Here are some reasons why now is the best time to make things happen:

Every year, we open the doors to the holiday season on Melbourne Cup Day. From that day onwards, we spend more and more time at Christmas functions, end of year drinks and celebratory lunches.

You’re probably working hard right now to get things wrapped up for clients so that you can take a well-deserved break over the Christmas period.  Or maybe some of you have already slowed things down and are starting your break early. But you and I both know that while everyone is thinking about slowing down, there are a few clever ones who will use this time to work on their growth plans.  There are a bunch of business owners out there who will make things happen now so that they can start next year AHEAD OF THE GAME.

The question is, will you be one of the clever few?

Reasons why waiting for next year to get your growth plans in order can cost you

When you’re planning for growth, you need to remember that it’s likely going to take longer than you expect to finalise your plans. It will also take time to put those plans into action. If you wait till next year to put your plans in place, before you know it, it will be February.

And instead of planning for sales growth, targeting new clients, selling more value added services, you’ll get dragged back into putting your head down and delivering the same type of work you did last year for the same fees.

This is something I’m determined not to let happen to me.

I’m about to launch Licence to Bill Q – a members resource library that will include all of my trainings, templates and tools in one place. Basically, I’ve digitised all of my educational content and created templates and tools so that you can implement all of my strategies yourself.

I started the project in September and had a 3-month plan to create the content, sort out the delivery and launch my marketing campaign.

It’s now December (3 months in) and I think I’m still 5 weeks away from being able to launch. That’s 5 weeks of lost opportunities to help more people grow their revenue!

So instead of slowing down, I’m stepping up my efforts during the silly season so that I can launch Licence to Bill Q straight away in the new year.

Clever things you can do to get ahead this holiday season

I’ll be working with a number of clients over the next few weeks to make sure they can start 2015 in front of the pack.  And here is the agenda we’ll be using on our planning days – you can use this agenda yourself to get started.

1. Identify priorities

There is a mountain of things we can do to create sales growth for our businesses. Most of us don’t have unlimited time and money to achieve everything at once so we need to get CLEVER about where we focus our efforts.

So before we start our planning day, we’ll have our priorities mapped out. One of the things to consider as part of this process is the sales journey.

The sales journey is a map of how you help your clients make the decision to work with you, buy more services from you and at the right price. 

You need to work go through each of the steps in the sales journey to identify what you need to work on. For example, do you need to create some products and packages to get more people aware of your services (e.g. presentations, webinars etc)? Or do you need to focus on connecting with more people who are CURIOUS about what you do but not yet ready to have a formal discussion with you?

2. Plan your production

Now that you know where your priorities are, make a plan of what you need to create. This plan needs to include:

• Timing and deadlines
• Who is responsible
• Details of the deliverable – e.g. if you’ve decided to use webinars to create more awareness, then outline the content of the webinar

3. Make progress on at least 3 items before the end of the year

You don’t need to make progress on everything before the end of the year, just action a few simple items. This is because plans you create can seem quite daunting to implement when you revisit them later.

Having a few items marked as completed when you start 2015 will give you that motivation to check off even more items on your plan.