Franziska: Hi and Welcome back! It‘s already the 3rd week of January and the last 2-3 weeks we‘ve spent a little bit of time on planning and really forecasting for the year ahead, for 2017 across different businesses. And one thing that I have noticed working with business owners, our members in Clever Bunch, in Genius bunch is that some people get a little bit stuck in this whole planning thing. How do I plan? How do I do this whole thing? So what I thought I would do in this video tip is share with you 5 quick steps on how to get unstuck and how to move forward.

Now these are all things that we do also here at Basic Bananas with the team and with our members. The first thing that we do is we “pick a theme” for the year for each business. Now as an example, the theme could be, it could be reach. This year, you want your business to reach more people. It could be, maybe fun. Maybe last year you realised that you know what, I just want to have more fun. It could be domination. It could be mastery. It could be any of these words that you choose. So those are your sort of core themes. Now you can also learn a lot more about these things on our podcast called “Pick of the Bunch”. You‘ll find it on iTunes or any of the other podcasting channels.

The second thing you then do is once you‘ve picked your theme, you then set your goals. Sort of at a high level for the whole year. For the whole year, you‘re now going to chunk down your theme into, what are sort of the high level things. Don‘t get too detailed but sort of high level, what you want to achieve. Even if you just pick 3, 4, 5 things, it‘s perfect.

Now what you need to do next, third thing you do is you now need to chunk those high level goals into “quarterly goals”. And one of my best tips that I have received years ago through books, and I don‘t actually remember exactly who said it. But it‘s a great tip is -don‘t pick too many quarterly goals. Only maybe pick 2 or 3 per business and focus on those. Same applies for your team members. If you work with your team members to set goals with them, make sure they just pick 2 or 3 sort of very important things to focus on. Why? Because if you pick 10 things it‘s really hard to achieve them all and we might lose the focus. So just pick 2 or 3 very important things to do in the next 90 days.

Now the 4th thing you do is once you‘ve got your quarterly focus, you now need to figure out, okay to achieve this one goal.. so let‘s say in the next quarter, we want to add 20% more revenue, might be one goal for your business. Now you need to think about okay how do we chunk these down into actionable steps? So 4th thing that you do is put the next steps. I want to grow a business by 20%? What needs to happen? What needs to happen for me to grow a business 20%? It could be that I‘m going to really nail my digital advertising, it could be that I‘m going to partner with one strategic partner, it could be that I‘m going to talk to my marketing manager and I‘m going to have a meeting with her or him to map out what can we do to raise our revenues by 20%. And the last thing you do, number 5, is you “put a deadline”. Put a deadline in your actions because when you have a deadline, it‘s so much easier to actually achieve this.

I have to trick myself all the time into deadlines. What I usually do is I put when I have one of those tasks say I want to partner up with one more strategic partner, I put that in my diary and I say Friday, at 2 o‘clock, between 2 and 4, I‘m going to nail this. If it‘s something that you can nail in 2 hours. Then I put a deadline on it because sometimes when you don‘t have a deadline, it‘s sort of maybe one day I‘ll do it but right now I‘m just busy with my emails, or I‘m busy doing something that is not as important as growing a business. So those are 5 quick strategies, sort of in sequence that you can apply if you feel a little bit stuck or you just want to have more structure in how you plan for your business. We use them here across all of our businesses. That‘s pretty much it for today.

Actually maybe one thing I can do also is I can show off this t-shirt here. Look at this, one of our team members, actually the whole team was working on this, but we have an event coming up for our business called Ocean Lovers and we just got them in today. So I‘m wearing it for you to show it off. I hope you like it. Check out our Ocean Lovers too. I‘m sure you will love it. That‘s it. See you next time.