Here's a clear truth about money: while accidental successes can happen, intentional success is more likely when you plan for it by setting and sticking to money goals. If you want to thrive financially, creating a plan, tracking progress, reviewing, adjusting, and moving forward will put you on the path to success far more effectively than waiting for luck to strike.

Your Goals Should Be:

Long-Term - Some goals might take a year or more to achieve. For instance, you might plan to pay off a business loan over five years.

Medium-Term - These are goals within a shorter period, like quarterly planning for website content or launching a new product every month.

Short-Term - What steps can you take today to earn money? Keep track daily to know if your plans are working.

Separate - Distinguish between business and personal goals to remain objective. Paying yourself a salary can help separate the two.

Tracking is essential because it lets you test...

Businesses of every type, including coaches, need a business plan. Don’t think you can skip by on this important step because you offer a service instead of a physical product. Every business can benefit from a business plan.

First Step, Focus.

When you create a business plan you need to focus on the reasons for the business: Who do you want to serve? What do you want to provide? When do you want to start? Where will you set up shop? Why do you want to start such an endeavor? How will you meld all these things together to create a prosperous business?

These are the primary reasons why you’re going into business and they should always be at the forefront of your mind when making decisions.

Something else to focus on is your big dream. How much money do you want to make over the next 5 years? Do you want to sell multiple products or have several locations? Everyone’s big dream will be different but you should write it down as part of the plan.

Second Step, A Plan.

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Today I want to share my thinking process for setting smart business goals with you. I like to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that I want to buy a new car. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, I’ll bump the goal up to $600. In other words, I need to add an extra $600 (or more… more is always better) to my monthly bottom line. Once that’s done and I am seeing that level of income on a regular basis, I’m ready to order my new car.

Once I know how much money I have to make, I can start to think about different ways to do just that. I could find more customers for one or several of my existing products. For example, if I have a $10 eBook, I would have to make an extra 60 sales per month. From there I can work backwards. If I know that on...

Do you set aside time regularly to plan what you want to do in your business? If it’s not something you currently do, I strongly encourage you to embrace it for the remainder of this year as well as the one coming up. Setting aside time at the end of the year, to plan out what I want to do and more importantly what growth I want to achieve in the coming year has been crucial to my own success. Over the next seven days, I want to share some of what I’ve learned and what I’ve found helpful with you.

Let’s start off by taking a look at why business planning is “the secret” to success. There are a few different factors that come into play here. The first is efficiency. When you go in with a clear plan, you can focus on what’s most important. Instead of spending time trying to figure out what you should be working on, what pieces of the puzzle are missing from your product funnel, or what you need to do to break through to the next income level,...