracted, procrastinating or un-motivated?
- Are your working conditions conducive to a productive or creative day?
- Can you stop interruptions – from family, co-workers, delivery people or employees?
- Have you put enough time aside for high pay-off activities?
- Can you carve out a routine – daily, weekly or monthly to work on those things that will bring you closer to your definition of success, instead of doing the day-today client work?
I have some advice on managing your time and creating greater efficiency in my blog, ‘Poor time management can lead to poor performance’. I hope this blog has helped you define what you want from your business and given you a few ideas on how to achieve that. As ever, I am ready and happy to speak to you about anything that has come up for you while reading. Just give me a call and we’ll arrange a chat – remember, I offer options for free business mentoring and consultation. I look forward to hearing from you – Mike.