Create a Personal Business Plan for a Successful Year
By Stuart Calvert
As summer comes to a close and vacations wrap up, people are returning to work energized and ready to once again buckle down. It’s one of those times of the year that people are full of ambition and with that comes a mental list of things we want to accomplish over the coming months.
The problem is that it’s very easy to get off track with the number of interruptions we’re faced with everyday and the numerous demands placed on our time. All of a sudden that to-do list we had in our minds months prior, barely has a dent in it. To be classified as top talent that fittingly commands top dollar though, it’s imperative to find ways to ensure things get done despite all of these distractions.
One of the best ways to ensure we keep focused on our priorities and stay on track is to create a personal business plan to help guide our daily activities and tasks – those ultimate goals that the majority of our time should be spent on.
Set Your Goals
One of the most important parts of creating a personal business plan is distilling down the main priorities and goals you want to accomplish. Think of it like if you did nothing else, what are the main things you want to get done over the coming year? When the year ends, what things having been completed will make you look back and feel both good and proud about the past year?
The goals you pick should challenge you but at the same time be realistic and attainable. Additionally, in order to continue showing your value to your employer, your goals should be items that have a significant impact on the business, and align with the corporate goals of your organization.
From Strategy to Tactics
Once you’ve determined what your main goals are, it’s important to take the next step and lay out the strategy you’re going to use to achieve them, along with the specific tactics you’ll employ.
Your strategy might be that you’re going to use social media to achieve the goal of increasing exposure for your company. The tactics would then set out which specific sites and social media tools you’re going to use, as well as outline what your activity on those sites would look like. The more specific you can be in providing details about what it is you need to do to accomplish your goals, the higher your likelihood of succeeding.
Make Things Measurable
Another great reason for creating a personal business plan is to provide a scorecard that you can use to continually gauge your performance against and determine if you’re on track. For this to be effective it’s important to make your goals measurable - try and attach metrics to specific activities whenever possible as it allows you to more clearly determine if goals have been met or not.
For instance, with the goal outlined above of increasing exposure for the company, ideally it should have metrics attached to it so that we can show whether or not the goal was achieved. A measurable goal would be “to increase awareness of the company within the industry from 20% to 40%”. Doing this allows us to clearly determine if the goal has been met or not. If we just say we want to increase exposure for the company without really defining how we’re going to measure that, then it becomes much more difficult to tell if we’ve been successful. As well it makes it more difficult to work towards the goal without parameters to let us know if what we’re doing is working.
Get Management Involved and Onboard
When you start to create your personal business plan, be sure to get your manager involved. Many companies in fact support and even mandate that their employees create personal business plans for themselves. By getting management onboard, you can ensure both parties are on the same page as far as expectations for performance, what the main goals are, and how they can best be achieved.
In addition, the simple act of discussing your business plan with your manager brings it to their attention and shows you to be a person who takes initiative and is intent on performing at a high level.
Give Yourself a Reward
It’s much easier (and more fun) to work towards a goal if there’s some sort of reward in place for accomplishing that goal. Sure getting things done will likely earn you accolades from management, along with promotions and more money over time, but immediate, short-term personal rewards can provide that extra bit of motivation to go above and beyond in your daily activities. It’s the perfect opportunity to allow yourself a bit of a guilty pleasure reward or something you normally wouldn’t splurge on.
How does having a personal business plan help us perform better?
- It helps keep us focused on our top goals and sets out the steps we need to take to achieve them
- A good business plan provides metrics which we can continually measure our performance against to determine if we’re on track
- Allows us to show management we’ve succeeded with specific proof
- It’s been proven many times that written goals have a higher rate of achievement (Go one step further and make sure they’re visible to you on a daily basis – post them somewhere obvious so that you can’t not see them)
Plan Your Success
Most people want to be top performers and do work that significantly impacts the business – work that will not only gain recognition, but also garner them promotions and more money. Unfortunately there are so many things that can take up our time at work that it’s very easy to get off track. Creating a personal business plan helps to keep main goals top of mind and outlines exactly what needs to be done to achieve them – in turn making it easier on you to succeed.
In order for a personal business plan to work though you have to make a point of following it. Keep it visible, re-visit it often, and make a point of devoting the majority of your time to the things that you have set as your top goals. Don’t be afraid to modify or adjust your personal business plan slightly as you go, but try and adhere to the main goals you set out for yourself in the beginning as long as they continue to remain realistic.
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As Partner, Stuart Calvert works with some of the brightest minds in the consumer packaged goods industry.
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