As 2014 quickly comes to a close and Xmas rapidly approaches, what goals are you going to set and how are you going to get them done, in the shortest 90 days of the year?

For many businesses, Christmas time is their busiest time of year, with record sales and stock turnover.  For others it’s like weathering the storm.  So whether this is a time to rejoice for you or a time to tread lightly, it is always going to be a time that needs careful, clear and clever planning.

Whatever your business, you’ll need to plan.

Marketing could be at the heart of this 90 day plan, because whatever business you’re in, there is business being done and you’ll want a good piece of it.

1-REVIEW

Review your year to date.

Review the success of the yearly goals you planned back in November/December last year (or January this year).  How accurate are they, what still remains for you to achieve?

2-OUTLINE

Outline the last 90 days.

Write down everything that is happening from now till the end of the year.  Include holidays, marketing campaigns, targets, KPIs, events and the goals you still need to achieve.

3-PLAN

Plan out your actions.

To guarantee results your actions need to pre-planned.  It’s no good waking up the day before Christmas saying “What am I going to do with all this left-over stock?  You know what, I probably should have done some marketing.”  Or getting to April next year and saying “I haven’t done anything I wanted to this year, I wish I’d made time last year to do some planning.”

Consider including some time in here to plan your next year results.  If you don’t allow time for important tasks or actions like planning, whether it’s your 90 day or full year goals, how do you expect to achieve them?

Your outcomes will only ever be as good as the planning that went in to executing them.

If traditionally you haven’t been great at following through or completing your goals, it’s critical that you also take the time necessary to break down these goals in to simple actionable tasks.  Without going in to the complete Goal Setting procedure here because that’s not the purpose.  Recognising that many goals have failed to eventuate, purely because the single next step was unclear.  We don’t need to know every essential action to achieve a goal, just the next one.  Creating a clear action based timeline from now till goal completion, will give you plenty of opportunity to achieve your desired outcomes.

Nothing left now but to execute your plan and I’ll see you soon to talk about ‘achieving your 2015 results with grace and style!’

To your business success,
Ross Pepper

Red Hot Pepper
Empowering the Success rate of Small Business