I’ve had several business owners ask me lately how to balance short and long term planning in your business.

I know it can be overwhelming to be a business owner and you constantly have to make decisions on what to do and how to prioritize.

You simply can’t do everything and it’s easy to get caught up in the shiny object syndrome, constantly being drawn in new directions and losing focus.

I’m going to share with you 5 steps you can use to ensure you balance your short and longer term goals and create a strategy that will get you to where you want to go.

1)      Get clear on your long term goal. If you don’t know what it is, how will you get there? (If you’re not in touch with your desires or you need more clarity, the Success-soul™Living Starter Kit will help. You can get a copy here: free resources.)

Break down what needs to happen to achieve this goal. What are some milestones you will need to reach? When will you reach these milestones?

2)      Break down your revenue goal into yearly, monthly, weekly and daily numbers. Now you know what to focus on daily to reach your goals. For example, if your goal is to make $100 000 per year, then that means making $274 per day for 365 days. Given that you probably won’t work each day of the year (I hope not) then you will need to come up with a number that works for you, given the vacations and days off you want to have. Remember, it’s your business, you get to control how you run it!

3)      Ask yourself which marketing activities you need to do each year to reach your goals. This is where it’s key for you to know your numbers and hopefully you are tracking them. How many sales conversations do you need to enroll one client/make one sale? Or if you make your sales online, what do you need to do to get the right number of leads to convert into as many sales as you need? You want to think about things like what it costs you to make a sale, what your most effective (or enjoyable) marketing strategies are. From there you can decide on what marketing activities you will focus on in the next year, and schedule them on the calendar now.

4)      Set up time regularly to work on long term projects. You may want to set aside certain days or weeks to work on these projects. Schedule this on your calendar so you know when you will be working on it and so the day doesn’t get sucked into other work by accident. The more proactive you get, the more you can focus on things that are happening in the future and the less time you need to spend time putting out fires. By knowing that you have these special days set aside for other projects, you can focus on the short term goals without being too caught up in not getting the long term goals taken care of. You have energetically set aside space in your calendar for it.

5)      Finally, make sure you plan each quarter, month, week and day to ensure you don’t miss anything important. As you get good at planning, and you stop spending your days putting out fires because you are working proactively.

The goal should be to spend 80 % of your time doing things that are important, but not urgent, so you’re not wasting your time putting out fires. You will then be ahead of the game. This will allow you to stay on track with both your short and long term goals.

I’d love to hear some of your planning secrets? Feel free to share.

If you feel you could use some extra support, I invite you to apply for a strategy session with me here.