Create Your Strategic Roadmap For Business Growth This Year

Hey entrepreneurs, today is a behind-the-scenes video into my own business and how I approach this time of year

We have just changed over to 2024 and I like to take this time to reflect on the previous year and make plans for the upcoming year.

My hope is that, in this video, my process and how I approach it might inform your process and give you some ideas. If you’re one of my current clients, I’m probably doing this with you during our regular sessions.

If you’re someone who’s looking for some possible help, I can help walk you through this process if you’d like or you can do it on your own. (You can email me to set up a time I can help if you need it).

Building A Strategic Roadmap

This time of year, I like to double-check the previous year and build out a Strategic Roadmap for the upcoming year.

To do that, I start by looking at where I’ve been in the past and how the past year and a couple of years have gone.

With that information, I can set an expected pace of where I am headed for the future.

If I don’t make many changes besides keeping on doing what I’m doing and working hard where will I probably end up?

Now sometimes when I do this, I’m pretty happy with those results.

Sometimes I decide that’s not really where I want to be – I’d like to accelerate that and get somewhere else.

For this year, I am focused on some additional growth.

In other years, I’ve been pretty happy with where I was.

In those years I made my focus on things like…

• improving certain skills
• working on other areas of expertise to expand my future business potential
• pursuing more work-life balance
• and more…

I try to still have a focus so that when I get to where I’m on pace for that I’m happier at the end of the year, and I’ve acquired more skills to allow for future growth.

Now that I’ve been adding these skills over and over again, this year is a year for me to deploy those skills even more and get better and better at connecting with new clients.

A big part of my focus this year is improving my sales outreach activities so I can help out more and more people.

I’m really finding my groove and consulting with clients. I’m loving the experience. I’m loving helping people from all over the nation right now.

My goal is to reach more and more people as I grow this year.

Actions

I look at where I’m headed to where I’m going, and I can evaluate what are the Actions that will take me from what I’m on pace for versus where I’d like to be.

I think this is an interesting thing as many people are like “I’m gonna double my business this year”, but they don’t decide to double their activities.

So if I would like to have twice as many clients, for example, I probably need to double my sales and marketing efforts.

Otherwise, where are they coming from? How’s that even working?

Setting a realistic goal and also having clear actions to achieve that are really, really key.

Risk Factors

For me, I always like to identify what are the risk factors.

What are the things that are likely to get me off that track so that I may miss my goals?

Limiting Factors

And what are the limiting factors, the things that are not true now that would need to be true for everything to go the way that I wanted them to go.

And those tend to be activities I’m not currently doing or skills I don’t currently have.

How can I identify those and make a list of those things?

Bringing It All Together To Make A Plan

So I take some time to map all that out.

It gives me some idea of the future I’m headed towards.

I find that if I have a feature that I’m headed towards I’m happy with. For me, it’s easier for me to go out there and do the work that I’m looking for.

If I’m unclear about the future or I’m depressed it might not turn out the way I’d like it’s very unmotivating. It’s hard to come in and do what I do best every day without being distracted.

Setting Reminders

Once I have my strategic roadmap put together I find that I have – I don’t know if you’re like this – I have instant amnesia.

I have the whole Strategic Roadmap and Strategic Plan put together. It’s crystal clear in my head. This is where I want to be, this action I want to take.

Maybe the next day, it’s still pretty clear in my head. I’m pretty sure I’ll never ever forget it.

But then by day four, I’m doing something totally different. I forgot all about it and I’m just keeping my head down and doing my regular work!

Because of that, I’ve found that it’s important for me to have daily reminders to stay focused and revisit it – to make this a theme.

Essentially, I will make up a cue card. This card has on it reminders of what it is that I’m focusing on right now – what are those action steps?

I look at it multiple times every single day. It takes me 20 seconds to read. I have a packet of those quick pieces of information put together and that keeps me focused on those activities so I don’t get derailed so easily.

For me and probably a lot of you to get pulled up by other shiny objects that aren’t actually our focus, but we just got excited and interested in them.

There is a space and a time for that but I like to make sure I’m on track for my goals first and foremost, and then recognize I’ve got some extra capacity for some discretionary fun.

Conclusion

So my process this time of year is to look back on the past year, close things out, sort of project what the future looks like see if I’m happy with it or not.

If I’m not, see what actions separate me from where I want to be.

And then to make a cue card as a reminder I look at on a regular basis to be able to take those actions and move forward.

On my cue card right now, one of those actions is more consistent content and videos and making sure I’m staying on top of that not falling off.

So keep me accountable.

I’ll see you next video.

Thanks and good luck.