Entrepreneurship – Essence of Business Milestones
Published March 30, 2012 | 
It’s never really been about just doing the best we can, but doing what is necessary to show successes along the road to reach the final successful achievement.
Focusing on the essence of milestones for your business, write down the objectives that must be achieved before you can consider having reached your goal, and these very objectives are the essence of your milestones. An example may be, if you want your unique gift store to reach the goal of a monthly profit of $20,000, milestones would be making monthly profits of $5,000, then $10,000, then $15,500, then $18,000. Also, if you want your floor janitorial company to make the make the switch to being 100-percent green-friendly, the milestones may include finding a couple of affordable suppliers of green cleaning products, and then developing your own commercial cleaning solutions.
Going further, you should organize the goals and milestones in sequential or chronological order including short-term, medium-term and long-term. Understand that a well-organized list allows for much easier change, adjustment and revisions as needed. But, try not to revise your milestones and goals unless your business significantly changes and you have to take action and make the changes.
So, assume that your business experiences a loss of 10-percent in profits after the second quarter of the current year. That is the time to make the adjustments and revisions to include new goals and milestones relating to the action of gaining new customer accounts or lowering operating costs or both, rather than continuing with the original milestones on your initial list. 
You should consider that reaching your old goals and milestones may not be possible until your business recovers a bit after you taken the necessary actions.
You should make it a practice to refer to your list of milestones at least every six months to ensure that you are on track, but most entrepreneurs that are dialed in to the “Lean Business Planning” process will check progress weekly, monthly and quarterly. As you reach each milestone, cross them off or highlight them, or signify in some clear way that you have completed an important step toward accomplishment of your goals.
Finally, a list that is either laminated or placed in some sort of document protector and posted in a prominent location in your office can serve as a daily source of motivation for your entire team, the simple effect on everyone can be priceless.
Entrepreneurship – Milestones and Your Business
Published March 29, 2012 | The straightest road to failure is one without milestones, signposts, and the final definitive goals.
Think of business milestones like checkpoints or signposts on the road to success for entrepreneurs, indicators that a business endeavor is both thriving and growing. In reality, milestones are the actual events or markers that occur on the path toward achievement of the desired end results of associated business goals. When we looked closely, milestones can be either short-term or long-term goals, or both, and can be easily achievable or quite challenging. Understand that effective development of milestones for your business could very well require some time and effort, but it is an extremely valuable exercise, particularly if your business is new or has yet to launch.
Your first step should be to set both short-term and long-term goals for your business. The goals may focus on different desired outcomes including profits, marketing, brand recognition, and even community outreach to name just a few. For example, if you own an online eCommerce store, short-term goals may include the redesign of your website and reduction of your shipping costs. Now, your long-term goals may include opening a retail brick-and-mortar storefront and in addition, establish an annual book drive and sale. This of course is what more often than not, occurs in reverse, with the online eCommerce store added to brick-and-mortar storefront. 
What’s important to understand before you get started, is that if you initially experience difficulty assembling the list, start brainstorming, and write down anything that comes to mind related to your business.
Your next step is to revise your list of goals through the elimination or change of the goals you determine to be currently unfeasible. For instance, if your list of goals from brainstorming includes the goal of your eCommerce storefront processing 50 new orders a day, you may be likely to realize and discover that this goal, though not automatically impossible, may prove very difficult to achieve. Consider revising that goal to gaining 30 new daily orders within a year. You should remove enormously unrealistic goals from your list, since they in turn have completely ineffective milestones. Remember, the simple essence of a milestone is to drive you toward ultimately reaching your goals, not to be an obstacle of discouragement to you by being unreasonable.
Entrepreneurship – Goal Deadlines, Timeframes and Milestones
Published March 28, 2012 | One of the simplest ways to feel the essence of happiness is the realization that we have accomplished something.
Set deadlines and timeframes to meet milestones, but simply stating, “Our goal is to increase our sales to $1 million,” for example, is certainly specific, but nothing about it provides a sense of urgency that’s important. There’s a great old truism that says, “A goal without a deadline is just a wish.” Nine powerful words that means set a specific date for completion and it then becomes REAL. Then you can work backwards from there to plan in detail the steps needed to get you there, and the very order of their priority.
Goals without a plan are similar to assignments without deadlines, and if you don’t have a set time frame for the end result you set yourself up for failure since it’s much easier to procrastinate and not complete any of the process.
Let’s look at some things to help you understand and get started towards successfully planning all your important goals.
Always write the goal down, include why it is important that you attain the goal, so if at some point you find yourself of two minds and hesitant to make a decision, then you can always refer back to the reason that prompted you to set it and prioritize it in the first place.
Set both a date to begin and a completion deadline date, with the understanding that often when we start on a whim we are not well prepared to follow through, the deadline serves to give us an end point to work towards which in turn creates the sense of urgency that’s needed.
Be sure to always break your goals into smaller more manageable parts, but don’t forget to include a time frame for each piece, you will find it much easier to tackle one portion of a project at a time than the alternative of becoming overwhelmed when you take a glance at the big picture.
Regular evaluation of your progress, to review what is working and what isn’t, and when to make necessary adjustments you identify.
So now you can understand the high-level of importance of a business timeline, and I strongly-encourage you to create your own as soon as you have a need to. It will help you get a better understanding and picture of exactly where you are coming from, and most importantly where it is that you’re going or want to end up. When you reach the end of the timeline you can evaluate the effects of taking the time to plan.
