How To Align Your Business For Growth This Year

Your business only grows so much as you allow it to grow. I can’t stress this enough: growth is dependent on a solid foundation. Your business is like a plant. It will only grow as large as the pot you planted it in. In 2021, if you want your business to scale, you’re going to need to give it a nice large pot that it can fill.

Today, I’m going to give you a few essential components for aligning your business with growth.

SET THE RIGHT GOALS

People always stress setting goals. If you set goals and put your mind to it, you’ll achieve what you want. But a lot of people overlook the fact that you can’t just set any goals. You have to set the RIGHT goals.

What are the right goals? The right goals are ones that:

1) Align with your vision and values AND help you achieve them.

2) Take into consideration your boundaries and limits, whether they are skills, finances, or otherwise.

3) Are in the right order. Sometimes a goal can be incredibly overwhelming because it’s too far along the line of tasks to do. In this case, just “rewind” your goal and think about what you need to achieve BEFORE getting to that goal. For example, before launching a course, you might need to find a course platform, learn how to use it, and create the content for your course.

These are only a few examples of what might constitute as a RIGHT goal. If you need more help setting stellar goals for the new year, check out my complete guide to goal setting, where I break down why traditional goal setting techniques don’t work and what you need to do to create goals that you can actually achieve.

REASSESS THE PEOPLE THAT YOU WORK WITH

This goes for current and future people that you work with.

When it comes to the people you hire. Consider doing a role assessment to make sure that everyone is still doing a job that they are qualified for and that they have the capacity to complete. Make sure that you’re also still using their services. Sometimes you just might have outgrown someone’s services and sometimes they might have outgrown their role.

This is a great time to either give them more responsibility or allow them to find another position somewhere else that will allow them to grow. You never want to keep someone around who is no longer the right person for the job because it’ll only cause problems for both of you later.

When it comes to the people you work with. People that you work with may include folks that you’re collaborating with. You always hear that you should take every opportunity you get, but this isn’t always the truth.

Sometimes you’ll join a group (course, membership or mastermind), where the content isn’t useful and you contribute way more to the group than you get in return. Or, maybe you’re offered a position to speak on a podcast that you know your ICA isn’t listening to. It’s OK to review these offers and decline them if they aren’t worth your time, energy, and resources.

When it comes to your clients. It’s weird to consider reassessing your clients because after all, they’re giving you money right?

But look, if you have a really difficult client, maybe someone who always cancels their coaching appointments last minute, who doesn’t pay on time, who doesn’t do the work and isn’t getting results, the amount of time, effort, and resources that you spend on them is worth WAY more than what they’re giving you.

In this case, it’s a much wiser choice to let go of this client and also use the experience to determine who to take on as a client in the future.

PRIORITIZE, PRIORITIZE, PRIORITIZE

With a continuously growing to-do list, you’re going to want to nip it in the bud at the beginning of the new year and prioritize.

Out of your to-do list pick 2–4 high-level goals to focus on in the first quarter and categorize the smaller action items into the higher-level goals. If anything doesn’t fall into one of the 2–4 AND doesn’t align with your vision and values, just get rid of it! Otherwise, put it in the backlog for the next quarter.

When you’re this busy, prioritization matters!

CONCLUSION

I have a feeling that 2021 is going to be your year. If you set the right goals, have the right people, and tackle your priorities, I’m confident that you’re going to align your business for your biggest year of growth yet!

originally published at www.kristenwestcott.com/blog