Help yourself to achieve your goals – Masterminding

In our last blog we explained how to establish exactly what your goal is for what you want your business to achieve. This time, we’re going to describe one of the support methods you can use to help you to achieve the targets that you have set yourself – and eventually get those goals.

As well as helping others with growing their businesses, I’m also constantly working on growing and expanding my own. One support method that has been very helpful for me over the years is ‘Masterminding’.

A Mastermind group is a group of five or six individuals who can be considered peers in terms of having broadly similar experience and career achievements. The group meets regularly, every month or two. The meetings are treated formally – as if it were a meeting with a major client – and, as in any business meeting, social discussion is kept to a minimum. Every group member has an opportunity to share with the group what their goals are, and what targets they need to hit to achieve the goals. They also share with the group what problems and constraints stand in the way of the targets being met.

Because they understand your business, but are detached from it, the other group members can think objectively and give you helpful suggestions. Importantly, after you have received the suggestions from the group, you commit to implementing at least one, and report back at the next meeting on what progress you have made. website loading speed test The commitment is the critical part: this maybe the only time that you, as a business owner, are held accountable to another person or group, and this is what will drive you to achieve.

These are the characteristics of a really effective Mastermind group:

–          The participants are people that like and trust each other, but they aren’t just a group of good friends or people that normally meet in a social rather than business context. This is important because they have to be able to be frank and objective, not feeling obliged to spare feelings or just patting one another on the back. The atmosphere should be a professional one.

–          There are no conflicts of interest among the members, so they should not be suppliers, or clients of one another, or members of the same organisation. Again, this is because the group members have to feel comfortable with being frank with one another.

–          The group takes their commitment to meet, and their commitment to the challenges that they set each other, as seriously as they would their other business dealings. It is the accountability that really makes it work.

We wish you all the best with your Masterminding – let us know how you get on, or if you’ve got any questions. For more ‘self-help’ growing your business, try our book Getting Down to Business, available from the online shop at www.exec-tc.com.

Do you know what your goal is?

If you think that your goal is for your business to make £X amount of money this year, you probably have the wrong idea. You need to ask yourself, why do I need the money? What do I actually want it for: to buy a second home abroad? To be able to afford to retire in five years’ time? To pay off a loan? You work out what your goal is by asking yourself, ‘why do I want it? Why do I need it?’ until the true goal becomes clear.

Many business owners misunderstand the difference between a goal and a target. The goal is what you want from your business or your lifestyle; the target is the actual revenue that the business will have to earn in order to get there. In my book, Getting Down to Business, I’ve described the definition of a goal for a business as, ‘not to earn a million pounds, but to send your children to university and have the option of retirement at fifty-five.’

 In my experience, a large number of business owners have not got clear goals in mind for their business, and so do not have a clear idea of how to take the business in the right direction to achieve what they want. Setting your goals properly is the way to make sure that you set the right targets for the business and achieve what you want in the long term.

The experience can be illuminating: frequently, the business is actually set up in a way that makes it difficult to achieve the goal. For example, one business owner that I worked with wanted to spend significant amounts of time in a second home abroad, but his business was set up in such a way that it was impossible for him to be absent for any length of time. It would be necessary for him to re-organise his business, either to employ a manager who he could co-ordinate with remotely by internet and telephone and run the business that way, or to stop what he was doing and embark on a different sort of business altogether which was better suited to the lifestyle that he wanted.

Only once you have a clear goal can you start to plan effectively and set targets which can be sure to bring you nearer to what you really want from your business and your life.

 Our next blog post will be about how to go about achieving the goals, so watch this space! In the meantime, if you want more advice on how to set goals for your business or how to go about achieving them, contact Doug D’Aubrey on 07946 730475 or Doug@exec-tc.com.