Finally, having a timeline is great and setting goals is good but the essence of it is the simple fact that “time is money.” So understand that if you are not able to monetize the efforts within your timeline or shortly thereafter, you will end up falling short when it comes time to make investments back into and creating different aspects of you business, sometimes attributable to setting the wrong timeline. But, you’ll improve with goal and timeline experience.
Entrepreneurship – Goal Meaning
Published March 27, 2012 | The direction of the wind can’t be changed, but sails can be adjusted to always reach the destination.
You should always ensure your goals have meaning for the team to which you are presenting. Letting your technology team know you want the trash cleaned out on a daily basis is not going to help them develop new social media and Web marketing applications. That’s someone else’s goal and doesn’t mean a thing to the technology team. Make sure the goals you develop are aimed and directed at the correct audience. If it’s something they have absolutely no control over, why should they care, and the essence of the goals have no meaning to them.
There is a common saying for dogfighting, “Lose Sight, Lose Fight,” that obviously means if you lose sight of your target, you’ll lose the fight. But if you stay visually focused and connected with your goal, you’ll continue to dig deep, doing whatever it takes to break through the challenges and obstacles that can hold you back from reaching your goals.
You should think of goals you establish as promises, which carry a higher-level of mind-set commitment, since there are very distinct reasons why a promise means more to YOU than a goal.
A promise has emotional attachment that carries a much deeper and personal sense of responsibility to the person to whom it is made, whether it is to you, or to someone else in the business. Understand that a promise also carries a higher emotional attachment with these specific feelings.
It’s obvious that when you make a promise or oath, your emotions are directly drawn in and involved. And it is because of this direct emotional attachment, the “mental filing system” in our mind immediately assigns this promise a top-priority position in your mind’s “inner-filing cabinet.”
A promise has a history of success and our mind’s recognition activates, specific to the history of success you’ve had when it comes to making promises. Your mind knows you’ve achieved an exceptionally high success rate of nearly 100 percent in many cases historically, and strives with a much higher commitment-level to maintain this momentum.
Understand that based on this critical history, your subconscious naturally assumes you can and will continue the historical pattern of success by keeping this promise. It’s clear that your mind is preconditioned for success in this way, because it knows it’s more than capable of keeping a promise.
It’s clear that prior successes carry extremely positive emotional attachments from the feeling when you did what you promised you were going to do. Your “mental filing system” recorded this data in your “inner-filing cabinet” as a positive emotional reaction, and your inner-resources work hard to keep your promises so you can maintain the “good” feeling.
You should clearly understand that a promise triggers your subconscious mind to set you up for success, and by limiting your level of achievement to just goal setting you are turning your subconscious into an “overprotective parent”. A “strong parent” who is constantly challenging you to not take any risk, for trepidation and fear that you may fail.
Your subconscious actually works opposite and against your goals, with a strong endeavor to convince you that you really don’t have time for any lofty dreams, and then quietly making it okay for you to “forget” about them.
Remember it is important to understand yourself, and not be your own worst enemy in your journey to achieve whatever you strive for.
Entrepreneurship – Goal Attainable
Published March 26, 2012 | If you want to catch excellence, then pursue perfection.
Attainable is extremely important when you identify and prioritize goals that are most important to you, and you begin the process of determining ways that you can make them come true by achievement. The process of achievement that you develop should include the right blend of abilities, skills, attitudes, and the financial capacity to increase the likelihood of successfully reaching them. A significant phenomenon occurs as part of the dynamic process, as you begin to consider previously overlooked opportunities more clearly and bring yourself closer to the achievement of your goals and beyond.
Understand too that goals you set which are too far out of your reach, you and your team probably won’t fully commit to doing. Although you most likely start with the very best of intentions, the simple knowledge that the goal is too much for you means, your own subconscious will remind you repeatedly of this fact, and will serve to stop you from even giving it your best effort.
The essence of a goal should stretch your efforts slightly, so not only you feel you can do it, but it will need a genuine commitment from you. For instance, if you aim to squeeze two weeks of work one week, you and your team all know that isn’t achievable. But setting a goal to do a week’s work in three days, and when you’ve achieved that, aiming to do the 
remaining work in three more days, will keep it achievable for you, and your subconscious will be on board with the achievable commitment.
There is something that I’ve witnessed people having a lot of trouble with, an element that if you don’t define it, you will run into a proverbial wall.
For example, I think we can all agree that one thousand dollars is perhaps more attainable than one million dollars. But, there’s one incredibly essential component or element that’s still missing in the goal setting success recipe, and that’s the how. How are you going to make this money? What’s the process?
Just stop for a second and think. I mean, do we just say to ourselves, “I want ten-thousand dollars now!” and then just sit there waiting while we stare at the wall in front of us? I don’t think so, sitting and waiting’s not going to ever work, never, no way, no how. So goals are great, but you actually have got to get up and do something to achieve them.
So when you’re setting goals remember to define the processes as well.
A better goal would be, “I want ten-thousand dollars from my Web design business.” Since it assigns another specific, which is always a good thing, because it lets you know where to concentrate and focus your effort resources.
Believe me when I say, “This is a real time-saver.” It’ll keep you active at exactly where you need to be active, and unnecessary distractions will be eliminated.
Remember this isn’t rocket-science, and we’re not creating poetry. It’s a very feasible, attainable and specific goal that will serve to keep you away from the indecisive and completely open-ended “I just want my business to make a million dollars and be happy” sort of goals.
Much more importantly, the essential “feeling of success” which reaching for and achieving more attainable goals brings, helps you to remain motivated and build momentum towards even greater success.