February 20th, 2012 
admin If you have ever found yourself asking these questions on Monday morning, you need an Action Plan!
The first step in creating an action plan is to find your WHY.
-Why am I really doing this business?
Advanced Tip: If you need to create a brand for your business, these questions are also a great starting point for focusing your branding ideas.
If you plan your time after you chose your marketing system, you might end up resenting your business for eating up too much of your free time, and end up either re-doing your plan or quitting (and I don’t want that to happen to you.
The third step in your action plan should be choosing 3-5 marketing systems, based on a specific target market. If you’re not sure it will work, don’t spend a lot of time on it.
The final step to your action plan is writing your action items in your scheduler, every day. I wonder how many of those businesses would have been successful if the owners had worked a consistent action plan past 90 days…
So stop wishing and get to planning!
Creating a Business Action Plan
Graphs aren’t decoration. Bar charts are okay if you don’t have much historic data, and less than a dozen values of your performance measure time series to display. Virtually all my performance measures, including my New Signups measure which tracks new subscribers to my email newsletter week by week, are displayed in line charts.
You need at least 20 values of your performance measure time series. Add a line to highlight the current average level of performance.
I’m talking about the average level that current performance exhibits. The current level predicts the average number of new signups I’ll likely continue to get if nothing significantly changes.
Use the graph title to stay focused on the goal.
TAKE ACTION:Why not create yourself a graph template that satisfies these 5 features, and test a few of your business performance measures using this new template? See if you get some clearer insights into what’s really going on with your business performance.