Life Plans or Business Plans. Five Ways to Make Sure they Work

Writing Plans Can Be Hazardous to Your Business Online

When writing business plans, or any sort of plans, make sure yours work.

People like me (coaches, advisers and consultants) are always telling people like you (potential and actual e-ntrepreneurs©) to "dream big and set great goals". We are always encouraging you to create a vision of what you want to achieve as a person or in terms of starting your own small business online.

So you do that, then you are surprised and disappointed when things do not turn out just as they were in your vision.

Here are just five reasons why you may be having great difficulty achieving those goals and plans for a small business online.

1. Not your Vision: Your vision was not what you really wanted – you created it to meet the needs of others, not yourself.
2. Your vision was not clear enough. You did not see, hear, feel, taste and smell the reality that would exist when you had achieved your dream.
3. Focussing on the negative. For some reason humans are programmed to focus on negative things. When we are reviewing progress, we notice what has gone wrong, not what has gone right.   This means that people often focus on minor fire-fighting and totally miss the fact that their customers started using their product for something different. Launch the business in the direction you planned, but remember it is your customers that float it – make sure you are not fighting the current they are trying to create.  
4. Fear Factor. It is hard to break out of your comfort zones. Starting a small business online means you are going to have to do things you have never done before. We tend to focus on the fear we feel of doing different things, and ignore the fantastic potential outcomes of taking that action. 
5. Break-Down. Finally and most important of all, I find my friends are good at taking their visions and setting long, medium and short-term goals and action points. What they are not good at is applying their skills to visualising successful outcomes for those mid and short term goals. In other words they do not programme their brains.

Creating a good visualisation of a successful day, programme, plan, project or action can add massively to your success. Professor Richard Wiseman of Hertfordshire University in his book 59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lotadvises exactly that.

How Much Money Should I Spend To Set Up My Internet Business?

Well, for a start I have very little to spend, so that closes the discussion down a bit. But my ISP (Internet Service Provider or the folk who host my website in this case) offer a service where I can set up a fairly instant website, with very little knowledge of these things and.... Robert is your Mother's Masculine Sibling.

Hmm... can it really be that simple? Well of course not. So far I have pretty much disliked every design they offered.

Starting a New Online Business

If it is true that you can't teach an old dog new tricks I am in trouble.  Arthritic, smelly, fur falling out all over the place and four-legged I might not be, but transister radios were cool when I was a teenager.  Yup, I am that old - I can even vaguely remember the Beatles the first time round!

I am comfortable with the world wide web, I know how to use most of the programmes on my computer; I even know how to use all the apps on my mobile phone.  So I feel fairly comfortable with new technology.  But not with nechworking (a little word I came up with to describe the technology of online networking). 

Why am I bothering you might ask yourself.  I am bothering because I intend to plunge into the icy internet pool  and start a business online.