The end of the year is probably my favorite time of year when it comes to talking to business owners. I love this time of year because it’s awesome to hear how entrepreneurs are sprinting towards achieving the goals they set three quarters ago and to hear about how they’re going to take what they learned this year to make next year even better. Getting to have those conversations with people and supporting the work they’re doing are literal parts of my own “why”.
Quick Side Rant.
There’s a difference between someone just complaining/daydreaming about what they’re going to do to finish strong versus the grit and resilience that comes from an entrepreneur who’s already mid-sprint. Talking shop with wantrepreneurs is the opposite of my “why” and it kind of makes me sad. Sad because, more often than not, the wantrepreneurs have the best of intentions but they overthink, worry too much about being judged, or are waiting for everything to be perfect before they take that next step. Then nothing happens. They don’t show up, they don’t solve a real problem, they don’t put their businesses out there, and they continue to just stagnate in place waiting for the New Year to announce a new plan in which they will ultimately also do nothing.
Yikes, I depressed myself right there. Back to the positive and to support those that are willing to continue to work even when it gets hard!
End Side Rant.
If you’re mid-sprint right now or at the very least are just about to start that sprint (I mean the “step up to the line and on your mark” kind of about to start.) I’m going to give you two things that will help keep you focused on your momentum so you can pour as much energy and focus on the work that matters most for you and for the people that you serve. They’ll take a little time and honest reflection to set up but you’ll be able to reference them often to help you guide the decisions you’re going to have to make quickly as you push through your year-end sprint.
They are the Purpose Statement and a Change Agenda. Stay with me here, it’s not just business buzzword nonsense, I promise.
Building a Purpose Statement doesn’t have to be like setting your business’s Mission, Vision, and Values. It can be more fluid and change as the business your building changes. A good Purpose Statement will have you scanning what’s going on around you in real-time and allow you to specifically articulate why people need you more than any of your competitors. It also gives your audiences and target customers a reason to engage with you, to follow you, and to keep them coming back to you. It’s not generic aspirational fake authentic nonsense either. Purpose correlates directly to a measurable value created or delivered and is made up of three parts.
Objective
Here’s where you’re articulating your goal. A purpose statement for your year-end business sprint could be a target number of customers you’re trying to serve, a revenue target, a goal around hiring an employee or your first virtual assistant, or even where you want your business’s standing to be in relation to your competitors. It’s got to be clear though, no vague “to be the best” or “have the greatest customer service” nonsense. It can describe why you’re in business but make it a function of you being of service for people - think the message under a McDonald’s sign that lets everyone know they’ve served billions of burgers.
Advantage
What are you doing now, in this sprint for example, that makes you different? How is the work that you’re doing unique and worth keeping the attention of someone who sees your Facebook Ad for more than four seconds? Yes, we’re talking about competitive advantage but in more of a micro-every-day-action-taking way. I don’t want you to think about what makes you the best choice for someone in the big broad strokes that are more akin to your Mission, Vision, and Values. I want you to think about the real-time topical every day things that make you a better value than any of your immediate competition. Why should people care about you? How is your process the best process for solving your customer’s problem? Clear over clever wins every time here.
Scope
A Purpose Statement for a year-end sprint has to keep the activities you do laser-focused. Getting clear on your scope means being strong enough to tell people what you won’t do, what you can’t do, or where you won’t do. If you’re in a business that sells multiple products, offers multiple services, etc it means figuring out which few you’re going to give the most focus to over the next 60 days. Articulating the value, the specific solution you’re focused on delivering is taking the idea of the Pareto Principle and ruthlessly committing to developing that 20% work that will create the 80% results in your business - from your goal from customers served to dollars in the bank. It means for a little while there might be parts of your business that are on autopilot or projects that you had the best of intentions to get to that get prioritized for after the New Year.
After you get your thoughts on Objective, Advantage, and Scope put together the challenge is putting it all together into one cohesive statement. (No more than two sentences.) This statement will be the guide you’ll use when you get to that point in your work where you look up and are wondering what to focus on next. It’s that crucial point where you’re emotionally riding the line between the positivity highs that comes with seeing that you may pull this off and hit your goals and the complete apathy that comes from extreme burnout. At that point is where your Purpose Statement will keep you grounded and pushing on. Its format should look like this:
Purpose Statement: I or we will [insert specific goal like: earn $XX,XXX, sell 100 online courses, hire two employees, etc.] by years end by [insert specific differentiator that makes your solution relevant to people right now] in [insert a specific scope like using a mile radius so, serving your immediate community within 15 miles from where your work happens].
