So as you may know, January is all about business planning in The Connection Exchange.   Week one's blog shared my plan for 2015 in the Connection Exchange with a key topic each month that we'll cover.  Then week two (last week) I wrote about How to Plan year ahead really looking at goals.

This week we're discussing ~ When it comes to planning, what the 3 key things that should focus on right now?

So much planning goodness!

1// Set yourself up for Financial Tracking Success

The first thing is getting your finances in place, and really ensuring that you’re tracking everything in your business. Now if you’ve recently started up, or you've been going for maybe a year or so, hopefully you're actually thinking about how you're going to be tracking your income.

Now I do just want to say this; that it is really important to start as you mean to continue and also set your intentions around your finances. What I mean by that is if you think ‘well I’m not really earning money yet so I won’t set up any kind of Excel spreadsheet or any kind of tracking of finances’ then it’s as if you’re expecting not to make money. By setting yourself up your able to say ‘here’s my Excel spreadsheet, this is what I’m spending,’ and then at least you know when you do make that first sale or money starts to come in, you've got somewhere to track it.

This is key, so I would encourage you to set it up asap in your business. I've just invested in Xero accounting software which is only $25 a month (and you can give it a free trial for a month as well) and the fantastic thing is that it feeds all of my bank account details, PayPal account , credit cards etc, into the system which makes my financial tracking (and life in general) so much easier. As I have a lot going on in the business, especially with the events that are coming up, {make sure that you book in for the two EPIC Events if you’re anywhere in Australia} so it’s really important for me to track everything coming in and going out. That’s the first thing.

2// What Will your Sales Targets be this year?

The second tip is to take a look at what good looks like for you this year meaning sales. Put a number on it. Really define how much you would like to earn this year. You might say ‘I’d love to earn 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 whatever-it-is-in-my-business this year,’ and if you’re planning on earning that, what are the revenue streams that you're going to be generating that money through. What are the services or products that you're going to be offering, and then take a look and see how many sales you need to make in each of those streams to achieve that goal.

Once again it’s about setting those intentions – if you know how much you want to earn and you’re able to think about ‘if I want to earn X amount, that means I need to be generating this much in each of my streams or across my products.’ So once again, define it .

3// Plan your Marketing Activities

Once set up your financial systems and identified your sales goals, the third tip is to look at what activity in your business you need to undertake in the next month, 2 months, 3 months, to actually generate the revenue in those streams of business.  For example you may be offering a service around being a virtual assistant and you want to offer administration support to entrepreneurs. If that’s want you want to do then you need to take a look at: are you set up, how are you going to market yourself, are you going to ask the people that already know you and support you to refer you, what else can you do, can you do Facebook advertising, what about Google Adwords advertising as well. Taking a look at how much you’re able to spend, if anything, on advertising and planning is essential. You also have your free social media marketing channels as well such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (Instagram’s a great one I've purchased through Instagram before), so really taking a look at that activity will help you have a clear focus and hopefully means you won’t be wasting time or money

So the first one tip;

• Make sure you get your finances sorted and you've got somewhere to record what you’re spending and how much you’re earning.
• Take a look at how much you want to earn this year, so really define your sales
• and number 3 is, outline the activities you need to undertake this year to ensure that you're going to meet those sales targets to add revenue into those financial systems that you've set up.

What are you focusing on when it comes to planning this year?