Where’s Your Finish Line?
It sounds like a weird question for someone in business, but is one of the more important ones you could ever ask yourself.
Basically, where do you want to end up? What’s your business going to look like when it’s finished? For example:
- Will you work from home, or do you need offices/premises?
- Will you have staff?
- How much would you like to be earning? What sort of sales level do you need for this to happen?
You hear people go on about having a ‘vision’ for their business sometimes, and it’s easy to write this sort of language off. It comes down to asking yourself the same thing, though: where are you going?
You could just toddle along, of course. Take things as they happen. But if you do that, then you risk ending up somewhere you don’t want to be. At the top of the ladder, only to find out the ladder’s up against the wrong wall.
As you start answering these questions, other ones come along. Maybe you don’t want any staff – you just want to work alone. That’s fine, but what about if you want an extended holiday at some point? A month in Australia, perhaps. Can you afford to just close your business down for a month? Do you know anyone who can handle things for you while you’re away?
A bit of planning never did anyone any harm. If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail, as someone once said. What do you want your business to be when it’s all grown up?
And once you’ve got that answer, you can start asking the next question.
What do you have to do to get there?
