“Excuse me gentlemen, but what exactly are your intentions?” Tom Hanks as Captain Jim Lovell, Apollo 13
As business coaches, we are constantly working with people to craft their intentions for their businesses. It’s surprising how few people have put serious thought into what they want to get out of their businesses or their careers. One of the first things we do as coaches is drill down to the specifics of what people want.
“I want to make a lot of money.” “I want to work fewer hours.” “I want to sell the business.”
These are all understandable ideas, but they are not specific intentions. You need to think about exactly how much money you want to make. Are you wanting to make enough to retire? To put kids through college? To pay off debt? How much money is enough? Be specific about what you want to make.
How many hours is “fewer”? Twenty-five hours a week? Thirty? And if you want to sell your business, how much do you want to sell it for?
We ask our clients to come up with three big intentions for their businesses. These intentions need to be something unprecedented, something they don’t already know how to do. And they need to be specific.
Once you get specific about your intentions, you can start using them as tools to that will drive all the actions and decisions you make in your business. Your intentions become the top of the mountain that you are going to climb. Stand at the top of that mountain and ask yourself how you got there. What resources did you need to do to accomplish your intentions? More hours in sales? More employees? New computers? Whatever it is, start doing it. Set a timeline for accomplishing your intentions and make sure you have specific and measurable benchmarks along the way to track your progress.
Do you need help creating intentions for your business? Do you need someone to hold you accountable for those intentions? We’d be happy to help. We’ve worked with thousands of people over the years to help them deliver on their intentions and win the game of business.
Are you ready to win?