Creating a business roadmap is an essential step for a business to have a big picture idea of where you want to go, where you are now, and the steps that it’s going to take to get you to your final destination. This is a tool that we like to use with small businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs to make sure that you are building your business intentionally. We want you building the business you want, not the business that just happens.
When you started your business, did you have an idea of what your success would mean? Have you defined your goals? I’m big on planning (go figure!) and encourage my clients to plan consistently. We even have a planner system we designed that focuses on this idea of holistic, work-life balance goal setting. Visit our Freebies section to grab a free planner week download and try it out.
But let’s get back to our Business Roadmap. The idea here is that if you know what success looks like for you specifically, and you know where you are in your business right now, we can put steps in place to move you from point A to point B, ensuring that you stay on track and are building your business with your end goal in mind.
That seems like such a simple statement to cover such big objectives, but honestly if you have a direction in mind for your business, you will find yourself much more mindful of the actions you take day to day.
Building a Business Roadmap gives you Direction
So often we see businesses that grow organically, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, if your idea of success is to be working 20 hours a week, traveling the world, and have a passive income that’s supporting you, then we don’t want to build a business that requires you to be in a storefront 40 hours a week. Those two things are likely to be mutually exclusive.
So when we build a business roadmap we lay out the framework that helps give us direction.
We start with looking at where we see ourselves now. Think about what the pain points and the frustrations are that you face each day in your business. Consider what you’re happy with, what you live doing, and what you would love to not be doing.
Then we can figure out exactly where you want to end up down the road. Each action you take, the time you devote each day, the relationships you build, they all drive where your business is heading. The focus of a Business Roadmap is to ensure that direction is taking you towards your final endpoint. To the place and time where you consider your business a success.
Your Business Roadmap, plus a little business accountability on an ongoing basis, will help form a big picture plan to keep your business moving on the right track in the direction you want it to go.
Business Roadmap Training
Business Roadmap Training
Check out the video on how to build a business roadmap and grab your free planner to build your own.
(All resources, downloads, and a copy of the video trainings are hosted in the MentoringU Skills Lab. You will be prompted to checkout, and create a free account to access them. If you are already a Skills Lab member you can find these resources under the Freebies section.)
Today’s my birthday!!! And I am celebrating in the craziest way. I’m officially opening the doors for early access to the MentoringU Skills Lab! Entrepreneurs GET READY!
Entrepreneur Skills Lab Early Access Is Open
All my life my birthday has been a month-long celebration. We didn’t have a lot of money when I was younger, so my mother would make a huge deal out of things that looking back, cost very little. She would get up early and call the radio station… Yes this was back when you actually listened to live radio… And she would have them mentioned me on the radio and play a special song for my birthday. She would make my favorite dinners all week, and we would spend the entire month letting me choose what to watch on the television. All small things that cost little to nothing, but to a kid, it turned a single day of celebration into a month of excitement about the fact that I was even born. Few other things have ever made me feel so special!
As I grew, I continued to celebrate birthday month. It drove my friends in college crazy, and still drives my husband crazy. However this year for the first time ever, I haven’t been focused on gathering friends and organizing celebrations to live it up for my birthday. I’ve been focused on you guys, my amazing community of action orientedEntrepreDOers. I’ve been focused on launching the new MentoringU Skills Lab and inviting your in to this labor of love! This has been a dream of mine for so long that getting to launch it during birthday month feels like the best present ever. It’s been a dream of mine for a really, really, really long time and I am beyond excited that it’s going to go live today on my birthday.
I have always, again going back to my childhood, been one to tell people how to do things. When I was a kid it was seen as being bossy, when I was in school it was seen as being a teacher’s pet… Lucky for me it’s now seen as a marketable, valuable commodity for my clients. I’ve always wanted to be in the know, up to speed on the latest technology, the newest programs, the best software to use for any particular problem. I’ve tried new softwares, reviewed them and shared what I learned with those around me. I’ve driven traffic to tools that were little known, but that I found fabulously useful.
I’m in the business of solving small business problems!
I have also really enjoyed 10 years of building solutions to client problems. Over the years that has meant I worked very closely, one-on-one, with a fairly small number of clients. Solving problems takes time and I wanted to focus on the folks that I worked with. I was happy building relationships and slowly growing my business, and I was blessed enough to be able to do that.
But every business hits a tipping point where you either have to restructure and scale up or let something slip. I wanted to continue helping the businesses coming my way, but was running out of hours in the day. It was time to take my own advice and restructure to serve more EntrepreDOers. With online learning becoming so much more popular, I decided to take everything that I have ever built (did I mention I’m a bit of a packrat) and put it into the new Skills Lab membership site.
This is huge. This is giving access to everything I’ve ever built, all at once, for one low price. Access to the Skills Lab is going to be just $29 a month. That’s less than most gym memberships, less than 7 cups of coffee from a popular coffee shop that shall not be named, and is definitely a steal.
There are trainings on social media… how to set it up, advertise on it, and automate it. One of my favorite sections focuses on automating your workflows. This is something that people don’t pay very much attention to, but I find to be a huge success strategy for small businesses. I also find automation to be one of those buzz words that doesn’t get defined very well. To me, and in the Skills Lab, automating workflows really focuses on identifying the tasks that you do over and over and over and figuring out a way to make them happen in the background. So for instance maybe you post the blog post that you wrote needs to get promoted out to your social media every single time you post. Well, there are tools to automate that process. Maybe you sell in an Etsy shop and once a month you grab all of your customers, export them out of your Etsy Shop, and put them into your email newsletter list so that you can contact them about sales and deals. Well, there’s tools to automate that. Automating your workflows is really all about identifying tasks that don’t need your personal attention, maybe tasks that you would hand off to a virtual assistant if you had one. It truly is the embodiment of work smart not hard.
