Each day brings new adventure, which is probably one of the reasons that you became an entrepreneur in the first place. You love the challenges and the excitement that comes with solving the crises that occasionally appear while you build your business. You love finding ways to build your business with marketing innovations. You love considering additional products or services to add to your line- up.
Sometimes those things can distract us from our singular job, which is earning a profit from satisfying customers. For example, we can get distracted from satisfying customers by re-writing our website with the latest and greatest Search Engine Optimization concepts or trying to find a way to include an animation on our front page. Maybe we accidentally spend more time laying out and re-laying out a brochure and less time on following-up with our customers. While these can be good activities, they can so easily distract us from the real work we need to do.
Want to make sure you’re on task? The first thing you need to have is goals. Goals are real, measurable results we expect to get. For example, a good goal might be “Build my opt-in email marketing list to 10,000 names by January 1, 2008.” This goal may be realistic, it’s also measurable (because on January 1, 2008 you can look at your list and answer a simple “yes” or “no” to determine whether you met your goals).
The next thing you need to have to keep you on task is objectives. Objectives are like mini-goals with action steps and they should all point to our goals. So you might create three or four objectives from the above goal that might include, “Create a website with an opt-in email capture line by July 1, 2006” and “Create an online advertising campaign to drive people to the site by August 1, 2006” and so on. Each objective should build on the last and when you put all of your objectives together, you should achieve your goal.
Next, your objectives should be scheduled. Although you create a due date to accomplish your objective, you’ll want to plan out the activities that need to be accomplished in order to see each objective through to success. In the above example, if you want to create a website with an opt-in email capture line by July 1, 2006, you’ll want to:
1. Buy a URL
2. Buy web hosting
3. Create a web page
4. Add a capture line
5. Tweak the page until you’re happy with it
6. Post it at the end of June in case it needs a day or two before it appears online.
When you’ve created a list of the tasks that need to be done for your objective, you can schedule them and get them done when they come up.
When your goal due dates appear, you can measure them as successful or not successful. If you did not reach your goal, try to identify why.
How does this help you to earn a profit by satisfying customers? When you create goals, be sure to create ones that are specifically tied to that activity. Don’t create goals without being able to tie them to that activity. So if you want to implement a new accounting system, for example, you should be able to justify it against the earning profits/satisfying customers “rule” somehow. When the latest and greatest marketing fad or distracting task comes along, measure it against your goals. Does it help you accomplish any of your objectives? If not, it’s likely just a distraction. If so, it should be scheduled in and done in order with everything else.
