When you know the direction you want your organization to go in, you have to have a plan of action to get there. Otherwise, you’ll remain stuck in a world of dreams. Every destination requires a map. If you want to achieve business growth and success, you will need a plan of action to get you there and then to sustain your growth.

A plan of action outlines how you will bridge the gap between your current state and your desired future. If you were going to go hiking in the woods, you would want to have a map before you enter the woods, not after you’ve already set out. Business is the same. I have encountered many organizations that have created bold visions of the future but they don’t have a plan of action on how to get there.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
When organizations do a good job of strategic planning and communicating that to their employees, then employees wonder, “How am I going to execute on that?” This is where the problem comes. So I suggest that we chunk things down into smaller increments. I like to chunk things down into 90-day increments because studies have shown that 90-day increments are really important to organizational success. At the end of 90 days people start to get off track and lose direction. The next 90-day increment is an opportunity to bring them back and refocus their attention on what to do to move the organization closer to that one-year vision of the future.

Each department can say, “This is what we’re going to do in the next 90 days to get us closer to that one year vision.” Then they should write these things down. Just like the five-year, three-year, and one-year clarity of direction, you need to write down what you are we going to do as a department in the next 90 days to move yourselves closer to achieving that one-year vision.

It’s important to read it every day to reinforce it repeatedly in your mind. Then you can keep coming back to that, and if you ever have the question as to where you’re going or what you should be doing, you can ask yourself whether what you’re considering is moving you closer or further away from your 90-day goals and your one-year vision. This makes the decision relatively easy because you need to stay focused in order to make that happen.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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Once you have an established plan of action, the next step is focus, and this is often missing in organizations these days. You have to develop intense, unapologetic focus on your plan of action in order to achieve the business growth you are looking for.

Distractions are everywhere these days, and they will prevent you from sticking to the path to your desired future. Most people I meet underestimate the power of focus. You can have a great vision, strategy, and plan, but if you don’t bring focus to it, then you’re not going to get where you want to go.

It’s important to evaluate the highest and best use of your time and talent. It goes back to that old 80/20 rule: 20 percent of our activities generate 80 percent of the results. Time, energy, and money are limited resources. Nobody can make another minute of time; that’s why evaluating your use of time is so valuable.

I’m finding that many business owners are distracted by their cell phone and social media in particular. We’re reading text messages and checking in with 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 we get distracted, it takes ten to twenty minutes for us to get refocused. We’re allowing ourselves to be robbed of time!

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
Intense focus looks like a story I read about Richard Branson. An organization offered him $100,000 to come and speak at their event. He declined. Then they offered $250,000, yet he declined again. They offered half a million dollars, but he turned that down as well. Finally they approached him and asked what it would take, and he said that no amount of money would take him away from what he was currently focused on. This is the kind of focus we all need.

It’s valuable to learn to block off periods of time to be productive, and to eliminate distractions during those blocks of time. Turn off your phone and all of its notifications. You’ll be surprised at how much can be accomplished in two hours with no distractions. I 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. Block off time later in the day to answer phone calls or emails or text messages. Take the first few hours of the day to be intensely focused on your priorities.

It helps to consider 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. If you want to make $125,000 a year, you have to produce the value worth $60 an hour. That’s $5 every five minutes. Oftentimes I’ll ask clients, “What’s an hour of your time worth?” They’ll tell me, “Oh, $150,” or, “$200 an hour.” Then I ask them, “Then why are you doing $15 an hour work?” Why are you doing the bookkeeping that’s worth maybe $40 an hour when you could pay someone else to do that?

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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We have been exploring the seven steps to accelerating business growth. The first four steps are clarity of direction, communication, having a plan, and intense focus. Step five is discipline. The power of discipline is that it unlocks results; no sustained business growth is achieved without discipline.

For some people, the word discipline has a negative connotation, but we have to get past that idea. Discipline means staying at it every day. It’s a commitment to focus on what we need to accomplish each day and those priorities.

It’s simple but true: Successful people are willing to do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. They’re persistent. It’s sort of like going to the gym. I don’t like getting up in the morning and going to the gym, but I do it. Successful people may not like it, but they’re disciplined to do it every day. World-class athletes and musicians don’t dabble around the edges. They’re intensely focused and they’re disciplined to work at it every single day.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
I used to fly an airplane for the company I worked for; I flew for 22 years. When you’re flying an airplane and you decide you want to go a different direction, then you set the new course setting and turn the yoke. The yoke is like the steering wheel in your car; but I learned quickly that if I didn’t keep the pressure on the yoke, the airplane would naturally spin back and go the direction it was going previously because of momentum.

