I have yet to meet a business owner who doesn’t say they want to take their business to the next level and make money in the process. To help them achieve their goals, I’ve developed a 7-step method to help business owners visualize and implement the future they want, and it all begins with Step 1: clarity of direction. Click on the link at the end of this post to view other episodes in this series. You can read Step 1, or click to listen.

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Clarity of direction is knowing where you want to be in the future—where you want your business to be and where you want your personal life to be. The first step in any journey is deciding where you want to go. When I board an airplane, I know my destination—in fact, the destination guides the boarding process.

Your business and personal life are no different. You need to set a vision for the future and describe it to yourself. Write it down. Be specific. What will it look like? This is clarity of direction.

Charting a Course

In the story of Alice in Wonderland, Alice is looking for a way out of Wonderland. When she comes to a crossroad, she turns to the Cheshire Cat sitting there and says, “Which way ought should I go?” And the Cheshire Cat tells her that it depends on where she wants to be. Alice says she doesn’t know, and the Cheshire Cat, smiling, says, “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Without a clear direction, you’ll be just like Alice. It doesn’t matter which road you take if you don’t know where we want to go. But of course it’s unlikely you will end up where you want to be. Surprisingly, few business owners take the time to set a destination for their business (or for their personal life). How can you define success if you don’t know exactly what you want the future to look like?

Not only do you need to know where you want to go, you have to know where you are currently if you are going to get from A to B. A is your current state, and B is your destination or desired future. To chart a course, you must be truthful about where you are. No pretending. No denial. If you took a 30,000-foot view of your business and your personal life, how would you describe it? That’s your current state. Understanding that is a critical part of charting a course to the future.

Planning Backwards

Once you’ve identified your current state as well as where you want to go, then you want to go out five years from now and describe what that is going to look like for you in your business and your personal life. How many employees do you want to have? How much money do you want to make? How big of a business do you want? How many weeks of vacation do you want to take? Describe it in writing but stick to about six or seven items. Then work backwards from that.

If you want to be at this particular future state in five years, where do you need to be three years from now? Write that down as well. Use the same six or seven items and describe what each looks like in three years. Then work backwards again: Where do you want to be a year from now? If you need to be at a certain point in three years, where do you need to be a year from now?

Don’t allow your “small” business to make you small-minded. You didn’t start your business by thinking small, and you didn’t get into business just to do okay. Give yourself permission to dream big. Do it, and then write it down, because once you do, your subconscious mind goes to work to start to make those things happen.

I suggest to my clients that they read these five-year, three-year, and one-year visions every day. Doing so is a powerful tool for creating the future you want and putting your subconscious mind to work for you.

Clarity of direction is the all-important first step (of seven) in growing your business and making more money. When you’re ready to take the next step in your business’s growth, call Gary at 503-312-3145 for more information.

Click to view other episodes:
Seven Steps to Accelerated Business Growth Series

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I have discovered that in many organizations, the leadership knows where they’re going, but the employees do not. When direction and vision are not communicated effectively, employees tend to figure it out themselves, and they may start pulling in directions that leadership or ownership doesn’t want to go. What’s the point of clarifying direction (Step 1 in my 7-step method to business growth) if you’re never going to communicate that? To achieve the future you want—fast—you must communicate your vision to everyone in your organization.

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The Inefficiency of Chaos

When individual departments determine where they’re going (and this happens more often than you might think!), then it’s unlikely that each is in unison with the others or with the organization as a whole. In short, a lack of good communication creates chaos, and chaos is the enemy of efficiency. Organizations with silos simply can’t achieve the kind of results that they want to achieve. But this chaos is often self-inflicted because leadership has not effectively communicated where the organization is going to be five years from now, three years from now, and one year from now. In the absence of communicated direction, employees find their own.

Paddling Together

Effective communication will get everybody within the organization on the same team. Imagine how well your company could do if everybody was in the same boat and paddling the same direction. It’s different if there’s one person paddling the boat—then it’s pretty easy to set the direction. But when you have 20 or 30 or 40 people within the organization and they’re not all paddling in the same direction, you’ll never reach your desired destination.

Most employees want to know where they’re going and what the future holds. They want to be a part of something that’s bigger than them, and they want to be a part of an organization that’s going somewhere—that’s not stagnant and just getting by. This is especially true for young people today. They’re not interested in punching a timecard for 40 years and doing the same thing over and over. They want to know that there’s an opportunity for the organization and for them within the organization. Communicating that clearly is critically important.

Don’t worry: There’s no danger in over-communicating your vision. In fact, it’s a vital part of achieving your vision. For 40 years Gary has been helping businesses grow and make more money, and he can do it for you too. Give Gary a call at 503-312-3145 for more information.

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Imagine you’re going on a hike in the woods. Would you bring a map or would you wait until you were in the woods before wishing you had thought to do so? Business isn’t much different. If you want to bridge the gap between your current state and your desire future, you’re going to need a map—a plan of action for getting there. Oftentimes organizations create bold visions for the future but then never follow through with a plan of action. Without a plan, they are doomed to wander aimlessly.

