Liz Biz Tips: Three Ways to Turn your Dream into Reality

You have dreamed for so long about creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet, all you have to show for it is the dream. Does this sound like you? ​​​​

Perhaps you attend conferences, sign up for webinars, pay for training, and possibly even work with a coach or another type of adviser. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, you aren’t making progress toward your dreams. It’s certainly not out of laziness, but something else, you just don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan, and end up stuck.

Start With the Long-Term

Many job interviewers ask this basic question, “Where do you want to be in five years?” Depending on your career level, you’ve probably heard that once or twice. But as a business owner, that may just be the most important consideration you can have.

Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create the roadmap 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 that direction.

Create Milestones

Once you know your ultimate destination, you can craft a plan for getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.

As an example, if in five years you want to enjoy traveling for eight weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that is possible, for example:

• Enough income to cover travel costs

• Passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working

• Staff who can manage the business while you’re away
  

With this list, you can work backwards from your five-year goal to create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $150,000 annually in order to fund your travel, 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 Small Goals

If you say to someone, you need to move from $60,000 to $150,000 in five years, it may sound overwhelming in some cases. After all, it’s a $90,000 increase and most people will look at that as unfeasible. But when you break it down as we have above, and then again into smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t seem so daunting.

In the first year of this plan as outlined, your income needs to increase only by $10,000. That’s less than $1,000 per month! From that perspective, that’s a bit easier to accomplish.

You can break that down further by the week: $1,000 per month is only $250 per week. If you can increase your sales, or gain a new client, you will reach your milestone in no time at all. That might mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an additional amount every month in social media, or perhaps reaching out to make a few more phone calls. The bottom line is reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than thinking about that five-year plan.

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct 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!

Are you ready to improve some area in your life with coaching? Reach out to start a conversation liz@goalreaper.com

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