Let Your Lifestyle Determine Your Income
Let Your Lifestyle Determine Your Income - NOT the Other Way Around
Too many entrepreneurs and contractors allow their businesses to determine their lives...instead of the other way around.
What am I saying?
You allow yourself to accept the lifestyle your business affords, as opposed to asking yourself, "What kind of lifestyle do I want?" and building a business that will provide exactly that.
In the first situation, you are trapped in a situation of having a take-what-you-can-get mentality that can leave you feeling burnt-out, disappointed, and frustrated.
The second inspires you to be ambitious enough to carry out all your business dealings with passion, pride, and purpose. It allows you to set goals and business objectives that will translate to real results at both professional and personal levels.
But how do you translate personal lifestyle goals to business success? Let me walk you through a simple process.
Create your vision board:
This is one of the most powerful goal-setting techniques ever known to man. The idea is simple: to breathe life and structure into your loftiest goals and deepest dreams.
vision board: Here's how it works.
Identify the things that are most important to you - both personal and professional. This could be your family, friends, travel, fitness, career, hobbies, business, finance, spirituality, or more.
Then ask yourself: what do I want to have achieved after one year in each of these areas?
Once you've answered the question, create at least one or two PowerPoint slides illustrating your vision for each of the major areas of your life. On each slide, make sure to have a picture or some other graphical representation of what you hope to accomplish in a year's time and include a written description of your goal.
Review it weekly, or whenever you need to uplift your spirit. Your vision board should help you remember WHY you're working so hard and WHAT you're working toward.
Suddenly, you realize that there’s more to success than just paying the bills. It's about living your dreams. And there's nothing more motivating than that.
But how can this make any significant impact on your business?
Link Your Lifestyle Goals to Your Business Objectives
Here are two practical strategies for you to bridge the gap between your lifestyle goals and business objectives.
1. Create an Aggressive Optimistic/Pessimistic Forecast that Can Fund Your Vision Board Goals.
Develop an optimistic and pessimistic forecast.
The optimistic forecast should be a serious stretch for you and your business, so much that if you are only able to achieve even half of that number, you’ll feel proud of yourself!
Then, all your planning, visualizing, strategizing, and thinking should be focused on achieving this forecast.
Most importantly, your daily and weekly activity plan should reflect all the tasks and the effort required to meet your targets!
The second forecast should be a pessimistic one. Imagine asking yourself, “What do I do when everything goes wrong? What will happen to all the hard work I’ve put to build this business?”
Your expense budgets and capitalization model should reflect this scenario.
Have you caught on yet?
The trick is simple and straightforward: market, sell, and serve clients always with the intention of hitting your optimistic budget--and manage your cash and expenses as if your pessimistic view is looming on the horizon!
2. Develop a Daily and Weekly Activity Plan.
This is where most people drop the ball. You can have an awesomely inspiring vision for your coming year and a great optimistic/pessimistic forecast that theoretically drives your business while keeping you disciplined in cash management.
However, if you fail to translate your aggressive sales and revenue targets into a daily and weekly action guide for both you and your team, you will not be compelled to hit your targets!
You've got to be specific!
Ask yourself: How much should I sell to meet my revenue goal this month and this week? How many bids will it take to hit that number? How many hours do I have to spend following up with leads to bid that many projects?
Unless you pay attention to this activity plan on a daily and weekly basis, you will definitely lose your way and miss your forecast.
On the other hand, if you exert enough effort to deliver within your optimistic budget each and every day, you're likely to end up pretty close to your target and your vision book will become a reality!
Creating this sort of long-term strategy isn't difficult: it just requires a bit of training and someone to hold your feet to the fire. This is the exact process clients of The Contractors Coach use to achieve success far above most contractors who are their peers.