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Staying on Track

The best way to create a plan of action that will keep you on track is to chunk things down into smaller increments. I like to break the plan into 90-day increments, because studies have shown that using 90-day increments is an effective tool that leads to success. At the end of 90 days people tend to get off track and lose direction. Using 90-day increments provides an opportunity to bring people back and refocus their attention on what they’re going to do in the next 90 days to help move the organization closer to that one-year vision.

I advise preparing written directions for the 90-day increments. This can be done by department: for the next 90 days this is what we will do to make progress toward the one-year vision. Then read it every day as reinforcement. This provides a valuable lens for questioning whether your actions are moving you closer to or further away from your 90-day goals, providing a framework for decision-making.

No one gets from New York to California without a map (or a GPS!). A plan of action is vital for reaching your destination. For 40 years Gary has been helping businesses get where they want to go, and he can do it for you too. Give Gary a call at 503-312-3145 for more information.

 

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One thing that successful businesses have in common with great athletes is focus. You have to develop intense, unapologetic focus on your plan of action in order to achieve the results you are looking for. Focus means eliminating the distractions that pull you off the path to your desired future. Most people underestimate the power of focus. But focus empowers you. You can have a great vision and a plan of action yet still not achieve what you want if you don’t have focus.

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The 80/20 Rule

A critical aspect of focus is putting the 80/20 rule to use. You only have so much time, you only have so much energy, and you only have so much money, so what’s the highest and best use of my time, energy, and money? Generally speaking, 20 percent of your activities generate 80 percent of the results. Time, energy, and money are limited resources. How can you focus those resources to achieve your goals?

I have found that many business owners are distracted by all the stimulus and social media that exists these days. We’re checking our cell phones, listening to text messages, and doing Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. All that takes us away from being intensely focused on the plan of action that we want to achieve our vision of the future.

Every time you get distracted, it takes 10 to 20 minutes to get refocused, which means you’ve just wasted all of that time, energy, and money on something that’s not the highest and best use of your time. If you can figure out the 20 percent of your activities that generate 80 percent of your results, you can use your time, energy, and money much more effectively. That is intense focus.

What Focus Looks Like

I read a story about Richard Branson that said an organization offered him $100,000 to come and speak at their event. He declined, and they came back and offered $250,000. He declined that as well, so they upped their offer to half a million. When he declined that, they asked what it would take to get him to come and speak. He said that no amount of money could take him away from what he was currently focused on. That’s the kind of focus every business owner needs, because that is what it takes to achieve goals.

One effective tool for achieving focus is blocking off periods of time to be productive. During those periods of time (they can be an hour or two), you should eliminate distractions: turn off your phone, turn off your laptop, turn off all the bells and whistles that bleep at you constantly. If you can learn to do that, you’ll find that in that one or two hours of intense focus you can get two, three, or even four hours’ worth of work done. It’s incredibly empowering.

I also recommend to my clients that they don’t check their email first thing in the morning because email is somebody else’s agenda for you. It’s not your agenda, and it’s not your priorities. When you allow yourself to get sucked into email at the start of the day, it often leads to not accomplishing what you want to accomplish. Block off the first few hours of the day for intense focus on your agenda, and then block off time later in the day to answer phone calls or emails or text messages. You can train your employees to learn to do the same thing. Have them block off time to focus on their priorities that are going to help them achieve their 90-day goals.

Know What Your Time Is Worth

Understanding what your time is worth can make it easier to take these steps. Learn what an hour of your time is actually worth. In other words, if you want to make $75,000 a year, you have to generate $36 an hour worth of value for your clients. That’s $3 every five minutes or $9 every 15 minutes. Think about how much time you’re wasting on social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and those kind of things, and evaluate whether you are spending your time wisely. If you want to make $125,000 a year, you have to produce $60 an hour worth of value for your clients. That’s $5 every five minutes. When you look at it that way, wasting 15 minutes on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or taking 15 minutes longer to get back to work is costly.

Oftentimes I’ll ask clients, “What’s an hour of your time worth?” They’ll tell me, “Oh, $200 an hour.” Then I ask them, “Then why are you doing $15 an hour work? Why are you doing your bookkeeping that’s worth maybe $40 an hour? Why don’t you pay someone to do that?” Knowing what your time is worth and keeping that in the forefront of your mind allows you to focus your time and energy on what will deliver the most return for you.

Are you focused on the 20 percent of your activities that are going to generate 80 percent of the return? What’s an hour of your time worth? Are you generating that much value for your business or for the business you’re working for? Do the math, and let those calculations inform your choices.

For 40 years Gary has been helping businesses owners understand the value of their time and focus on activities that lead to results. Give Gary a call at 503-312-3145 for more information.

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We tend to think of discipline as something negative, but discipline is really nothing more than commitment. To achieve the success we’re looking for, we have to be committed to coming in each day with the focus to accomplish what that day requires. Successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do, and they are disciplined to stick at it every day. They’re persistent.

