Your 1-Year Plan: Be Realistic About Your Business
Remember: as Bill Gates said, most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years. Your 10-year target needs to be big. It needs to be audacious, but your 1-year plan needs to be very specific and very limited in scope. When everything is important, nothing is important.
So, inside of one year, you need to be thinking about the handful of limited-scope projects that your business can accomplish.
So, “Where are revenue and expenses a year from now?” is one of the key questions you need to ask in your 1-year plan.
Do you have a budget to support that projection? A lot of people don’t use a budget in their personal lives, and even more business owners don’t have a budget for their business. You have to have a budget for your business so that you know whether your business is hitting its 1-year revenue and profit goals.
When you have your 1-year budget and projection of revenues and expenses, you need to think about how that ties in with your 3-year picture and your 10-year target. Keep in mind that only in one year you won’t necessarily reach your 3-year picture or your 10-year target, but you need to be making progress toward them.
How much progress you want to make toward them is going to depend on how ambitious you want to push your business. But the flip side is that you have to be realistic. Again, like Bill Gates said, most people underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years, but overestimate what we can accomplish in one year.
So set your 10-year target higher, and be more realistic and more conservative with your 1-year goals.
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