In this video and blog post, I share with you how to create an effective business strategy.
There are 3 main problems that I see entrepreneurs face when they’re wanting to create a living, doing what they love, and making a big impact in the world.
1. Lack of strategy
Firstly, many people lack an effective strategy in business. Their tasks and content are random and ‘ad hoc’.
They end up doing all sorts of different tactics that they learn from all different sources (often free), without an over-arching, cohesive strategy…
…applying a little bit from here, a little bit from there, and trying to piece it all together. This rarely works.
2. Lack of systems
Many people don’t have their business systems set up properly. Things aren’t automated. And they’re running this really clunky, manual business.
They’re running a business where they’re trying to just remember things. They are trying to quickly come up with a post or just randomly write a blog post.
This is costing them time, energy and money.
3. Lack of support
Many people are trying to do business alone. Again, this doesn’t work.
When they don’t have people helping them, they’re wasting time struggling alone.
Many people think they can figure it out by themselves. But successful people know they need to invest in help and support.
In this article, I share about the first problem – a lack of strategy.
Without a strategy, you don’t have clarity on where you’re headed.
If you don’t have clarity, you don’t have peace of mind.
You start doubting yourself, you get stuck in overwhelm, procrastination, you get stuck doing things that aren’t helping you find your ideal clients.
Without a strategy, you can end up really frustrated.
When I ask people what the outcomes are in their business in the next 1,2, 3, 5 years and what are their targets for the next quarter, I find that a lot of people don’t have clear goals and targets.
They don’t know their numbers, they don’t know how much money they want to make, they don’t know how many clients they want to attract.
It’s really important that you have an effective business strategy.
In most cases, you need to go back to basics and lay a proper foundation for your business before you start posting content and trying to apply random tactics.
The other thing that happens without a strategy, is people get really resentful because they’re stuck in uninspired action instead of inspired action.
They get stuck doing things like creating the perfect logo or tweaking their website until it’s perfect. Or making sure that their business card’s perfect, and they still don’t have clients.
So it’s really important that you have an effective business strategy, and that you almost go back to basics and lay a proper foundation for your business before you start posting content and trying to apply random tactics.
My motto – strategy before tactics.
So, what is a business strategy?
A business strategy is a high-level working plan, not a plan that you write, and you just put on the shelf and never see it again. It’s a high-level working plan for reaching your business outcomes.I want to talk to you about having an effective strategy.
This includes knowing the What – What your business stands for, what exactly is helps people with.
Also, the Why – why are you actually doing what you’re doing, why you want to make the difference that you want to make in the world, why you want to help people with what you want to help them with.
And also the How – how you’re letting people know that what and the why throughout your online marketing.
To create an effective business strategy, there are five things I recommend that you identify.
1. Your business values
We need to know what our business values are. Sometimes, these are slightly different from our personal values.
Your personal values might be things like love and connection, adventure, music, family, things like that. You can actually have personal values and business values on a separate list, and I recommend that you do.
Some examples of business values might be integrity, congruency, authenticity, passion, creativity, structure, systems, excellent customer service, and empathy. So for clients achievement, winning awards could be a positive social contribution, it might be innovation.
These are all great things, but what are the few that you really want to be known for?
You need a strategy for your business values. You need to know what your values are, and what actions you’re taking in your business to make sure that you’re reaching these values.
It all starts with the business values, I recommend that you do that first.
2. Your business’ vision and mission
If you don’t have a clear vision and mission, like if someone came up to you on the street and said, “Hey, what’s your business vision or mission?”
(I don’t think that happens very often…) But let’s say it did, would you be able to give them a clear answer?
Would it be concise and snappy? Would you be able to just kind of fall it off your tongue?
Or you need to consult some documents that you wrote a few years ago to the workshop?
How clear is it? And how clearly are you putting it out there for the world to see what your vision and your mission is?
Is it in your Facebook profile is that on your website, people know what you’re all about?
The difference between a mission and a vision, the mission is how you’re going to actually how you’re going to make your vision happen. So your vision is what the world looks like in your imagination, and the future as part of you having your business and your mission is how you going to make that vision happen.
My vision is to inspire over a million people to make a living doing what they love, creating, contributing from a place of abundance and freedom to see living fulfilled, authentic, inspired, and the fullest expression of their potential.
Those words are really powerful and meaningful to me, I love helping people to become fulfilled living out of the authentic expression, living a life where they’re living up to their full potential where they feel inspired, feel fulfilled with what they’re creating and contributing.
That’s a vision of what I want to create.
The mission to actually get there is to equip and support business owners to create a profitable business doing what they love. It’s very simple. That’s my mission.
My values lead into the vision and mission. The vision and mission come from the values, and then the values, the vision, and the mission drive the goals.
3. Your business goals
You need a strategy for your business goals. You need a strategy for what outcomes you want, how many clients you want, how much money you want to earn, when, do you want to do workshops, when do you want to do webinars, what’s your marketing campaigns. You need a strategy for how you going to spend your time in your business.
Your actions are determined from the goals that you set.
So you need your big vision, your mission and then you need strategies underneath that. Basically, what are your initiatives? What are you doing to make that vision happen?
