After preparation, organisation is the key to a successful, active 90-day plan. Spending some time getting organised will save you time later, as well as providing you with a morale boost as you improve your 'competence confidence'.
Organisation is closely linked with determining your priorities for the next 90 days. If you've done your ten point preparation homework, you'll have a list of your five goals. Those are your key priorities. So what's next?
Your aim should be to declutter your life as far as possible - physically and mentally. Irrespective of your own mental image of who you are and what you want to become, you won't grow yourself or your business if you are dragging junk around with you.
In other words, your 90-day organisation phase should include the following:
1. Set up a dedicated email account for your business. DO NOT clutter it up with subscriptions to the latest "wonder guru" email lists. If you're subscribed to certain lists, re-evaluate their usefulness. Unsubscribe from all those you can't be bothered to read on a regular basis. Then unsubscribe from those that spam you with sales offers - you can subscribe later when you've reached your goals. Keep your final list of subscriptions down to a maximum of 5. Now change those email subscriptions to RSS feeds. That way you can look at them via your browser and declutter your inbox.
2. Use the 2 minute rule for all incoming email, post and phone conversations - including anything that crops up in your contact manager websites. Deal with it, dispose of it or decide to tackle it at a specific date and time. Your inbox/in-tray should be almost bare. Work on it until it is.
3. File receipts as soon as you get them. If you don't have a filing system, start one. File by category, such as car, petrol, order payments, invoice payments and bonuses/commission.
4. Set up a business bank account as soon as possible. If you can't manage to do that, at the very least you need to set up a separate savings account with money transfer capabilities. This helps you to separate out your personal life from your business life as far as the taxman is concerned.
5. Make sure you have immediate access to customers, team members and prospects contact details at all times. If that means using a filofax or daytimer rather than a computer-based system, then that's fine. Just make sure it goes with you at all times.
6. Set up activity tracking for all plan-related activities. Talk to your upline, or contact me for a selection of templates. If you are involved in direct sales, you should be tracking sales generation activities, quantity of orders placed, by whom, projected and actual delivery dates, order value and retail profit. If you are building up your team, you should be tracking prospect contacts, follow up calls, autoresponder subscription and unsubscription rates, amount spent on advertising, advertising source to prospect ratio, prospect signups. When coaching your team, you should be tracking their retail and recruitment activity with them, as well as tracking your coaching activity.
7. If you are running your business from your home, ensure anybody else in your household knows how to answer the phone in a professional manner. Roleplay is useful here - practice phoning until they get into receptionist mode automatically. If you can't manage that, invest in call diversion and send all phonecalls to a number you can control and access. If your company provides a voicemail facility, subscribe to it - it's worth it.
8. Invest in a whiteboard and place it somewhere prominent in the main part of the house. This will be where you and your family/co-habitees can update each other as to what's going on. Consider investing in a "family" calendar - the sort that lists daily activity by person.
9. Invest in a cashbox, so that business income can be kept securely until you can get it to your bank. Make the habit of banking your takings before you spend them.
10. Set up a system so that everybody, including family and customers, know when you are working on your business. Use your whiteboard, update your wallplanner, and decide on a routine that suits you and your customers. Then stick to it for the next 90 days.
Good luck. We'll deal with creating your plan tomorrow.
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