The Eight Week Plan to a Fabulously Profitable 2013 And Yay to Week One
Written by Julia Bickerstaff // October 31, 2012 // Daily Juice // No comments
Eight weeks!
I do like a bit of planning! A big part of me would love to disappear for a day or two and have a big planning session for my business….away from the daily-do….away from the kids….away from the house chores and, oh look there’s me getting all carried away.
But it’s not really practical. So instead, at this time of the year, I try to do a little bit of planning each week in the run up to Christmas. That way I’ll be all ready to kick off next year with some oomph in January rather than, um, March.
The trouble with doing a little planning each week is that it easy to forget where you’re up to. So I follow a plan (I did say I liked planning!)
I’ve just started following my plan for this year and thought you might find it useful too. So here we go: 8 easy and fun planning things to do, for your business, one a week, (which will take you right up to Christmas) which will help you make 2013 more *profitable* than 2012. Yay!
Week 1
The first step is really easy – but how many of us actually do it? Not many! So here it is:
- Write down how much you would like to earn next year. It’s that simple!
- ‘Earn’ means the profit that comes to you, so that’s your revenue less your expenses.
- When you are working out how much you want, don’t forget you will need to pay tax on profits. So if you need to ‘take home’ $60,000 you need to work out the pre-tax amount. Don’t worry about getting too detailed here. I’d just do something like this. If you pay tax at a rate of 30% then you will need to earn $60,000/0.7=$86,000. If the maths bogs you down, just divide your ‘take home’ by 0.7. That’s a 30% tax rate and is a good enough ’guestimate’ for everyone to use.
- To add a little extra spice to this I suggest you have three money goals: a good one, a great one and an awesome one!
- Your good goal is the one you thought about in Step 3.
- Your great goal is a slightly bigger one – so I’d add 10% or 15% onto the Step 3 one
- Your awesome goal is one that’s pretty big and a little cheeky. Probably 20% to 30% higher than the one in Step 3.
- I use Good, Great and Awesome goals for this reason:
Once we set a goal we rarely over achieve it, if anything we tend to come in a little under. The “Good” goal is the real goal but if we only work to that we might not quite reach it. But if we aim for the “Great” goal we should manage to get the “Good” one.
I put the “Awesome” one in because you might want to stretch your goal a little. Working towards “Awesome” usually gets you to “Great”!
- Now write you Good, Great and Awesome goals on this worksheet. And in the box at the bottom write down the goal you are going to work towards (Great or Awesome)
That’s it for this week. Next week we’ll look at how your business went this year, and after that we’ll look at six fabulous ways you can use to get your business more profitable in 2013 and reach those “Great’ and “Awesome” goals!
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Finally, I’ve had the comments turned off on this blog because we’ve had so much spam. Ugh. But comments are back on again now so…… I’d love to hear from you. Are you going to do the plan? What do you reckon to Week 1? Anything else you’d like to know?!
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