By Neil Winteregg, Director of Sales Training
End of one year, beginning of another.
And just like that, in the blink of an eye, we are already in the final month of 2018 and on the cusp of 2019.
This is the time of year we start to reflect on how much we accomplished in the last twelve months, maybe get a gym membership and say what we are going to change in 2019. Get slimmer, quit smoking, find the right partner, whatever it may be, we start to look ahead and make a plan.
But let’s look at business.
Whether you like it or not, much your life is spent working. If you are reading this post up to this point then you probably like working and get happiness and joy out of working hard.
If we spend so much our lives working, it is time we really look at and confront the cold hard truth of the last twelve months and see where it got us. How did you really do? Did you make your goals? Are you really happy with how the year is going to end? I hope you are. But I know from working for sixteen years with business owners that all too often “being happy with what we accomplished” is really saying “I didn’t get to where I wanted to be.”
Well, how can this happen? We work five or six days week, think about working when we aren’t working, and at the end of twelve months we might hit our goals and we might not. It would seem with so much attention being on what we want, it should happen.
I get people asking me all the time, “how much money should I make next year?”, “What should my business be doing?”, “what should my sales be?”.
Well, in reality, these are hard questions to answer. Why?
Because what YOU think of as success is probably different from what I think you are capable of or what your “competition” finds as success.
It really depends on where YOU need to be.
If you ask your accountant, he will tell you a 5% growth for the year is excellent and right where you should be. Well, no offense to any accountants out there, but what is good for your accountant probably isn’t good enough for you. An accountant is happy when the bills are paid and all the columns and numbers add up. The accountant isn’t usually interested in how much you got paid or how much you need to survive in abundance. Are your family and your lifestyle really ok with an annual growth of 5%? I don’t think so. Your cost of goods and services easily went up by 5% this year, so is making 5% more than you did last year really a job well done? Probably not.
I find most business owners and individual workers think too small. I am personally not happy with myself or my clients only growing 5% in whatever statistical manner they track. Just because everyone else thinks it’s good doesn’t mean anything. You are thinking too small. You need to plan on and focus on growing at least 20% over whatever you did this year. At least. If you are a newer business that’s still finding its footing and getting going, then you need to grow 1000% or more!
Don’t listen to what other people expect of you.
Listening to your accountant or friend telling you to slow down, take it easy, you can’t always get what you want, etc. is the pathway to stagnation. The busier you are the happier you will be. Don’t settle. Make a goal for 2019, then make it bigger. Then make it even bigger. Then do whatever you have to do every week to make that a reality. Stop listening to what other people expect of you. Listen to yourself and decide for yourself what the real target for 2019 is. How much do you really need to make for your family? What lifestyle do you really want?
Good. Now go get it!
Free people want to work. Free people want to create and don’t care how many hours they work. For people like us, it’s the end result we want and getting there is the fun part. If you did hit your goals for 2018, then well done. Take a day off.
But remember, for 2019 you need to think BIGGER!
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