Tips for planning your business goals - Part 2

Following on from Part 1, about organising your business plans, I'll now show you how I go about planning my goals from the plans in my little notebook.

I can imagine you have quite a few pages covered in colour co-ordinated notes by now, what we need to do is sort these out into what needs to be tackled straight away (these will be the ones that will benefit your business right now) and the longer term goals that will need to be built up little by little.

Start with your large goals, some of mine are:

1. To launch new product collections
2. To get more sales through Etsy
3. To gain more stockists

These are all huge goals which on there own seem an impossible task!  There are tons of questions to be asked for each and it can be daunting to really go for it and make them happen, I mean where do you start!  It's so easy to dilly dally around and put it off so it takes you a lot longer, when your business could be flourishing if you had just taken the leap to begin with!

Some are a little more straight forward than others though.  These three goals interlink with each other too, which helps, so try and aim for goals that all revolve around a similar theme (for example have your freelance goals, building your brand goals, blogging and social media goals, licensing deal goals).  This way you're not trying to tackle everything at once.  You will need the time to build each part of your business properly and you may not invest enough time to ensure you meet these plans, or they may take you a lot longer!

So I've picked my three big goals that I will be focusing on at the moment, from here I need to ask my self lots of questions so I can assess how I will meet them and draw up a schedule I need to stick to to make it happen.

Launching new collections

• What products would I like to get manufactured?
• Should I expand upon current product ranges? In which case do new designs need to be made or can do I have designs in my portfolio that work well together?
• Researching manufacturers needs to be undertaken, and this can take a considerable amount of time!
• Do I need to send away for samples or get a product sample made up? (these can take a few weeks to be made, sometimes longer!)
• Which target market will I be aiming these products at?
• You need to look at your finances and see how much money you can budget for this.
• What quantities will you be ordering?
• What packaging would you need to order for these products?
• Will you need different packaging if you were to sell online or wholesale?
• Is wholesale a viable option?  Will you make enough of a profit?
• Will you be launching these collections at an event? In which case how will you need to plan out your production schedule so you meet the deadline?

You get the idea, there are a lot of little things that go into these goals, so you need to write each big plan out and then ask yourself lots and lots of questions.  Ask other people or other designers what you need to do to meet a certain goal, they may know of other aspects that you need to take into account.

One of the most haunting pieces of advice I've been given is that 'you don't know what you don't know', which is why it is so important to ask others!

Follow on to Part 3 here!

Why not ask your questions below so I and others can help you get the answers!