Jul 1, 2020
Mini Challenge Day 1: FutureProof Your Coaching Business Now
Why Business Planning Is The Secret To Bulletproofing your Business For The Future
We’ve had a shock. Who was even thinking about a virus and a global lockdown when they made their plans for a successful year back in December 2019? Certainly not me!
As a coach and mentor I have seen my client group dwindle as they hunkered down to hard times and felt too nervous to spend money on coaching. But it has had far less impact on my income than you might expect. But this is not true of many of my colleagues whether they are therapists, counsellors, coaches or mentors. Incomes have plummeted and they have a lot of worry and anxiety about the future.
So I have been asked to share my strategies and run this short, very important challenge to help my colleagues get back on their feet again and make their coaching business secure for the future, no matter what happens.
Let’s get started. First of all let’s find out about what planning you have done in your business. Do you set aside time regularly to plan what you want to do in your business? If it’s not something you currently do, I strongly encourage you to embrace it for the remainder of this year as well as the one coming up. Setting aside time at the end of the year, to plan out what I want to do and more importantly what growth I want to achieve in the coming year has been crucial to my own success. But there are a few key areas I have been focusing on for several years now which have meant that Covid has had less impact on me than it might have done.
Let’s start off by taking a look at why business planning is “the secret” to success. There are a few different factors that come into play here. The first is efficiency. When you go in with a clear plan, you can focus on what’s most important. Instead of spending time trying to figure out what you should be working on, what pieces of the puzzle are missing, or what you need to do to break through to the next income level, you know exactly what needs to come next.
As we’ll explore in a future blog post, with a clear goal in mind and a plan for the year, it becomes easy to walk backwards to create effective and efficient daily to-do lists. But what about a situation like we find ourselves in now. How does your planning take that into account? It has shown us that there are some meta-goals that need annual attention too. More about these later this week — but just to put a concept out there for you to begin thinking about…. If the next 5 years are going to be like the last 5 years what do you need to be putting in place now to ensure your continued Health, Wealth and Happiness (or whatever your top three life priorities are).
The usual type of goal is to set an income goal. And there is nothing wrong with this. Setting a big goal for yourself helps you think outside the box. If you don’t believe me, try it. Decide on a big income goal for the coming month. Write it down. Keep it in front of you. Then get to work and start to notice what happens next. You start to think of things that didn’t occur to you before. You come up with creative ways to get more income. You decide to run a fun promo that adds quite a few dollars to your bank account. The same happens when an important deadline comes up unexpectedly. Think back on that time in college when finals rolled around. You got very creative about studying.
Last but not least, let’s talk about the subconscious. So far we’ve been focused on what we are actively doing to make progress by making a plan, setting goals and following through. There’s another dimension to all this and that’s what’s going on in our subconscious mind. While we are busy ploughing through our to-do list, cooking dinner for the family, and even sleeping, our subconscious mind is working towards those goals as well. It is helpful to have a regular practice such as journalling to help the unconscious along. I have often found myself writing down answers to questions I’ve been mulling over about my business.
In short, planning and setting goals is important because it helps you grow faster but also because it helps you protect yourself.
Just imagine if the next 5 years is like the last 5 years? How are you keeping your self financially secure, happy and living your life of purpose by coaching other’s to succeed in their goals?
Elizabeth specializes in helping you Get Your Coaching Business Back On Track. Sign up for her highly-acclaimed free challenges and webinars to find out how to bulletproof your business in 6 strategic steps.
