The Entrepreneurial Savant

This is a simple yet powerful way to achieve your goals. Many of us depend on appointment books and calendars to organize our life. Taking this one step further, as part of your goals achievement process get a five year calendar that is on one page. These are available as poster size planners at office supply stores. Use them to make specific appointments for each step of your goal achievement process. For instance, if you are a musician and you dream of making a record, break your dream down into realizable steps. These might include getting 12 songs together, rehearsing with other musicians, saving a certain amount of money each week for expenses, playing a certain number of gigs to prepare for recording, looking at studios and talking to others who have put out records, booking your first recording session, finishing recording and mixing, having cover art done by a designer, having CDs duplicated on your own label and selling them to stores, opening social networking pages etc. Each step can be entered into your calendar as a specific appointment or deadline by which you hope to have things ready. This project may stretch over one or two or more years but you can always see the next step and have a good idea where you stand. Not only that but your five year calendar will keep having new projects and goals added to it, serving as a record of your dreams and achievements.

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 *Virginia Satir

When problems crop up look for the specific problems and attach specific solutions to them. It is easy to generalize when something seems difficult to cope with or is beyond your immediate ability to solve or resolve. Virginia Satir was a founder and very effective practitioner of family therapy. She believed in getting immediate results from therapy rather than discussing problems endlessly. Going for the specific source of a conflict was one of her most effective tactics for helping families change the way they interact. This problem solving approach of avoiding generalities can serve as the first step in the process of handling difficult situations or challenges. Look for specifics.

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Synergy is defined as the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Synergy is what makes planning so important. By planning how to reach your goals through a well defined set of steps you get the added bonus of synergy. It works like this: Every effective action you take multiplies the effect of any other actions you take. If you are seeking publicity for an event you’re working on you make a plan to reach every potential source of publicity. You call the radio and TV stations with a good story about your event. You send press releases with pre-written anecdotes about the organization, perhaps its history or influential founders. You build a website, place ads on Google and send out an email blast, all according to your basic plan. What happens? People hear your event announced on the radio on the way to work. You’re in their E-mail later that morning. The paper features a story about the eccentric millionaire who started your group and mentions the fund-raiser. That night, they flip on the news and there you are again, building the decorations. Wow, they think, this event must really be the thing to do. And the power of synergy reinforces and reminds them about something that now seems much more than just an event in the paper.
Professional promoters and public relations people do this all the time, but there is no reason why you can’t get in on the action. The event you are promoting might be yourself. Maybe you want a new job or a new client. Make a plan and use the power of synergy to make it many times more effective.

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Are you surprised when things don’t turn out the way you planned?
When unexpected events turn things around in unexpected ways?
When it seems that Murphy’s Law should be named after your experiences?

It is said that entrepreneurs are risk-takers. Perhaps that’s why so many fail. Most successful people are risk-avoiders because they know that it is very difficult to make up a loss, whether a monetary one or a loss of momentum. They build in risk protection using a variety of techniques. One of the most effective is rehearsing scenarios. All this means is that they look into the future and imagine as many possible scenarios (What-if? situations) and how they would react to them. They look at how different variables could affect their plans and they make contingency plans to handle those crises and profit from them. In cases where they cannot profit, they plan ways to exit with the least amount of damage.
Perhaps you have a business dependent on one customer. What if the impossible occurs and they pull out? Rehearse your actions now and you’ll be ready ahead of time. Suppose a partner pulls out of a project or a relationship? Or your distributor goes out of business? Or you don’t get into the college you wanted? Simply rehearsing these scenarios and developing back-up plans can do a great deal to ensure your success.

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Breaking down your goals into steps is important and making those steps achievable is even more important. You can go even further and break them down into steps that can be accomplished on a daily basis. This really gives us the sense of getting somewhere with our plans.
An important thing to keep in mind when planning these incremental gains is to think them out ahead of time and make sure they are realistic in the context of your overall goals. Don’t set them each morning but rather, know them ahead of time. This done by taking the bigger steps in your plan and breaking them down into a series of tasks. These tasks may overlap each other or be unrelated activities that are spread out over time. Just try to identify the ones that can reasonably be accomplished in a day and put them on your calendar.

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When we set goals for ourselves or others, we have to also determine the steps required to achieve those goals. A common mistake in goals work is to set goals that are so distant that it is difficult to imagine reaching them. Even when we make our goals more realistic, we often define steps that are too far apart. This makes it difficult to stay motivated and on track.  It is important to put achievable steps into your planning so that you give yourself and your co-workers something to celebrate. These early victories serve to recharge your engines and get you psyched up for the next stage of your project. So, even if you include difficult steps in your goals process, put in some intermediate ones so that you can celebrate some early victories.

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Strategy is the overall plan to achieve a goal. Tactics are the tools that are used to enact a strategy. When marketing a new product, a company develops a strategy by identifying the customer or market and determining how best to reach that market. All kinds of research is done and decisions are made about what steps are necessary to attract the attention of the market and then supply the need you have created. This overall plan is a strategy. The tactics used may be packaging, advertising, publicity, testimonials, sales training, etc.
When planning, start strategically and proceed using tactics, individually and together to create synergy.

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