To give you a simple example, if I use me and let’s say I’m looking for people to hire me to help them create their own Purpose Statements mine might look like…
Purpose Statement: I will help 10 professional service businesses create their Purpose Statements by years end by keeping them out of the wantrepreneur zone and prescribing real actions they can take right now that align with how they do their best work. The businesses I’m committing to serve will be those in my immediate community no more than 15 miles from my office.
You get the idea, now it’s your turn. Well, don’t leave yet. Let’s talk about what you do with your Purpose Statement once you create it.
Once you are happy with your Purpose Statement now it’s time to set up the rest of your sprint’s guardrails. Enter the Change Agenda. This Change Agenda will help you figure out what you need to adjust in your business (temporarily) so that you can be as effective as possible with all the time, energy, and resources you’re putting into achieving your goals by year-end. The goal is to keep it simple, clear, and Purpose Statement-centric. If you’re reading this and thinking that you don’t need to change anything, I’d argue that the environment (includes processes and systems you use) in which you work is just as important as how hard you work. So don’t skip this part!
A Change Agenda is just three parts. We’re going to talk about it in three conceptual chunks but you format it however works best for you. From bulleted lists to tasks on a Trello board, it’s all good. Now that you’ve put some real effort into the Purpose Statement let’s work on creating an environment that sets it, and you, up for success:
Are there parts of your business that you think you want to change?
If you’re coming into the year-end ready to burn what’s left in your fuel tank that probably means you have some ideas on what you’d like to do differently next year. That’s great! The goal with the Change Agenda is to think about how you can roll what you’re doing now into what you’ve learned over the year. If there are things you want to try, stop doing, etc. this is a great point to give it a go. The caution here is that sometimes implementing change can take way longer than you think, especially if it has to do with using a new fun tech tool or creating new processes. I’d save implementing the new CRM for January and focus on the little things you can do right now that are easy to implement and that will be useful in the future.
What were you doing that you need to change to make it through this sprint?
After you prioritize the areas you want to see changes it’s time to get super-specific. Your Purpose Statement will require you to be laser-focused with your resources so you’re going to have to make some tough calls around how you allocate your time and money. You might have to change up the subject matter of the content you’re producing, increase the amount of content you’re producing, adjust the amount of money you spend on supplies, rearrange your work schedule, delegate a little more so you can focus on meeting new people at your local Chamber and Young Professionals networking events etc. You should think about all the things that happen in your business, everything that you consider work. Then strip away, minimize, and reprioritize any initiatives or processes that don’t support your Purpose Statement.
What do you want your business to be doing post sprint? (Sometimes businesses pivot depending on the outcomes of a process like this. And, that’s ok!)
Your sprint is going to eventually end and you are going to have all kinds of fun data to review. You’re going to be able to see what your entire year looked like, the impact of all your hard work over the last few months and, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by having data that supports how unimportant some of the stuff you were doing was. How your business operates and how you help people is a dynamic process. The tastes and expectations of your customers will change over time which means you need to be comfortable with change too! Check-in with yourself and your business every once and a while as you’re working through your sprint and leaning on your Purpose Statement. Make note of what’s working and what’s not, what you like and don’t, and document opportunities you can make time to explore after you finish achieving your epic year-end goals. Come the turn of the year you’ll be able to choose a direction for your business that best aligns with what you decide is important to you and how you believe you can be more efficient in delivering on your value. No worries if that means you permanently leave behind processes, products, and services (and sometimes people) that got you to where you are now but won’t get you to the impact you want to have in the future. As always, the more specific the better - see Purpose Statement.
You made it!
As of the writing of this post, there are 61 days left in 2019. That’s plenty of time to put your head down and work towards something epic. The best part of all this is that if you’re honest about the process and are committed to the work you’ll be in great shape even if you don’t end up hitting your goals. You’ll have real and actionable data you can use to refine who you serve and how you help people next year. Maybe you even see that some of the stuff you were doing wasn’t helpful or relevant to your business at all. There’s only upside here! Plus, taking a post like this and taking action means no one will ever mistake you for a wantrepreneur...so there’s that.
