At the bottom of an old crate, you find an ancient lamp. After polishing it with a corner of your shirtsleeve, a special business genie appears and grants you a wish. If you could wish for anything – and we mean anything at all – that could guarantee you a successful future as an entrepreneur, what would it be?
Most entrepreneurs would peer into the future, because success in business greatly depends upon accurately predicting the most effective way to meet the needs and desires of your customers, and acting upon those predictions in the most effective and lucrative way for you and your business and brand!
A Magic Lamp and Business Genie?
It goes without saying that magic lamps and business genies don’t exist, and our new Do-It-Yourself online branding course Go Ahead. Dream Big. won’t allow you to actually peer into the future, but the first module in our new program will enable to you complete one of the most important steps you can take as an entrepreneur: planning ahead and charting where you want your business and your brand to be in a year.
While no one can predict the future with any certainty, successful entrepreneurs understand the importance of accurately assessing the current state of their business and taking the necessary steps to ensure that, in twelve months, their brand and their business is exactly where they want it to be.
Shift Your Focus To Where It Should Be
Entrepreneurialism requires a substantial amount of hard work and dedication – after all, you’re not just your own boss, you’re often also filling many other roles as well. With so much work and so few hours in the day, it can be extremely difficult to find the time or the “bandwidth” to properly plan for the future. This especially when you don’t know exactly where or how to start. However, failing to put the future of your business in focus can leave it at a competitive disadvantage, and the further your business falls behind your competitors or your brand fails to meet the expectations of your target market, the greater the chance your business could stagnate or possibly fail.
It’s easy to “make a plan to plan,” or to make a commitment to yourself to shift your focus from the present to the future of your business, but actually doing so on your own can be extremely challenging. Without a proper framework for drawing up your plan and putting it into action, you may not ask yourself the right questions or create an accurate assessment of your business and your brand, derailing your efforts from the beginning and wasting the precious time and mental energy you’ve committed to the effort.
Where Do You Want To Be In Twelve Months?
In the first module of Go Ahead. Dream Big., we will provide you with the tools and guidance you need to accurately and efficiently plot the current state of your business and your brand to effectively create a twelve-month roadmap to achieving your mid-term goals. Having the formal structure of a course module in place allows you to save time and place your plan within the larger context of the Go Ahead. Dream Big. program as a whole. Simply stating or believing that you will someday shift your focus to the future of your business and put a plan in place to propel your business into next year isn’t enough – it’s time to actually follow through and do it!