As an entrepreneur, it can be difficult watching many of your fellow entrepreneurs making big strides in their business. If you’re anything like I used to be, your first instinct may be to get jealous. Or worse, you go into a downward spiral of sadness feeling as though you may never be able to achieve what they have.
Sound familiar? You’ve dreamed for so long about creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet, you aren’t moving forward. You’re still asleep in dream land.
You attend conferences, sign up for free webinars, buy paid training, and sometimes even work with a coach or two. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, you fail to make any progress toward your dreams.
Are you just lazy? Of course not! It’s something worse. You don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan and you’re stuck.
If this sounds like you, fear not! Below is the best way I’ve found to turn a dream into a workable plan. Then, once you have a plan, work the plan, and your dreams will “magically” start coming true!
Start with the long-term dream, but don’t let it overwhelm you!
If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, “Where do you want to be five years from now,” you might have thought it an odd question. But as a business owner, that might just be the most important consideration you can have.
Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there. You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure you’re still headed in the right direction.
However, remember that just because you’re thinking about the long-term, you shouldn’t let it overwhelm you. Instead consider this – the distance from Tampa, Florida to Los Angeles, California is 2,525 miles. But, even if you drive just a few miles a day you’ll eventually arrive at your destination. Which brings us to the next point…
Reverse engineer your long-term dream, and create milestones to use as momentum to keep going
Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.
For example, if in five years you want to be free to travel for 8 weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can happen:
- Enough income to cover travel costs
- Passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working
- A staff who can manage the business while you’re away
With this list, you can then work backwards from your five-year goal, and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $150,000 annually in order to fund your travel plans, and right now you’re earning $60,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this:
- Year 1: $70,000
- Year 2: $85,000
- Year 3: $105,000
- Year 4: $125,000
- Year 5: $150,000
With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
Create smaller goals to get to the big wins over time – and you will get there!
If you say to someone, you need to move from $60,000 to $150,000 in five years, that’s a pretty overwhelming task. After all, it’s a $90,000 increase and most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as impossible. It’s big, so it feels scary!
But when you break it down as I have above, and then again into smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t look so daunting.
In the first year of the plan I have outlined here, your income needs to increase only by $10,000. That’s less than $1000 per month! Surely that’s easy enough to accomplish!
You can further break that down by week: $1000 per month is just $250 per week. If you sell just one more $250 group coaching package, or five more of a $50 training program every week, you’ve already reached your milestone.
That might mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an additional $20 per month in Facebook ads, or perhaps reaching out to one more JV partner. The point is, reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than thinking about that five-year plan.
Over to you – get real about your dream
So what’s your big dream? How can you reverse engineer it into achievable milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can), then you can achieve anything in business and in life.
Who knows? You might even become more successful than the people you’re envious of right now. Do yourself a favor and only compete with the previous version of yourself. From now on, focus on what YOU need to do every day to make your dreams realities, and slowly, but surely, they WILL become realities.
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