Starting A Home Business – Why Setting A Goal Is Essential For Success
The key to success in starting a home business is to set yourself a clearly defined goal. A goal turns ambition into a fixed point to aim for. It is the driving force of your home business. A goal is your motivation and inspiration; the reason why you do what you do. Without a goal to focus on, you have no clear direction and when faced with challenges, you may feel disheartened and tempted to quit.
Where Do I Start?
What holds most of us back when we think about starting a home business and setting ourselves a goal is the fear of failure. We’re afraid to dream big, in case it doesn’t work out.
When setting myself a goal, I start with this powerful question:
“What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”
Taking the fear of failure out of the equation, allows us to open ourselves up to possibilities we may never have considered before. I find it useful to brainstorm and write down everything that comes to mind, however big, small or unrealistic it may seem. Be daring and adventurous and most importantly, enjoy yourself. This is meant to be fun!
Find Your Inspiration
Once you’ve explored your goals, choose one to focus on; the goal you feel most passionate about and ask yourself what achieving this goal would give you. Look beyond the material gains and focus on the way in which it would change your life, and the lives of those you love, for the better. Writing this down and putting it up somewhere in your house, will remind you to focus on your goal every day.
Set a date
Now, set a date for when you will achieve this goal and write this down too. If you leave your goal as something you’d like to achieve at some arbitrary time in the future, you’re less likely to consistently do the things that will get you there. Setting a date and writing it down, means you intend to meet that deadline.
Break It Down Into Manageable Chunks
The final step to setting goals when starting a home business is to break down your main goal into smaller, more manageable steps. After all, you can’t eat an elephant in one bite, but you can eat it one bite at a time!
Taking your goal as the starting point, ask yourself the following questions:
• How much money will you need to achieve your goal?
• How many sales will it take for you to earn this amount?
• What will it take to make that number of sales and how many hours will you need to work?
• How many leads will you need to generate per month?
• How many leads will you need to generate per day?
Again, I can’t stress the importance of writing this all down in detail and putting it up somewhere prominent in your home.
Go And Do IT!
“You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. It’s simple, fantasize, rehearse then go out into the world and DO IT!” Henry Ford.
Goal setting is a fantastic tool for success when starting a home business, but having a wonderful goal to aim for and doing nothing about it, won’t get you anywhere. You must take some form of action everyday that will bring you a step closer to achieving your goal. Be disciplined and consistent with your efforts and remember to celebrate the small successes along the way, as this will keep you enthusiastic and motivated.