Intentions - The Starting Line

"If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up somewhere else.” – Yogi Berra, American Baseball Great

At Possibilities Unlimited, we spend a lot of time working with people to create specific and measurable intentions for their businesses. Those intentions are the essence, if you will, of your business purpose. In the past several blogs, we have gone over all the different aspects of creating intentions that will propel your business to unprecedented results.

What we’ve done is map a very clear destination for your business. You know where you’re going and what it’s going to be like when you get there. You’ve analyzed your action steps and scheduled them into the calendar. You have taken out a map and highlighted your route. You have programmed your company’s GPS and you are ready to go.

The only thing that’s missing now is the starting point! Before the GPS can figure out the distance to your destination, it has to determine your current location. In business terms, you have to know where you stand and what you have to work with before you can deliver on your intentions.

A SWOT analysis is a great tool for taking stock of what is and isn’t working in your business. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. It’s like an inventory of your competitive advantages and your challenges. Taking the time to assess what your company does well and where you need to focus more effort can eliminate a lot of the guesswork in your action plan. The SWOT analysis also clarifies where you have ample resources and where you may need to devote capital to become or stay competitive.

Our previous blog on SWOT analyses details the concepts and questions to ask yourself when assessing your “current location.” It’s important to conduct SWOT analyses on a regular basis because the external components, Opportunities and Threats, change with the economy, trends, competition and other factors outside of your control.

Once you’ve done your SWOT analysis, you are ready to start your journey toward the fulfillment of your business intentions. You will have a very clear picture of the path ahead, and exactly what it will take to get there. To win any race, you have to show up at the start.

Are you ready to win?

On the Mountaintop

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” – Jack Welch

Our past few blogs have centered on the concept of specific and measurable intentions for your business. From creating them to using them, to keeping them alive, delivering on intentions is hard but worthwhile work. It’s always possible to have big dreams come true, but when the goal seems very far away, it’s sometimes challenging to take those first steps toward it. We can be afraid that it’s just too big for us, or that that we are not deserving, or that there’s no way we have the knowledge, skills or resources to deliver.

If you have done the work of creating your intentions and scheduling actions into your calendar to paint a picture of your path, you are well on your way to getting there. But how do you develop the confidence to get off the dime and get moving?

We ask all our clients to go through an exercise that puts the client into the picture of the finished intention. Here’s how it works:

First, write a letter to yourself or to your coach, as if you are standing in the future, having delivered on your dream. You are on the mountaintop, looking back over the climb. You did it! You made that million dollars, or opened that new location, or took that dream vacation with your family.

Standing in the place of “it’s done”, write down everything that must have happened to get you there. It’s important to note there are no wrong answers. Don’t over-think the exercise, and don’t grade yourself on composition and grammar! Just brainstorm everything that had to happen.

For instance, if your intention was to generate $1mm in revenue – what would you need to make that happen? A new salesperson? Two new computers? Twenty more hours a week in sales? A different supplier or five new product offerings?

This is a place to be creative. Even if you have no idea how you will obtain or learn how to make those things appear, write down what you think must have happened. You’ll soon see the bigger possibilities for taking your company to that next level.

Wanting to make $1mm is a very different thing from being intentional about making it happen. It takes vision, combined with a specific game plan and a very diligent existence system to have it all come true.

From your letter, develop a list of actions that will unquestionably deliver the result you’re looking for. The key is what will unquestionably deliver the result. When you review your list, ask yourself this…if I did everything on this list, what is the probability that I will achieve my intention? 60%? 75%? 95%? If the actions on your list do not yield at least a 95% probability of success, then add more tasks to the list.

Last week we talked about keeping your intentions in existence. This list is an important part of your existence system. We’ll talk more in future blogs about how to use your letter and your list. For now, we want you to imagine yourself at the finish line, having won the game. Because being able to see the possibilities of new future give you the power to make it a reality.

Are you ready to win?

Going the Distance

“If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” – Buddhist Proverb

We are about six weeks into the new year, and there are bound to be some of us who have already let go of those New Year’s resolutions. We start with great ideas, the best intentions, but most of us have a difficult time going the distance. Was your resolution to lose ten pounds? Go to the gym three times a week? Spend more time with the kids?

What about your intentions for your business? Were you going to make 25 sales calls each week? Hire a new assistant? Increase profit by 20%? We have been talking about how important it is to set intentions for your business. How you need to have specific and measurable targets that drive your actions throughout the year. But if we keep getting distracted by the fire drills and interruptions that happen every day, those business intentions are likely to go the way of that gym membership.

What is it that stands in the way of us delivering on all those good intentions? We understand what we have to gain by sticking to the program, we know that the payoff could be huge, but we just keep dropping out the actions that will keep us moving toward the goal.

No matter whether you have set intentions for your business or your personal life, the key to delivering on them is a good existence system. Because if you can’t keep your intentions in existence, they will die.

What is an existence system? It is a tool or method you use to determine where your actions are going to occur in time. Everything we do, from getting out of bed in the morning, to landing the big contract that makes our year, occurs in time. If we schedule our actions into time, and into our calendars, we keep those actions in existence, and we have a much higher probability of success.

There are several types of existence systems, but the best is your calendar. Just as you schedule a dentist appointment and show up for it, you must schedule your business actions into your calendar and SHOW UP. Do you need to spend five hours a week in sales? Ten hours finishing a proposal? Twenty hours building a production system for your product? Make appointments for yourself to spend time on these tasks, and then show up for those appointments.

Your calendar then becomes a measurement for your future success, your tool for keeping your intentions alive. The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the actions that need to happen to deliver on your intention. Next, assign a specific amount of time to those actions. Finally, schedule all those hours into the calendar over the next week, month and year. You will begin to see the picture of your future success as you see how these tasks will unfold over time.

But what about interruptions? We hear this all the time. “I can’t just ignore my biggest client when he calls with a problem.” “My boss constantly runs into my office with emergency projects.” Yes, we all are plagued with interruptions that can derail our progress and throw our schedule off kilter. The solution is to schedule time in your calendar every day for interruptions. Maybe it’s an hour, maybe two. If the phone system dies and you need to deal with it right away, move up the hour for interruptions and reschedule your sales call for the open slot in the afternoon. When you schedule time for interruptions, you are less likely to drop out the time you had scheduled to accomplish important tasks.

When it comes time to show up for that sales activity, you should be focused on that and nothing else. It’s amazing how productive you can become when you allow yourself to focus on one task for an hour. Before you know it, you have made significant progress on your intention, just by having it scheduled in your calendar.

Visual displays may sound cheesy, but they go a long way toward keeping your intention in existence. Those fundraiser thermometers are a good example. With a quick glance, you can see how far you’ve come and how much more work you have to do. Set up a reward system along the way. After each key component of your intention is accomplished, reward yourself with a nice dinner or new handbag. Keep the incentives in place, even if you’re only playing against yourself.

This week, create an existence system that allows you to schedule all the actions that need to happen to deliver on your intentions. You may see that you need additional resources to get it all done. Making adjustments and being open to new possibilities is all part of keeping an intention alive.

If you would like support in building a system that will hold you accountable to your intentions, give us a call. We are experts at creating specific plans and systems for staying on the path to success. Because if you are going to win the game of business, you have to go the distance.

Are you ready to win?