Great you’ve made it this far, you know how last year went and you know what you want to accomplish in 2015.  (If you didn’t get a chance to read those articles here are the links. Step 1 & Step 2.)

Now it’s time to determine how you’ll measure what you accomplish and what actions you need to take to get there.

First we’ll look at the measures. What you want to know is what actions will you measure that will tell you your on your way to getting more clients.  There are two types of measurements.  Leading and lagging measurements, we want to focus on the leading measurements, as they will help us predict that what we are doing is going to get us to where we want to go. While lagging measurements are important, they tell us what we’ve done.

It’s also important to have measures that you can easily keep track of and measure on a daily or weekly basis.  For example a good measure for professionals, including coaches and consultants is how many calls have you had with warm prospects.  You most likely have an idea that if you make so many calls a day or week that a certain percentage of them will turn into clients.

What this allows you to do is set expectations. If I make x number of calls I should have x number of new clients next month, thus when you realize you’re not making the right number of calls you can expect a slowdown in business.

For your annual planning pick 3 or 4 measures and break them down into daily or weekly numbers that you can track.

Secondly, it’s time to look at what actions do you need to take to accomplish what you’re focused on.

The way to do this is it look at your focus and decide what 2 or 3 things you want to accomplish that will help you create your focus and are linked to what your measures are.  Using the previous example of getting more clients and measuring the number of phone calls you make on a daily basis to consistently do that what do you need to do?

Start by doing a brain dump of everything you can think of to do and then lay it out in order. When doing annual planning you don’t need to get real detailed you want to lay out the high level actions and then in your quarterly planning you’ll get more detailed.  If you want, at this point you can detail out what you want to do for the first 90 days of 2015.

Maybe another area of focus for 2015 is to update your website.  One of the questions to ask yourself is when can you focus on it.  If you’re doing something new in the 1^st quarter, then maybe now is not the time to focus on it.  In this case you’ll lay it out at a much higher level, possibly 3 or 4 high level tasks.

Finally lay out any event’s, vacations anything that takes time off your schedule.  I want you to set yourself up to succeed and accomplish everything that you can.

There you have it, a simple straight forward annual planning process.  I know that it’s possible to get much more involved and create a more detailed plan. I also know that the act of creating even a simple plan is better that not creating a plan. Not because a plan is the be all and end all. It’s that the activity of planning gets you looking at what you want to do and get’s it out of your head and on paper, which is a step in making it real.

Even though we’re into 2015 it’s never to late to plan for the year.

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Jane works with Women Entrepreneurs & Business Owners who are Overwhelmed.  My focus is helping them regain clarity, let go of ambiguity, uncertainty and fear, while bringing focus to their goals and objectives.  I ask the hard questions knowing that you’re ready to answer them. My clients and colleagues call me a thought provoking Business Therapist.

Women Entrepreneurs in Business (WEiB) an online membership group dedicated to supporting women entrepreneurs in creating a business that feeds their soul and pocket book.

The Sage – Grow Your Business an in-person program designed to help women entrepreneurs increase sales and expedite growth of their business.

Jane is also the author of Put Your Big Girl Panties On and Kick Your Fears in the Ass.

Additional information is available at www.lovasconsulting.com. Contact Jane by email jlovas@lovasconsulting.com or by telephone at 703.981.3157