How to get clarity

Do you ever feel sometimes that you've just got this overwhelm, so much going on, not sure what to do next? Well, that comes from a lack of clarity. So I thought I'd share in this video a few thoughts on how to get your clarity back. If you don't know me, my name is Mark Wickersham, author of a number of books on value pricing. So, clarity, how do we get that back? And really, there's five things we have to get in place. The starting point is, is you have to be really clear on what is your vision, what is it that you're trying to achieve for your business right now? And so a vision is something which is kind of, if you like, what does your business look like when it's done? At the end of it, when you want to exit, retire, sell whatever it is, what does your business need to look like? And you need to write that down. How big do you want it to be? What do you want it to be in terms of turnover, in terms of profits? Where do you want it to be based? Is it going to be multiple offices? Where in the world will it be? What sort of size of team do you want? What will you be doing? What type of customers you need to create that vision, the picture of what your business will look like when it's done.

Now, having then done that, what we do next is from that we create some goals, because a vision might be. It could be 20 years away. And the problem is 20 years away is a long, long way. We sometimes can't really get ahead round 20 years. There's a lot of things that happen in that time. So what we do is we then create some goals which are perhaps 1, 2, 3, 4, perhaps five years away. So we break it down. So if we want to be. Let's imagine our vision is to sell 10 years from now. If we want it to look, if that's what we want it to be in 10 years, what does it need to look like in five years? So if we want to get to here five years from now.

What would our fees, our turnover look like to be on, to know we're on track and then perhaps look at, say, two years from now, what would that be? So break your vision, take your vision and break it down to a couple of goals at nearer time scales, perhaps five years, perhaps two years. Now, what we do in step three is now we think about strategy. Now we've got some goals which will take us towards our vision, but they're close enough to make real. Now, if we Say if we know we have to be here in two years from now, what do we have to do? What are the strategies, what are the things we have to do to get from where we are today to where we set our goal to be in two years, three years? And make a list of those strategies. It may be you've got strategies around marketing, growing your client base, strategies around moving offices, redesigning your website, whatever it might well be, we start to create the strategies. Now, number four, what we do is, is we now break that down into milestones. Because when you create the strategies, the things you need to do to get from where you are today to that goal in say two years time, that's going to be an overwhelming amount of stuff to do. And we can't cope with too much stuff. So what we do is we then break it down into milestones and I recommend 90 days is sufficient. So if you've got a goal to be here in 12 months or two years, then where do you need to be in the next quarter, in the next 90 days, the next three months, what do you need to have achieved? What do you want? The increase in number of customers or what are the big goals, the milestones? And what I recommend is that in any 90 day period, and if you've got a goal that's a year away, break it down to four 90 day milestones and within each milestone come up with a maximum of three big things you want to achieve in 90 days, never more than three. We can't cope. So it might be you have to redo your website, it might be you want to start a new marketing initiative. And it might be hire a new person, don't come up with more than three of that, three of those things, three big projects. And then what you do is once you've decided what your milestones are, what you want to get, where you want to get to in 90 days, then now what you do is you create the plan. So if you want to hit these numbers in 90 days, these are the three big projects. What are the things you need to do, the specific steps, the actions along the way to achieve those two or three projects that will take you towards your first set of milestones. That's the process. We cannot cope with more than three things at once. So we start with the end the vision, then we create some goals that are more closer to us, we then work out our strategies, we then create milestones along the way, and then from that we create the plan. If you found this helpful, then please click the like button. The thumbs up. Share this video if you want with other accounting professionals, subscribe. And if you want any more help from me, I've put somewhere, perhaps below this video some links to some other free resources. So go and grab the free stuff and I will see you online again at some other time. Bye for now.