Over the years I’ve seen so many promising entrepreneurs with ideas that don’t get up – they dream about creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet, all they do is dream. I’ve also met many successful business owners who started with a basic idea and have made a great living from it.  

Start with a vision

If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, “Where do you want to be five years from now?” you might have thought it an odd question. But as a business owner, that might just be the most important consideration you can have.

Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there.

You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure you’re still headed in the right direction.

Create milestones

Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.

For example, if in five years you want to be free to travel for 8 weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can happen – income to cover travel costs, passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working, and staff who can manage the business while you’re away.

With this list, you can then work backwards from your five-year goal, and create milestones along the way.

With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

Small goals = little victories

If you say to someone, you need to move from $60,000 to $150,000 in five years, that’s a pretty overwhelming task. After all, it’s a $90,000 increase and most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as impossible.

But when you break it down, and then again into smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t look so daunting.

In the first year of the plan we have outlined here, your income needs to increase only by $10,000, or $1000 per month. You can further break that down by week: $1000 per month is $250 per week. What do you need to do different to reach that goal?

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can) then you can achieve anything in business and in life.