It’s October, and while the rest of the world might be dreaming of pumpkin spice lattes and planning their holiday menus…as an entrepreneur, you are likely focused on closing out the year strong. With less than 90 days to go, it’s time to ANALYZE, ASSESS, and ALIGN your actions for the next 90 Days to finish successfully!

That brings me to one of my favorite productivity strategies and tactics…The 90 Day Plan. In 90 days you can accomplish amazing things, profitable things, direction changing things! If this year hasn’t turned out like you wanted, or if the numbers just aren’t hitting the goals you’ve set…it’s not too late! Let’s buckle down and make it happen! Plan your next 90 Days like you would plan a vacation you can’t wait to go on!

In 90 days you can Brainstorm, Plan, and Execute. Sometimes getting started is the hardest part. A lot of the resources that I develop at MentoringU are intended to inspire action and are free for you to use. If getting started is an obstacle for you, try my action planner.

When I first developed the action planner, it really was an effort to help entrepreneurs think through what they needed to do to make a difference in their business. It will help you break down your goals into actionable tasks that you can quickly put into action.

For instance, if you want to build your email list to 5000 people… what are the actions that you take to get there? Your 90-day goal likely would not be ‘build my list to 5000 people.’ That’s not realistic for most entrepreneurs. However if the actions that you’re going to take to get to that final goal of 5000 people on your list include things like – conduct 3 webinars, develop a new lead magnet, and run $200 worth of Facebook ads…those are actionable items that you can put on your to-do list that will eventually help you get to your goal.

The action planner helps you take one goal and break it down into what tasks you need to do to be effective. Every one of those items that we just listed has other actions that need to happen before they become an effective promotion. You’re not just going to hop on to zoom and hold a webinar. You would be holding it to crickets.

You might need to

• Develop an outline of what you’re going to teach
• Begin building your presentation
• Create advertising graphics for social media channels and email
• Create advertisements on Facebook and Instagram
• Create a marketing email campaign
• Hold a trial run of your webinar
• Hold your webinar

What this really shows us is that even something as simple as ‘hold a webinar to grow my list’ has multiple steps and actions that will all take time and effort. Using a tool like the MentoringU Action Planner, or even just pen and paper, you can back out things to the lowest common denominator, the smallest task where you start and then begin to put that in play. To-do lists become difficult and we feel like we’re not accomplishing anything because we put big multi-step tasks on our to-do list. We can’t cross off hold a webinar to grow my list until we have done everything else that it takes to lead up to having a webinar, to maintain momentum and motivation, we have to start thinking smaller.

My single-minded, somewhat obsessive focus at MentoringU on the 90-day Plan is really an effort to help you start thinking smaller. If we work on the small tasks we begin to see big results.

Even better, we can identify tasks along the way that we can automate, taking the task off your plate! Right now we are just under 90 days from January 1st. This is the time to start thinking about where you want to start your business in 2019.

What do you need to accomplish in the next 90 days to consider 2018 a success?

• Do you need to grow your list
• Do you need to develop new content
• Are you launching a new product
• What is going to make this year a success for you? (And be sure you are defining success in both financial and emotional ways.)

Once you have aligned your goals and know what you will consider a success, let’s back it out and figure out what steps you can take to accomplish that in the next 90 days. If you haven’t already, go ahead and give the free online Action Planner a try. It’s going to prompt you to define a goal and a timeline, and then begin to break that down into actions that need to happen and tasks you need to tackle. When you finish it’s going to summarize all your inputs, and send it to you via email so that you can plug it into either your MentoringU planner or you can plug it into an online calendar like Google Calendar, just be sure to use something that’s going to hold you accountable.

If you need more accountability, or just want to keep on track, come on over to the EntrepreDOERs Facebook group and let us help you. I’ll be challenging you to keep on track and finish strong this year! Whatever method you prefer…just start somewhere!

Pick a goal.

Pick a task.

Take action.

Entrepreneurs need a 90 Day Plan to keep us on track and working towards a goal that brings us the desired end result…cash in the bank. When you are a small business or a one man shop, it’s more important that ever to have a plan that keeps you on track. We’ve all been there. If you need help getting started, don’t forget I offer a 30-minute strategy session on me, and we can use it to map out your next 90 days!