The Skills Lab Includes Content Small Businesses Need to Launch and Grow
Accelerating Your Business
Essential Business Skills
Basic Business Tasks
Marketing and Advertising
Leveraging Google Drive
Building your Sales Pipeline, and
Collaborating with Others
You’ll find guidance on how to set up a landing page, and what it needs to have on it to be effective, how to automate basic business practices and leverage productivity strategies to make you more effective in the time that you have to devote to your business. You’ll also have access to resources like our action planner, social media content creator, Ambitions Entrepreneur Virtual Summit Archives, and so much more.
There really is too much to list in just one blog post. Which is why we’re giving you 10 days to try the skills lab for $10.
I can’t wait to hear what you think about the new Skills Lab Membership Site, and I invite you to get on the waitlist today, and secure your spot for bonus offers like our website design course (valued at $399), our EntrepreDOit planner system (valued at $49), and our list of 50 free tools and resources that entrepreneurs should be leveraging to be more effective.
Time…it’s the one commodity we can’t easily buy more of. Now you can delegate, outsource and hire on but that’s not really getting more time. Over the next few months we’re going to talk all things productivity. How to be more productive, of course, but also how to do you get in a productive mindset, how do you figure out what derails your productivity and where do you learn to fix it.
How to do we make productivity a back burner habit that supports your efforts easily and with out a great amount of forethought?Productive people don’t have more time in the day, they just make the most of each and every minute. I’ll be sharing some of my favorite productivity hacks, along with resources and tutorials to help you get the most out of your day!
Over time you’ll notice that as you focus on these individual habits, distractions will decrease and hopefully your stress level will too.
Today’s strategy – Decluttering your Desktop…the virtual kind!
Don’t let a messy desktop slow you down. Clear your desktop, file those files, delete the icons you don’t need and get rid of any random files you saved to your desktop once upon a time. Want to know why this helps? Check out this article on how messy desktops can affect your computer processing speed. All those files saved to your desktop are eating up your operating memory and slowing you down! Create a productive desktop in five easy steps.
Delete any files are are not necessary or needed any longer. Be sure to empty your trash when you’re done.
Look through the remaining files. Are these active projects? Create folders in your my documents or on your external hard drive to file these into. A clear project or client based filing system will help you locate the files when you need them in the future.
Archive any files that are not being used for active projects, but that you don’t want to delete. Create an Archive Folder in your My Documents or external hard-drive and file them by topic.
Organize your icons – visual symmetry will help you locate files quickly in the future instead of searching through a hodge podge of random files spaced out all over the screen.
Reboot your computer
Want to take it a step farther? Grab our desktop wallpaper to help you organize your icons and keep your desktop in tip top shape! There is something very freeing about creating a decluttered environment that leads to a more productive session‼️
Click on the image to open the wallpaper in a new tab. Right click and save it to your computer. There you can upload it as your desktop background image.
Yeah I know, it’s been a little while since you heard from me, but I really am excited to be back. I’ve been hard at work helping clients get ready to be super productive in 2017, with a focus on tasks that deliver clear and consistent results. So often we waste time on tasks that derail our productivity and aren’t essential to success because we’ve lost sight of exactly where we want to go with our business and our personal life. Over the next few months I’ll be sharing some of the strategies right here on the blog. If you haven’t already, be sure you grab the 90 Day Jumpstart Action Planner. I’ll be referring to that handy-dandy guide over the next few posts, so you’ll want to grab it, print it out and keep it nearby.
Stock up on coffee, we’re about to make change happen with some good old-fashioned action oriented tools!
First up, How Entrepreneurs Can Manage their Time to Increase Their Productivity!
Time…it’s the one commodity we can’t easily buy more of. Now you can delegate, outsource and hire on, but that’s not really getting more time. Over the next few months we’re going to talk all things productivity. How to be more productive, of course, but also how to do you get in a productive mindset, how do you figure out what derails your productivity and where do you learn to fix it. How to do we make productivity a back burner habit that supports your efforts easily and without a great amount of forethought? Productive people don’t have more time in the day, they just make the most of each and every minute. Get ready… I’ll be sharing some of my favorite productivity hacks, along with resources and tutorials to help you get the most out of your day! One of my absolute favorite productivity hacks is using the Pomodoro Technique for focused bursts of productivity that deliver real results.
Ready to stop wasting time and start making money?
Time…it’s the one commodity we can’t easily buy more of. Now you can delegate, outsource and hire on but that’s not really getting more time. Over the next few months we’re going to talk all things productivity. How to be more productive, of course, but also how to do you get in a productive mindset. How do you figure out what derails your productivity and where do you learn to fix it. How to do we make productivity a back burner habit that supports your efforts easily and without a great amount of forethought?
Productive people don’t have more time in the day, they just make the most of each and every minute. These are skills and strategies that even the smallest business owner can put into place. Over the next month I’m going to bring you a different productivity hack each day. Use this knowledge like a buffet! Pick what works for you, what you can take action on and put in place and then commit to actually making this a habit. Over time you’ll notice that as you focus on these individual habits, distractions will decrease and hopefully your stress level will too. At the end of the 30 days take stock and see what really made the most difference and be sure to keep those habits front and center moving forward. In September our new Productivity Hacks series will be converted into an e-course with in-depth tutorials on some of the tools I reference. Stay tuned, or head on over to Instagram for daily sneak peeks!
MentoringU is a boutique strategy firm with a focus on supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs in the launch phase of products or promotions. We offer tools, resources, trainings and mentoring to help you achieve your goals with less stress and better results.
