In any race; and I think business is a race, you can plod along most of the time. Every participant in that race puts a spurt in towards the end with a view to winning. There is a judge or a referee in most sports but not in business. So I ask you now: Who is the person who keeps you honest with yourself in this race?
With a month to go as we prepare to enter the final quarter of 2018 with the build up to Halloween and then the mad dash to the C word (I can’t say it in September) the question I am asking both you and myself is:
WHAT AM I DOING TO MAKE MY BUSINESS AS PROFITABLE AS POSSIBLE IN THE NEXT 90 DAYS?
In answer to that question I am looking at just 3 snapshots
- Where was I this time last year
- Where am I Today
- Where will I be at the end of the year
And I am asking one simple but vital extra question with very complicated results
HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?
I will dedicate the rest of this blog to pointing you towards ways of identifying that ‘HOW’
- Where was I this time last year
First the numbers. At this point in the financial year where was I? What was the value of my pipeline? What sales goal was I setting for my business for 31 Dec 2017? Was I on target? Ahead? Behind? Now we come to the hard part WHY was that the case? Why was I Ahead / Behind target and what did I do about it?
You’ve heard the ads on the radio saying ‘Past Performance is not an indicator of future performance’
- So Cliché 1: Yes it is.
- Cliché 2: If you always do what you always did……..
- And Cliché3: Life (and business) will keep presenting the same kind of situations until we learn not to make the same mistakes over and over. So Last year has a lot to teach us.
What about this year? Where am I today? What clients did we gain? How did we do that? Could it be repeated? What do we have in place that is duplicable? Who did we lose and why? What could we do to prevent that? Because not only should we learn from our mistakes we should also learn from our successes.
So to the Final Furlong
In this last quarter having held up a mirror to ourselves what practical steps can we make to grow our businesses in these 3 months?
If I were working through this process in a mentor session the next bit would be to write up some goals and targets for the next 3 months, or 100 days or probably as little as 75 working days.
So will this be a quick read or will you actually do something concrete? I know that unless I have someone to hold me accountable I’ll probably fudge and make excuses for not growing the business and I find that’s true for most of us. We slip into a comfort zone that fails to challenge us.
So I challenge you to answer the 5 questions in the last section of this blog and I wish you all that you deserve for the Final Furlong of 2018
The Questions:
- How much do I need to earn between now and year end?
- How many individual sales is that?
- What actions will I take in the next 60 hours and thereafter to make sure that the next 90 days are a success?
- What one action (or inaction) will I permanently change to make this repeatable?
- Who will hold you to account to make sure you meet your targets successfully?
So here is the Final Fling:
Anyone who contacts me as that ‘mentor who keeps you honest with yourself’ as a response to this blog or the radio broadcast will get mates rates for this quarter’s sessions.