This year one of my counseling goals is to continue working with all my clients on your immediate needs to help you grow your business.  I will remind you to take time to work ON your business versus IN your business. What does that mean? Taking a few moments (or more) to ask questions about your overall strategy, building your businesses operations infrastructure and creating processes that will allow you to grow your business effectively.

Quarterly, I will send emails with general reminders and tools to my clients in four key areas, including:

Quarter 1: 2018 Goals and Sales
Quarter 2: Operations, HR and KPIs
Quarter 3: Financial Management
Quarter 4: Strategic Panning

Each email will have a call to action.  You can reply directly to the email and then take a moment to share how you plan to build your business.

During our counseling sessions, I will ask you about these topics that will help you be accountable to these critical areas of development. If these areas really resonate with you, we can use the many tools that SBDC has access to dive further (IBIS research, Franklin Covey Training, Growth Wheel Worksheets and more).

So the key question for this quarter: What is your 2018 sales goal?

Feel free to email me your response NOW.  I am waiting!  I also encourage you to write it out and share it with your team. For many of you, we have already talked about your 2018 strategy, but it is never too late. If you want to go further in-depth here are some follow up questions to ask.

When I break that sales goal down, what are my monthly and quarterly goals?

What marketing / sales activities do I need to execute to hit those goals?

Are they strategically in line with what I have learned about effective tools for my business in the past?

Finally, other than sales, what are three additional goals I would like to achieve in my business this year?

Is your goal to finally write those job descriptions? Get your financials under control? Create a dashboard so you can start having others do the work for you!?!

Whatever your goals are, let me know and let me know how the SBDC can help.

In other news, as most of you know, my family is growing again. I will be taking maternity leave in early April (or possibly sooner). As always, we have a robust team of counselors who can support you while I am away. You will be receiving more detailed information about who to contact when the time comes. Until then if you would like to schedule a meeting prior to my absence and you have achieved the stated goals from our last meeting, please feel free to go to my calendar to set up a meeting in my Peoria office or email me to set up additional options.

I look forward to working with you all in 2018.  If you have any question or feedback please let me know!

PS We are starting a new innovative format for mastermind groups in Peoria for established firms, if you are interested joining please let me know!