How to Turn a Dream Into a Workable Plan

Cynthia Hull

Tags Business Tips, Goals, online business, Success

Do you have a dream of creating a solid, sustainable online business?

You attend conferences, sign up for free webinars, buy paid training, and sometimes even work with a coach or two. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, you fail to make any progress moving from dream-state to reality.

Are you lazy? Nope! (..didn’t think so).

You don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan. You are stuck.

Start With the Long-Term

It’s a standard questions of job interviews:

“Where do you want to be five years from now?”

That can be a difficult question when you just want a job. But as a business owner, that might just be the most important question to answer.

Without knowing your long-term destination, it will be impossible to create a plan.

Step 1: Write down your long-term goals for your business.

Dreams

Create Milestones

Once you have identified a long-term destination, you can sketch out a plan for getting there. Then you can create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.

For example, if in five years you want to be free to travel for 10 weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can happen:

Enough income to cover travel costs
Passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working
Staff and processes in place to manage the business while you’re away

With this list, you can then work backwards from your five-year goal, and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $350,000 annually in order to fund your travel plans, and right now you’re earning $50,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this:

Year 1: $75,000
Year 2: $100,000
Year 3: $125,000
Year 4: $200,000
Year 5: $350,000

With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

Step 2: Create yearly milestones

small goals

Create Small Goals

Take a look at the five year plan: an income increase from $50k to $350k. That seems a bit overwhelming.

But immediately, in year one, the plan is to increase income by $25k. That’s an average of a little more than $2000 a month.

If you further break it down, it’s less than $500 a week .. or just about $72 per day.

Then the question is:

What can you do to right now to increase your income by $500 a week?

That might mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an additional $20 per month in Facebook ads, increasing your affiliate income. The point is, reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than thinking about that five-year plan.

Comfort Zones

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can) then you can achieve anything in business and in life.

Dream Big