Strategic Planning for 2015

By Joyce Feustel, Founder, Boomers’ Social Media Tutor and CWCC Member

 

As we near the end of 2014, be sure to celebrate the accomplishments you and your business have made this year.

Hopefully your business has increased its revenues and expanded its clientele. Perhaps you launched a new service or product line. Perhaps you made some inroads into a new market.

Take stock of the gains (and the disappointments) that took place over the course of this year as you start your strategic planning for next year.

What has helped me the most in strategic planning and goal setting are some tools that were shared with me by Simon Zyrd, Productivity and Business Coach and author of the free e-book Setting Powerful Goals and Achieving Them. Here is a link to that book:

https://www.hightail.com/download/UW13blR0NEgzS3FLRmNUQw

Simon stressed that the first step is to create a vision statement, and he has a very specific tool that ultimately results in that statement. Do you have a vision statement? Do you revisit periodically to see if it still represents your true vision for your company?

The next step is to create a strategic plan, which has an overarching goal and within that goal are key areas of focus. Then drilling down further, each key area has specific objectives and projects.

For example, an overarching goal for me in 2015 is to expand my service of providing training of 3-15 people in business environments. A key area of focus is to gain more of these clients through my connections at the CWCC and in other organizations where I am active.

Then an objective/project would be to periodically review my database and proactively reach out to CWCC members letting them know of my social media training services as well as asking them if their company could use such services.

A specific goal would be to grow my group training by a certain percent by a certain date in 2015, with a specific portion of these clients to come from CWCC member or people referred to me by a CWCC member.

What kinds of techniques do you use when doing strategic planning and goal setting for your business? Which ones have you tried that don’t work for you? How do you discipline yourself to put in the kind of time and attention that these activities require?

I look forward to getting feedback on this topic from my fellow CWCC members.

Joyce Feustel, Founder of Boomers’ Social Media Tutor, provides social media tutoring and training that help people become more effective in their use of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Reach her at joyce@boomerssocialmediatutor.com or at 720-984-1162. Or find her on the web at www.boomerssocialmediatutor.cm