Dream Planning – Write it Down and Work Backwards!
Brief: This blog post is all about helping you achieve your dream. Follow each step carefully and you’ll be on track to living your dream!
Step 1: Find Your Cloud
Close your eyes for 30 seconds and imagine a perfect state of happiness. What makes you happy? Having fancy things? Spending time with friends and family? Travelling the world? Doing your favourite activity?
Regardless of what makes you happy, ultimately it comes down to two currencies – time and money. The question is how much time do you need to have to facilitate this dream, and how much money enables you to make the dream a possibility.
Step 2: Write it Down
On a piece of paper write down how much time you need and how much money is required. Let’s use me as an example. My dream is to travel the world and play golf for 1 year. I’ve estimated I need 1 year of time freedom and roughly $10,000 / month.
How on earth am I going to come up with $10,000 / month?!
Step 3: Work Backwards
I am very firm believer that recurring revenue and passive income is the way to go – I strongly suggest finding ways to make passive income to free up time and money.
I happen to make websites. Businesses normally spend between $2500 and $5000 for me to make them a website. While I love a pay check of $2500, once I’ve spent it, it’s gone! In an effort to focus on recurring revenue, I’ve completed changed up my pricing method.
Now, I waive my set up fee and charge a monthly fee of $100, FOREVER! Businesses are happy because they don’t have to spend a lot of money up front, and I am happy because I have recurring revenue coming in. The nice thing about website is that most businesses keep them for 10+ years… So instead of making $2500 at once, I’ll make around $10,000 over a 10 year period.
My goal is $10,000 / month in recurring revenue – this means I need to have 100 pay as you go websites to make $10,000/ month.
Step 4: Being Outcome Oriented and Process Focused
Now that you know how much money you need, and have a plan on how you are going to get there, you need to set intermediate goals for your timeline and keep breaking things down. For example, if I have a capacity of making 10 websites / month, I know that it will take me at least 10 months to get to $10,000/ month in recurring revenue.
So how am I going to get 10 websites / month?
Let’s make another process!
Know Your Sales Funnel!
How many emails or calls is required to get a prospective customer’s attention?
Of the prospects who are interested, how many of them can you set up a virtual meeting with?
Of the people who you have a meeting with, how many of them can you convert into customers?
What is your sales cycle – how long does it take on average to close a deal from your first email to the contract signed?
Example:
Cold Interactions: For every 1000 emails I send, I get roughly 10 people interested
Warm Leads: For every 10 people interested I am typically able to set up 7 virtual meetings
Hot Leads: For every virtual meeting I have, I am typically able to close 3 websites.
Conclusion: Based on this funnel, I need to send over 3000 emails / month to get 10 website projects / month. You can ALWAYS optimize each stage of your funnel by making improvements to each level.
Step 5: Don’t procrastinate, go chase your dream!
What are you waiting for? Write down your outcome(s) and set up a process to make that happen. Whether it is putting $500 / month aside towards a dream fund, or learning a new skill online to help with recurring revenue, dreams rarely just fall into your lap – you have to chase what you want!
