We take a key interest in your future brand growth at Gordon Labs. This article will help you set a foundation develop resources and take action.
Planning—Writing Your Future
If you search the internet for how to plan, you’ll find a million variations on “what’s the best system” and “how to set goals.” You’ll also find a lot of advice on creating a thorough business plan which can be important when applying for a loan or attracting investors. We love the bumper stickers: “Plan to Win” and “Fail to Plan and You Plan to Fail.”
Unfortunately, as you’ve noticed, none of these do much good in dealing with the realities of growing your business.
Effective planning starts with a vision. (Cue the clichéd music.) Not the kind of vision where you say how much you’ll be earning or that you’ll be, “owning your niche.” And, just how many times have you created “SMART goals”?
What about the kind of vision where you’ve created for yourself a future that is so rich and specific that it’s real?
In reality, what will your days look like? Will you be telecommuting from the beach like a biz guru or will you be rolling up your sleeves in the factory or will you be in high-powered meetings with execs from global retailers?
How much time will you be spending with your family or working? Will you be having fun or not? What will your team look like? Who will be on it?
Discovering “what will your life look like” will help you define what’s important to you.
Learning—What Do You Need Next?
When growing a brand, the only thing that leads to success is what you do right now. Having created your vision, and told everybody you could about it, what do you need next?
This can include things you need to know and how things work. And planning involves what resources you need to put in place. Do you need a mentor? New team members? A partner to develop or manufacture new products? What do you need to add team members?
Identifying “what do you need next” has you asking questions. Ask enough questions, and what you should be doing now becomes pretty apparent.
What do I need next? My customers keep asking for a skin moisturizer, but I don’t have an effective formula. Who could help me develop that? How do I find them?
Massive Action
Massive action has become one of today’s buzzwords. What does it even mean?
You can read whole books on it, but here’s a definition you can use right away: It means taking much more action than you’re comfortable with to fulfill on that vision you created. If you want to be a mogul, you have to stop being willing to take the amount of action you take now. How much would a mogul do today?
The pitfall is to do a whole bunch of stuff. Massive action is taking actions that are likely to get you to your vision of the future. Massive action is not checking a box; it’s blowing up the box.
In summary:
1. Create what your future will look like until it’s real.
2. Ask what do you need to have your business look like that.
3. Take massive actions that are the actions that will get you there.
4. Repeat until fulfilled.
And if your future includes growing your brand with contracted manufacture of personal care products, we’d love the chance to help you plan…