So these are things like having a podcast, running regular workshops, running regular webinars, running retreats, writing a book. These are the big kind of strategies, and then under those, you need goals to make these things happen.
Let’s say the goal is to write a book. The actual actions that you’re going to take, you might say, I’m going to write 10 pages a day, or I’m going to write 100 pages by in quarter three by the end of quarter three.
You want clear numbers, and you want to make sure that you have dates for those numbers as well.
You need to have the strategy for what to do before the sale, during the sale, after the sale. The strategy for before launch, during launch, after your launch. A strategy for all your campaigns, your advertising – everything needs a strategy.
Make sure that the goals are specific, they have numbers and dates attached. And you’re making them from your big-picture goals all the way through to your 1-year goals, your quarter goals. And then you break that right down to your weekly goals and then your daily goals. So every day you open your laptop, and you know exactly what to work on.
There are so many people that are scattered and overwhelmed and stuck in procrastination because they haven’t got goals. They know how to set goals, but knowing and doing are two different things, and to know and not do is kind of not to know.
You need to realise the importance of the power of it.
This is the main thing that I recommend people look at when they’re first starting a business because otherwise, they’re just running off with all these different directions without their overarching strategy.
So we’ve got to lay that foundation.
4. Your Core Message
Next, you need to identify your core message, your one thing.
Gary Keller has a great book called “The one thing” it’s excellent.
He talks about – what is that one thing that you want to be known for?
Why are you different?
What’s that one thing that you going out to, that one problem that you want to solve, that one outcome that you want to help people achieve, you should know what that is and clearly communicate that to the world.
You need a strategy for your core message and why you’re different and how to express that value.
5. Your Ideal Client
Number five, you need a strategy for how to identify your ideal client and how to communicate with your ideal client.
A lot of people are posting online, but they don’t attract ideal clients. They try to kind of reach, everyone.
One minute they’re talking about health, next minute they’re talking about manifesting, next thing they’re talking about mindset. Next, they’re talking about how to attract your soul-mate – they’re all over the place. They don’t have a strategy.
It’s really important that you’re really clear on who your ideal client is, where are they hanging out? How old are they? What are their interests? What are their biggest problems? What are their fears, their frustrations, their dreams, their desires?
Do you know how to help them solve their biggest problem, the thing that’s keeping them awake?
Where are they hanging out? What do they need from you? What’s your unique genius zone that you can help them with? What is that one thing that you know that you’re a master at, because you’re gifted in it and other people don’t have the unique combination of skills that you do?
Usually, your ideal client is you a few years ago before you solve the major problem that you wanted to help people solve. So that’s a really good clue about, you know where to start with your ideal client. But I’ve got a whole strategy around it. And it actually takes a bit of time and thought and effort.
A lot of people say, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I know how to do that. I’ve got my avatar”. But when I look at other people’s answer when I look at my client’s answer about that ideal client, most aren’t clear, most of them are really vague, they have a really wide age range. They’ll say something like”its women from 30 to 40, living in Sydney”. That’s not an ideal client, that is a massive target market.
You want to pinpoint right down to the dreams or desires and fears or frustrations, and most of all the problems that you’re going to help them solve.
Remember, marketing is not about what they need, but it’s about giving them what they want. In your marketing, you’ve got to give them what they want. A lot of people trying to sell things to people that they think they need, and people don’t actually want it. You need a strategy for that.
So to recap, the five ways you set up your business strategy is to get clear on:
1. Your business values
2. Your business vision and mission
3. Your business goals
4. Your core message
5. Your ideal client
You might be wondering, what if I don’t know where to start with all this, like, it sounds good, that makes sense.
But I don’t really know how to apply it to me. And this is really common that people know that they need a strategy, but they don’t really know how to actually put into place, how to create one.
And that’s exactly what I love helping people with.
Would you like to know how to apply this to you?
How to make sure that you have a great strategy in your business, an effective strategy, so you don’t wake up in the morning, and spend time on low-value tasks, actions that aren’t actually getting you any results…
Because that’s going to lead to burnout, overwhelm, and frustration.
When you wake up and you feel like your to-do list is never-ending. And then you get to the end of the day. And it’s like you haven’t even done anything. You haven’t even done anything meaningful or fulfilling or worthwhile, and you’re not seeing a good return on your investment for time.
I know this because this is exactly what I’ve been through. I’ve been through, really running around with all these different tactics and trying to fight things trialing and erroring, and making a lot of errors.
And now I really love helping people to avoid all that pain, all that wasted time, that wasted energy. Those years that you’ll never get back.
Would you like to know how to attract and sign up new clients?
Join us at my upcoming 1-Day Workshop in Sydney, Saturday 17th August
‘How To Attract Your Ideal Clients’
This event is for people who are ready to roll up their sleeves and grow their business.
ALL the enthusiastic, positive, grateful clients imaginable are out there right now, ready and waiting for you.
All you need is the right system to attract them into your business.
You’ll learn the best marketing tools and a proven system to attract them.
If you’re unhappy with the money you’re earning, you HAVEN’T applied the right system yet. At this workshop, I’m sharing a rarely-utilised strategy that will be your new secret client-getting advantage.
Earlybird offer available until Sunday, 11th August
So if you are building a business or wanting to build a business – check it out.
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