Most business owners will be pleased to see the back of 2020 and should already have made suitable changes to their business strategy for 2021.

 

Any good business coach will tell you, if you want to survive and thrive, you cannot leave your success up to chance. This year has shown us that the business environment is changing quickly, you must learn how to pivot and plan for success.

 

Change is inevitable and can have different levels of impact. At its simplest initiating change can be said to have three stages: Identifying where you are now, identifying where you want to be and identifying how you are going to get there.

 

When making a change to your business strategy for next year it can be useful to look at this tried and tested Now, Where, How approach and document this in a simple One Page Plan, which is continually reviewed and holds you and others accountable.

 

Don’t be afraid of making changes to your business strategy, this simplified explanation sets out how you can make a solid plan for 2021and how to reach those goals.

 

 

NOW:

 

Review your current business plan by running a health check on your business. We use specific diagnostic tools but if you are trying to do this without a coach, you could try do a performance analysis across the main areas of your business by grading them 1-10 for instance, marketing, sales, people, profit, innovation.  Highlight your three strongest and three weakest areas, which will provide insight into what is and is not working. From there you can identify some key issues that need to be addressed.

 

WHERE:

 

Once you know the key areas that need to be addressed then you can set key goals for where you want to be and use mind mapping techniques to generate ideas that will contribute to achieving those goals. Once you have some ideas you then need to pareto these. The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes – this is sometimes called the 80/20 rule. So, try to establish which top three ideas are going to make the biggest impact to achieving your goal.

 

 

HOW:

A force field analysis tool will show you the how negative and positive forces can influence the success of reaching the goals from your pareto list and will essentially give you the ‘how’ to achieving these.

You then need to document these (we do this in a One Page Plan – template available from our Accelerator page) with actions and realistic targets on how you will achieve these.

With the actions – you need to say who will do these – you could allocate these to team members and set deadlines. A good business coach will review these every so often and hold you and your team accountable for the action points.

 

 

Here at RL we can help you adapt and focus on where you want to be in 2021 and figure out how you are going to get there. Sometimes simple tweaks to your figures and strategy can make a huge difference.