It’s similar for us as people and for businesses. If we don’t keep the pressure on that yoke and keep pushing forward in the direction we want to go, we will go back to the direction we had been going. That’s human nature. It’s hard to break that momentum, and that’s what makes discipline necessary. We have to keep the pressure on and be intensely focused 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 all skill,” and that means repeating it over and over and being intentional about the habits that we form. If we’re not intentional about the habits that we form, our habits will form us. We have to decide what is it going to take to be successful and then be intensely focused on that in a disciplined way. The genius of the most successful people in the world is rooted in discipline.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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We have been exploring the seven steps to accelerating business growth. The first five steps are clarity of direction, communication, having a plan, intense focus, and discipline. Step six is the step everyone is striving for: results. When you follow the first five steps, you will be amazed by the results you achieve and the business growth that is unlocked.

The goal of the first five steps is the amazing results that are achieved in step six. When you have taken time to clarify the direction you want for your business and personal life and communicated that clearly to those around you, created a plan of action to bridge the gap between your current state and desired future, and then become intensely focused on that with the discipline to stay at it each day, you will be amazed at the results you get and how fast it happens.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
The steps sound like a lot to do and it can be overwhelming. But the key is to chunk it down into smaller increments. Think of it this way: If you make 1/10 of a 1 percent improvement in your business and your personal life every day, it adds up. It equals a 0.5 percent improvement in a week. That equals a 2 percent improvement each month, which is a 24 percent improvement over the course of a year. This is a lot and if it’s like compound interest, then that would double ever 2.7 years. In 10 years you would have 1000 percent improvement in your business and your personal life, including your bank account. These are serious results.

In 2014 I started working with someone who had been in business for five years. That year he had made his first profit so I started working with him because he wanted to sell his business. He was tired of working so hard and not getting the results that he wanted. We set the goal to sell his business in two years, and we communicated that to the one person who worked with him. We had clear direction and created a plan of action. As we worked on intense focus, it became clear that he was distracted at work. He would be in the office for eight hours but really he wasn’t accomplishing anything. He was distracted by LinkedIn, Facebook, emails, texts, and phone calls. I made him commit to spending four hours a day without distractions, intensely focused on his business and disciplined to do that each day. I asked him to commit to doing this from eight to noon every day, and that after that he could do whatever he wanted.

That adds up to just 20 hours per week. That was in 2014 at the end and in 2015 he generated $800,000 of cash in his business and he was able to pay off all his debt. In 2016 that went to $1.2 million. He’s still only working four hours a day but he went to $1.2 million in revenue and didn’t want to sell his business anymore because it was generating lots of revenue. He’s still only working 20 hours a week and he’s getting amazing results.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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We have been exploring the seven steps to accelerating business growth. The first six steps are clarity of direction, communication, having a plan, intense focus, discipline, and results. Step seven is motivation. The wonderful thing that happens as you follow these steps is that you see results, and those results increase your motivation to keep investing in your business. You essentially create a powerful feedback loop that continues to result in business growth.

When we start getting results, we get motivated. It’s like going to the gym. If I start going to the gym and the scale tells me that I’m beginning to lose weight, then I’m motivated to go back and do it again because I can see that I’m getting results. It’s the same in business. Once I get great results, I get highly motivated. Once I get motivated, I want to repeat the process to continue to get results.

Successful business owners keep raising the bar to go higher and higher and get better and better, not only in their business but in their personal lives as well. That intense motivation keeps the process going.

EXPERT TIP | Gary Furr, Organizational Development Consultant:
Brendon Burchard says that individuals are like power plants. Power plants don’t bring energy in, they generate energy. We have to generate our energy in order to gain the success that we want to gain, and we can do that through following these steps that I’ve outlined. Once you start getting results, you get highly motivated, and once you’re highly motivated, you want to repeat the process. You’re acting like a power plant: You start generating energy and enthusiasm for your own success.

When you follow these steps, you can create the business and the life that you deserve and that you want—but you have to have the courage to choose. You have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want for my business and my personal life.” Some people are afraid to admit what they want because they are afraid to fail.

If you write all these things down, you can program your subconscious mind to create an amazing future for yourself—for your business and your personal life. You deserve to live the life that you want to live, and you deserve to have a successful business—but none of that will happen unless you apply the steps to get there.

You can create the business and the life of your choosing, but you have to have the courage to step up to the plate and say, “This is what I want.”

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