Creating a strong financial foundation entails taking steps that will clearly reveal your current financial situation.
Once you know where you are, determining where you want to wind up is the next step. Your ultimate goal is almost as important as your starting point; after all it gives you a concrete goal on which to set your sites. Take a moment to think about an entrepreneur you look up to, someone who is successfully running a business with the size, scope and profits that you would like for yourself. You can be confident that he or she has a behind-the-scenes business plan in place; one that is based on a concrete vision and has probably been around since the inception of the business. That successful entrepreneur is likely to have articulated where he wants to be in one year, three years and five years with very specific goals in mind.
Many small business owners don't take these necessary steps. They fall into the trap of a vision that doesn't go further than wanting more money. The bills are mounting and we're tired of being buried in debt. But our desire to change things isn't SPECIFIC so our plans wind up equally vague. There's no mystery. That's exactly why these plans often go without ever being implemented.
Compare your financial life to a road trip. You know where you're starting. Let's just say it's Atlanta. It wouldn't make much sense to get in your car and start driving without knowing where you want to wind up. But, now, let's say you choose to go Philadelphia. Well, now that you have both a starting AND an ending point, you can map out exactly how to proceed. You may plan stops along the way. You may even make a wrong turn or two. But, now that you know where you're going, it's easy to get back on track again.
Continuing this analogy, let's say that you do actually make a wrong turn on your way to Philadelphia and end up in New York. You may wind up liking it there, possibly even enough to consider staying and forgetting about Philadelphia altogether. There's so much to do, so much to see. If your reason for choosing Philadelphia is simply good cheese steak, then you may be happy to stay where you ended up, because you find the pizza in New York quite tasty too. Does it really matter if the lifestyle isn't exactly what you were thinking? Or your living quarters are a bit smaller than you imagined? You still like it better than where you were, so you change your plan and settle in.
How different would this scenario play out if your general dream of "Philadelphia" became an actual vision of what your life would be when you got there? What if you had researched and found the exact house you wanted? What if you had already determined the purchase price, the mortgage payments, what your view would be, where the good local restaurants are, what schools you would send your kids to? You knew friends there, what car you would drive, what you would wear out on the town. If your idea of your life in Philadelphia encompassed everything, from lifestyle to partner, business success to financial abundance, would you still be just as happy to settle in New York? Chances are, no. Yet, we all do this over and over again when we get somewhere. After all, it's better than where we were. And the immediate effort it might take to move on overshadows the fact that we're settling for less than we intended.
At Abundance Bound, we encourage entrepreneurs to create a "3-Year Vision." This entails actually writing down a detailed vision of what they want their life to be like three years in the future. It's an important part of the process to be as specific as possible. "I will be rich" is too vague. You need to spell out what that means to you. Some may consider a passive income of $8,000 per month, living in a nice condo in a safe part of town and driving a new Jetta to be the high life. Others want to pull in $20,000 per month and live in a house in Beverly Hills with a Porsche. Still, for others, that would only be halfway there. When you read your personal Vision, it should make you feel good. You should get excited and joyful as you imagine a vivid picture of what you want for your future. Let that excitement fuel you as you move ahead.
The process of putting your Vision down on paper plays a huge part in whether you achieve your goals. Your action plan will spring from this. It gets easier once you break your journey down into manageable pieces with measurable goals for each step. Fully visualizing the end result is a must. Vividly knowing where you want to go will allow you to draw your own road map from point A to point B and never be surprised by an unexpected toll booth. You will benefit from all your careful planning and hard work-both along the way and once you get to your destination!
