The easy and BEST way to craft a 2015 plan for your business. Step THREE!

So! We’re crafting a 2015 plan for our businesses in just five easy steps. Are you with me? Here’s step three: finding your themes. If you missed steps one and two you can find them (plus the intro to the plan) here!

You can now get the 5 Step Plan as a PDF! Hurrah! Just click here!

What’s a THEME?!

Themes are like your strategies. They’re the broad methods by which you’re going to reach your goal. Hmm, have I bored you?! It’s really more fun than it sounds! Let’s just find your Themes and then it’ll all kinda just make sense!

How to find your Themes

Honestly, this is a LOT of fun. It needn’t take long but you might want to spend ages doing it!

1.Get a pack of Post it notes – you might need heaps!

2 Write your 2015 business goal in BIG on a piece of paper

3 Now start thinking of activities you could do to help you reach your business goal.

4 Write each activity on a Post it note, and stick the notes randomly on a large piece of paper

5 Keep going! Write down as many activities as you can think of! Don’t worry if they’re a bit bananas. Quantity is good – helps the brain think a bit more creatively!

6 When you’re done* clear a big space – the kitchen table is ace for this. Now get your large- piece-of-paper-filled-with-Post-it-notes and take the post-it notes off the paper and stick them on the kitchen table in groups of similar-ish ones. Keep going until you’ve put all the Post-its into groups.

7 Have a look at the groups. Give each group a name that kinda sums up the theme of that group.

8 Look again at all the Post-its; are they in the right groups? Move them round a bit if not. If you’ve got lots of groups containing just a few Post-it’s, look for a theme that merges a few groups.

9 Now if you’ve just got between three and five groups you can pause for a minute. Hurrah! If you’ve got lots of groups you need to look at whittling them down. It’s really best to have no more than FIVE** groups. Why? Well these themes are like your strategies for the year and it’s always better to do a few strategies super-well than it is to kinda skim over a lot.

10 Being smart about your business means saying no. You. Can’t. Do. Everything. So now sweep up the post-its that aren’t in one of your five themes for the year and pop them in a safe place for another year. You’re not going to do those activities this time round.

11 Now open a word doc and make a table with the column headings being the five themes you’ve selected. Under each heading write down the activities*** you’ve thought about so far. This’ll keep your thoughts nice and safe and ready for the next step!

Tips

*You might want to do Step Five over a couple of days as sometimes you need to just let this stuff whirr around your head a bit. Well, at least I do. Most of my ideas appear on the shower, on a walk and just as I’m about to fall asleep. You TOO?!

**For lots of us THREE themes is plenty!

***It’s fine to add more activities into your themes – just not more themes!

Example

Without divulging any secrets… one of my clients sells jewellery and she wants to make $100,ooo in sales next year. Her themes for 2015 are: selling online, broadening product range, selling via wholesale, raising prices and PR/media. Some of her activities fit into more than one theme, and that’s a GOOD thing!

Not tricky!

Finding your themes and coming up with a preliminary list of activities is not hard at all. In fact it’s fun. YES?! So fun that you might be wondering why you need to bother?! Well it all comes back to making choices about what you do. More on that next time!

Next time

Next time we’re doing Step Four: Setting a 100 day goal

♡ YOU?! ♡

Have you got your themes? How good are you at saying NO?!

You can now get the 5 Step Plan as a PDF! Hurrah! Just click here!

PS This is part of a series I’m doing about crafting a super-simple plan for your business! If you don’t want to miss the next one you can get it in our weekly FREE Snacks email!

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