How To Plan Your Entire Year On One Sheet Of Paper – In 7 Minutes with Laura Posey

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Related Links and Resources:

If you go to our website www.simplesuccessplans.com/daily. you can download a free copy of 'Daily Success Checklist' There's a whole kit that you can download.

Summary:

Laura Posey is an internationally-recognized speaker, author and consultant.

She is known as The Simple Planning Specialist for her unique ability to simply and easily laser focus her clients to get dramatic results. Her Simple Strategic Plan is used by over 2500 companies from startups to Fortune 100.

She is the author of "How to Plan Your Entire Year on One Sheet Of Paper", and co-author with Jack Canfield of "Mastering The Art Of Success".

Laura is a graduate of SUNY at Buffalo and holds an MBA from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is fluent in German and is currently working on her Spanish.

When not on stage or with a client, you can find her traveling the world, playing golf, practicing the fiddle or snuggling with her rescue mutt, George, at home in Richmond, Virginia, USA.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:49 Laura’s ideal Client: Entrepreneurs are my bread and butter, coaches, advisors, consultants, service providers, all in the business to business space. I came out of insurance for many years as an agent and also as a Sales Manager. I just love the B2B Space, I love folks that are selling to other business owners.

2:24 Problem Laura helps solve: The biggest problem that I see with almost every entrepreneur, is that they have a terrible 'bright-shiny-objects' syndrome; they see opportunity everywhere, which is why they started a business, because they saw the opportunity. The problem is, they have trouble prioritizing the opportunities. They have trouble saying "no" to the ones that aren't really going to get them where they need to go. And so, we have to help them put some constraints on the opportunities. Choose the very best ones, and get them all the way done.

3:10 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Laura: The biggest emotion or feeling is that sense of overwhelmed; there's just so much to do, they're chasing stuffs, they got many projects going at once, they've got lot of stuffs done but there is a lot of stuffs that isn’t getting done. They're feeling overwhelmed, they're frustrated, they're stressed, and they just feel unfocused. They have this sense of "I just really want a path to follow; just give me some steps, let me put my business into a series of steps that goes from here to here so that I can grow it." That's what we help them to do is to get rid of that overwhelm and create that focus.

4:06 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Laura and her solution: I think the first one is that they think it's unsolvable, they think there's something wrong with them, that they're broken in some way. That they're undisciplined, they don't have any will power, that they have ADHD, they think something's wrong with them. And so, they don't try to solve the problem. They're trying to fix themselves and the problem isn't them. The problem is simply the lack of a plan and the lack of a system. The second thing that I see is that they go overboard; they try to do too much planning. They sit down, answered millions of questions and they end up with this big thick huge plan that they never used. It was a good exercise in thinking in clearing up some of the clutter in their head, but it doesn't become a tool that they can use every day to stay focus, to get over that overwhelm and to make progress every single day.

5:20 Laura’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): There's stuff to do today and there's the big stuffs. The biggest thing that I see that people haven't done is that they haven't design their ideal business; they don't have a clear picture what they really want to build. The thing I recommend is creating that very detailed business vision.

6:20 Laura’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's called the 'Daily Success Checklist', and it really helps you get focus today. It's 3 simple parts: what do I need to prepare today to be successful, what do I need to actually get done today to drive my business forward, and then a reflection to look back and say "what did I do well, what are the things that I might want to change and do differently tomorrow, and what are the things that I'm grateful for today." If you go to our website simplesuccessplans.com/daily, you can download a free copy there and we put together fillable version, a printable version, there's a tutorial video, there's a sample so you can see what it looks like when it's all filled out. There's a whole kit that you can download.

7:37 The big question is why should your plan be on a one sheet of paper? The answer is it really won business owners; business owners are notoriously chaotic and overwhelmed. So that one sheet of paper is something that allows you to create focus. The other thing is, it goes back to what I talk about earlier with constraints. It forces you to prioritize the things that you are desperate to achieve, that you really deeply care about. And it makes you put everything else on what we call 'not-now list', and you can do that stuffs when you get the actual plan done. So, forcing the constraints is really powerful.