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It’s not much different than going to the gym. I don’t like getting up in the morning and going to the gym, but I do it. So you could say that I’m disciplined to stay at it. Successful people may not always like it, but they’re disciplined to do what needs to be done every day. World class athletes or musicians don’t just dabble, and they don’t practice only when they feel like it. They’re intensely focused and they’re disciplined to stay at it every single day.

Keep Up the Pressure to Maintain Course

For 22 years I flew an airplane for the company I worked for. When you’re flying and you need to change direction, you turn the yoke. The yoke is similar to the steering wheel in your car. But when I learned to fly, I learned that if I didn’t keep the pressure on the yoke when I was turning, the airplane would naturally spin back and go the direction it had been going due to momentum. It’s the same in business. If you don’t keep the pressure on that yoke and on the direction you’re going, you’ll drift back to your previous state. Momentum is a powerful force, and to break it requires discipline to keep the pressure on and be intensely focused on your goals. Discipline is maintaining that pressure every single day.

Successful people are consistent in their practice of applying discipline to their daily lives. Tony Robbins says, “Repetition is the mother of skill.” That means repeating it over and over and being intentional about the habits that we form. If we’re not intentional about the habits we form, our habits will form us. The genius of the most successful people in the world is rooted in discipline.

Discipline may sound unpleasant, but its results are not. it’s a requirement for success in business. Gary helps business owners use discipline to take their businesses to the next level. If you need help, call Gary at 503-312-3145.

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Amazing results are what you get when you’ve taken the time to clarify the direction you want to go, communicated that clearly to those around you, created a plan of action to bridge the gap between your current state and your desired future, and then used focus and discipline to stay at it every day. People who take the first five steps are amazed at the results they get and they’re amazed at how fast it happens.

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One Day at a Time

Full disclosure: many people believe the steps sound overwhelming. I agree that it can seem that way, but the key to actually implementing the steps is to realize it’s all done one day at a time. If you make a 1/10 of a 1 percent improvement in your business and your personal life every day, that adds up to a 0.5 percent improvement each week, which equals a 2 percent improvement each month. That is a 24 percent improvement over the course of a year, and that is a lot. If you look at it like compound interest, then that improvement (if you keep at it) would double ever 2.7 years. This means in 10 years you would have 1000 percent improvement in your business and your personal life. Who wouldn’t want 1000 percent improvement? (Including in your bank account?) These are serious results, and they start with clarity of direction, communication, a plan of action, focus, and discipline.

I started working with a particular client in 2014 and he’d been in business for five years. In 2014 he made his first profit in that business (of $125,000), and so I started working with him because he wanted to sell his business. He said he was tired of working so hard and not getting the kind of results that he wanted. We worked together and concluded that he wanted to sell his business in two years. That became the direction. He had one staff member who was working with him, so we communicated that to her along with the plan: We’re going to sell the business in two years and here’s how we’re going to go about doing it.

It didn’t take me long to see that focus was an issue we needed to work on. My client was distracted by all the things that were happening every day. He would be in the office for eight hours, but really he wasn’t accomplishing anything. He was distracted by LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, emails and texts. He would chat on the phone for hours at a time. So I made him commit to spending four hours a day eliminating distractions, intensely focused on his business, and disciplined to stay at it. He was supposed to maintain that focus and discipline from eight to noon every day without distractions. I told him that from noon on, I didn’t care what he did.

He committed to do that every day—five days a week, four hours a day, which is only 20 hours per week. That was in 2014 at the end and of 2015 he had generated $800,000 of cash in his business and was able to pay off all his debt. In 2016 that went to $1.2 million, still only working four hours a day. That was when he decided he didn’t want to sell his business anymore because it was generating lots of revenue.

Amazing results and accelerated business growth are Gary’s specialty. If you need help, call him at 503-312-3145.

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One of the benefits of following these steps is that it motivates us to repeat the process. What is more motivating than results? It’s like going to the gym. When I exercise and start losing weight (and see those results on the scale), then I’m motivated to continue going back.

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If I’m disciplined to go to the gym every day, I get great results. Once I get great results, I get highly motivated. Once I get motivated, I want to repeat the process to continue to get results. What I’ve found with successful business owners is that they keep raising the bar to go higher and higher and get better and better. This tends to be true not only in their business but in their personal lives as well. That intense motivation keeps the process going.

Brendon Burchard says that individuals are like power plants. Power plants don’t bring energy in, they generate it. You have to generate energy in order to gain the success you want to gain, and you can do that through these steps. Once you start getting results, you get highly motivated, and once you’re highly motivated, you want to repeat the process. You’re like a power plant, generating energy and enthusiasm for your own success.

It’s Worth the Effort

Business can be discouraging at times, and it can take courage to believe you have the power to create the business and the life that you want and deserve. It’s up to you. Start by writing down what you want to achieve and put your subconscious mind to work for you. You deserve a successful business and the life you want to live, but it won’t happen unless you apply the steps necessary to get there.

Accelerated business growth is within your grasp. If you’re ready to put Gary’s principles to work for your business, give Gary a call at 503-312-3145.

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