What is your Ultimate Vision for your Life and your Business?

What are the top 3 things that hold you back or cause you to struggle to make that a reality?

Follow these steps and you will create a strategic plan that works for you:

1. Celebrate your successes from last year.  Identify what made you successful by answering these questions: Where did your clients come from?  What marketing strategies worked?  How did you adjust expenses to help your cash flow?  Where did you grow as a leader?  How did you best support your clients and provide value to them?
2. Create a Vision Board with your vision for 2012.  Ask yourself these questions: What is your dream for 2012?  Who have you clearly identified as your ideal client and how will you reach them?  What is a new idea that could exponentially grow your business?  What resources will you need?  What areas do you need to grow in for leadership and team development?  After you have answered these, draw out the responses or use magazine cutouts to create your board.
3. Write your strategic plan and include your mission, vision, values, key objectives and quarterly SMART goals.  Work backwards from your yearend goals to ensure you know what it will take to make it happen.  Use the LifePoint Ascent Plan if that is helpful.
4. Break it down by asking yourself: what will you choose to do monthly, weekly and even daily to ensure your success?  Map out your monthly marketing strategy and project your finances in a budget that has clear rules for spending and saving. Try to find the answer to how many “money-making” time blocks (we call this “green time”) with clients will you need to make your goal.  The more you can tell yourself what you are going to do the more time you will give yourself; this helps to take the emotion out of decision making.
5. Measure and adjust.  Keep in touch with your goals by seeing how you are doing and what you need to adjust.  Watch for the “80/20 rule”, where are you getting 80% of your results?  How can you focus on those tasks? Business owners who adjust their goals dependent on ROI will earn more revenue and gain more time. Also, post your strategic plan where you can see it on a daily basis.
6. Surround yourself with other positive business owners that will hold you accountable to your goals and will encourage the best of you.  Just like every business cycle, undoubtedly, there will be hard times.  The key to overcoming this is not seeing that the problems are bigger than you, but rather, looking at the situation and knowing that you are bigger and can move through it with success.  Understanding who you are and leaning into your own intuition and strengths will differentiate you from the rest and it will increase your confidence as a leader.

2012 is upon us. Creating a strategic plan where you dream big and map out the steps needed to implement that ultimate dream, will give you the edge that is needed to overcome your struggles.  You can do it, let me know if you need any help.  It is my pleasure to climb this mountain with you.

Belay On!

I spoke at New York Life last Friday, about 100 agents/ financial representatives. They were a great group and were very welcoming. They were celebrating their accomplishments of the month.

Along with celebrating their accomplishments, they had a presentation from Erin’s Camp. It’s a camp that helps children heal from the hurt of losing a parent. www.erinscamp.com. There are a handful of NY Lifer’s that volunteer, They “Do” what is helpful for these kids. As I watched the crowd, during their video, there were tears. Most everyone knew they had the characteristics to “Be” the kind of person who helps.

Why do so few “Do”?

In my presentation, we talked about “Doing” the tasks necessary to grow our business. There is a difference between busy work and task that has an actual ROI.  Sometimes it’s easier to get caught up “Doing” what you’ve always done and not take the time to measure its effectiveness in achieving your goals.

What is the goal in doing?

There’s a transformation that takes place in leaders from Doing (what they’re told, what they’ve always done, and what everyone else is doing) to Being (a leader who knows who they are and values themselves and is willing to differntiate based on who they are). Therefore they know where they are going based on who they really are. They understand what gets in their way and creates new patterns based on who they really are. They have a strategic plan that gets them where they’ve always wanted to go.

Is “Being” more important than “Doing”?

One of my family’s favorite movies is “Rudy”.  He is a young football player, who dreams of playing for Notre Dame. He is told, “Dreamers are not Doers,” yet he takes on that dream at the center of his way of Being. He doesn’t allow past patterns to inhibit his growth and movement. He knows who he is, where he is going and how to get there.  Ultimately, Rudy makes his impossible dream a reality by not only doing what is necessary, but by being who he knew he already was. 

What does it take for transformation to take place in your life?

Last month I introduced a new theme in my blog called, “Confessions of a LifePointer.” It is a way for me to showcase the incredibly talented, motivated and driven professionals who I call clients and who in turn, consider themselves LifePointers. My second installment of this segment is from Jim Guttau of Guttau PR. Here is Jim’s confession about his journey with LifePoint:

“In 2009, I felt my business had “flat-lined,” and I had lost my motivation to continue. I had even started applied for jobs, as I thought it was time to go back to corporate America. Terri Starck helped re-instill my motivation and get my career and business back on track. Through her proven system, I began holding myself accountable and setting goals for my business each month. I know it seems simple, but I had never really put “pen to paper” and written down goals and ideas for my business before. Terri also assisted me in budgeting and tracking my expenses, an area I typically struggled with.

Since April 2010, when I started working with LifePoint Strategies, my income has increased 43%–in just eight months!

It is now February 2011, and for the first time in five years, I have an official office and two team members. I wake up excited to get to work every day and thank Terri Starck for relighting my spark. I cannot wait to see what will happen during 2011.”

It has been such a blessing getting to work with Jim and help him reach his true self and achieve his goals. What we can learn from Jim’s journey is that with a strategic plan, you can climb any mountain or get through any rough time.
If you have a hurdle that you want to overcome or want see gains in your business this year, feel free to reach out to me to begin on your journey to greatness.

I have been very blessed in my practice to have the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented, motivated and driven professionals who I call clients and who in turn, consider themselves LifePointers. While the journeys of all of them are different, the successes and growths tend to be very similar. To that end, I wanted to showcase some of my clients and their paths in their own words, in a segments that I call: Confessions of a LifePointer. My first installment of this idea is Jon Terry of Alaris Properties. Here is Jon’s confession about his journey with LifePoint:

I have worked with Terri Starck for over two years.  She is the absolute best accountability partner with whom I have ever worked. She understands how to strategize, set goals, and make plans to achieve those goals. She helped me to set many goals and then later achieve them.

On April 10, 2009, in a session with Terri, I set some of the loftiest goals I could conceive. I created my first LifePoint Chart that consisted of Financial, Personal, Professional, Spiritual, Physical, Social and Learning Agenda Goals. Then, on February of 2010, I created my first LifePoint Ascent Plan, and made some even higher goals.

With Terri’s encouragement and accountability, I met and oftentimes exceeded the goals we had set. In the course of two years, I doubled my business and my revenue. Along the way, I learned some powerful lessons as well. When we set goals and hold ourselves accountable to achieve them, with measureable steps and calendared action items, even the impossible become possible.

We are limited only by our imagination and our internal self-talk. If you tell yourself that you can achieve a goal, then you can.  If you tell yourself that you cannot achieve a goal, then you will not. Thanks Terri for all your support, love and encouragement.  You will always have a very special place in my heart.

It has been amazing to help Jon’s business grow and in turn see his dreams get bigger. Many of us can set goals, but the ones who see the results are the ones who make it a priority to meet those goals. That is exactly why Jon has seen so much success.

If you want to see the same growth in your business and make your own path to business success, feel free to reach out to me to start making your dreams a reality.