A client of mine (let’s call him Pete) created an Internet-based business to offer emotional support to people. You might call it a form of counselling or coaching. He used his passion for helping others and his technical know-how to create a prototype for his business.
The problem was that although he had put in a year and had the beginnings of a wonderful business, he had not been able to finish the work and get the website launched.
There were many symptoms of this problem, including:
• spending time on details that did not leverage his time well
• feeling frustrated, discouraged
• needed to hire help but wasn’t bringing in enough revenue to do it
• feeling “stuck” and couldn’t think himself out of his constraints
• no revenue coming in for all his work
• not able to actualize his vision for the business
What we did first
When Pete came to work with me to write a one page business plan®, the first step we took was to work at recreating his business vision so that it was idealistic, thrilling, reflects his values and passions AND is achievable.
This narrowing of focus made the vision more real and gave him a place to begin to heal the world. And included in the plan was that in year 4, after he successfully serves his first target market, he can branch out to other target markets.
The next step was easy
The next step of uncovering his unique message and mission was easy now. He held on to his original passion to provide emotional support, but now he’s attracting a more specific group of potential clients, and his message is more direct and targeted to them.
Pete’s initial vision was to provide emotional support to everyone who is in pain. The revised vision we came to together was to provide information and resources to divorced dads and their families.
Then we set measurable goals
Before we started our work, Pete was not measuring anything in his business. So our next step was to come up with 3 things to measure. He was immensely relieved, as this took away some of the ambiguity that was weighing him down.
He set traffic goals for the website as one objective. This then led him to think of some strategies that would be important to generating the traffic.
Instead of working all the time to clear a never-ending to do list and respond to a multitude of urgent events, Pete and I created a strategy for building his business and he could measure the success of his strategy with measurable objectives.
This put parameters around the work he needed to do. He stopped feeling he had to do anything and everything all the time, which was burning him out.
One strategy was to generate website traffic by contributing to web discussion groups, using paid adwords targeted to divorced dads and to link to other websites with the same target market. To know if his strategy is working, Pete made sure that he had objectives to measure his progress
The final step – planning for the next twelve months
Our final step was for Pete to decide on key actions and projects for the next twelve months. This took a lot of effort, because he had not taken such a long-range view of his business.
By planning projects throughout the year, Pete got a hidden benefit. He realized that he could plan to take a week’s vacation, something he hadn’t done since he started working on this business.
While creating his one page business plan®, Pete discovered many truths about himself and his business, and he reconnected to the passion and enthusiasm that he had started out with.
This is the second in a three part series about creating a one page business plan®. You can read Part 1 here and Part 3 here.
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This post was written by guest blogger Amy Grossman, MBA. Amy is a One Page Business Plan® Certified Consultant who makes it easy for solo-preneurs to write a business plan. For more information, get Amy’s free 7-part e-course “Top 7 Business Plan Myths Exposed”.
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