What do you do next if you want to make your daydream real? If you want to take a vacation you make plans, buy your plane tickets and reserve a hotel room. When the date arrives you head off to enjoy the rewards of your daydreaming and planning.

Olympic athletes do a similar thing before a competition. They imagine themselves skiing a course or moving through their sequence of gymnastic moves. As they prepare, they see themselves doing each move to perfection and then standing on the podium with a medal around their necks.

Visualization may apply to planning a great vacation and to winning athletic competitions, but can it help you succeed in business?

You may remember the Harvard Business School study where recent graduates were surveyed about their goals and then ten years later. The result of visualizing their success? Graduates who had had clear goals in mind were making two to ten times as much m0ney as their classmates. Put this strategy to work; do some directed daydreaming.

Visualize Your Goals

Create a vivid image in your mind of what success means to you. Write down the answers to the following questi0ns about your image of success:

What would you be doing with your time?

Who would your clients and customers be?

How many clients and customers would you have?

How much money would you be making?

How much could you afford to give away to your favorite causes?

What would your lifestyle be?

Visualize Your Objectives

To reach your lofty goals, you’ll need to identify specific small business marketing goals:

How many clients or customers do you want or will you need to be working with each month?

How many new clients do you want to add per month?

In order to bring in new clients, you’ll need to generate qualified prospects. How many prospects do you want to target each month? How will you find them?

Visualize Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

You need a plan. Most small businesses owners struggle with this part. Begin by asking yourself:

What can I do to attract attention and prompt interest by prospects?

What can I do to increase the number of qualified leads generated each month?

How can I build the credibility of my firm so prospects trust that we deliver?

How can I ensure that prospects remember my firm when they have a need and are ready to buy?

What is the sequence of decisions prospects need to make to become clients?

Visualize Your Small Business Marketing Tasks

Just having a marketing message, or an advertising campaign or a web site doesn’t ensure you of anything. Each of these needs to achieve the specific goals and objectives you have set. The best way to evaluate these efforts is from your prospects’ perspective. Ask yourself:

What are my prospects’ primary concerns?

Are my marketing messages interesting to prospects?

What would my response be to my own marketing calls?

Without mentioning the name of the company, its credentials or products, is the value of what I provide clear to prospects?

What do I want prospects to do when they visit my web site?

If you want to do more than just visualize your success, I have two manuals you can use to create more opportunities and business.

Just visualizing success won’t get you there, but it is an effective way to begin planning. Develop your marketing goals, strategy, objectives, and tasks from this big picture, and you’ll create a plan that will lead you to become wildly successful.

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You find yourself wishing you could clone yourself so you could keep up with existing clients and keep your business growing. Since that’s not possible, what’s the solution?

Make better use of the time you have each day to get more done!

I interview Dave Crenshaw. Dave has shown business leaders worldwide how to uncover hidden hours every day and increase their per-hour worth. He’s a frequent radio guest on stations throughout North America and author of The Myth of Multitasking: How ‘Doing it All’ Gets Nothing Done.

A highly sought-after business coach and time-management expert to some of the country’s top business executives, Dave commands fees of $10,000 a day for his coaching.

Dave’s mission is to help you get more time. His techniques could

help you free up 30% to 50% of your time. Hard to believe? In the next few minutes, you’ll discover how to Get Organized, Get Focused, Get Time.

Sound familiar? You get to work early. You launch right in, going through the emails that are stacked up or looking over your sales numbers, and then you’re interrupted by a phone call, or one of your staff stops by with an “urgent” question.

Finally, at around 5:30 — or 6:30 or 7:30 p.m. — you check your ‘To Do list’ and find you’ve barely made any progress. And you tell yourself the same lie that you tell yourself almost every day. It’s the same lie that most busy people tell themselves.

“I don’t have enough time.”

The truth is that those who struggle to get all their work done and those who are super-successful all have the same amount of time.

Time is not the problem; it’s how you use it that makes the difference. You can either passively let the insistent demands of emails, phone calls and employees and colleagues run your workdays, or you can make a conscious decision to take charge of your time and make it work for you.

If you’re anything like the smart business owners and corporate vice presidents I work with, you feel chained to your desk, your computer, and your Blackberry. You’re expected to be available to answer questions and respond to emails and messages almost 24/7. Talk about feeling overwhelmed!

What can you do about it?

You can take charge of your time and get almost twice as much done in a week. You could have time to get out on the golf course or spend more time with friends and family. (Or go skiing in Vermont every week, as I do during the winter while continuing to see my business prosper!)

Put Yourself In Charge

Years ago the concept of servant leadership was touted. The idea was that as the head of the business or your department, you fostered the success of the whole unit by helping the people who worked for you and giving them the guidance and support they needed. Instead of dictating to your staff, your role was to listen to your employees and help them be better at their jobs.

There’s a lot to be said for the servant leadership concept, but almost every business owner and manager I work with seems to be using the model of slave leadership. Instead of leading their company, they’ve become a slave to their company communications, to their email, to their phone, to their staff and to customers and suppliers.

How about you? Have you become a slave to your business?

One CEO told me that he thought he should be pitching in by sweeping the floors and answering the phones when his receptionist was on lunch break. He thought it was important to send the message to his staff that he was part of the team.

It’s true that when urgent projects have to get out the door, showing up and helping out can be a big morale booster. This doesn’t mean you should regularly spend time doing janitorial or clerical tasks!

Another VP of Marketing at a Fortune 500 company told me he had an open door policy, where employees could stop by at any time and ask him questions. He went on to tell me he rarely left the office before 7:30pm and usually his to do list was in the same state as when he’d arrived at 7:30am.

Sure, you should make yourself available for informal communication with your staff; but not all day, every day.

The most important message to send is that you are the visionary and the captain. You’re the one in charge of leading the company to greater levels of success, whether you’re a one-person company or a hundred-person company.

Here’s how to find the time to be the leader your company needs.

1. Set Your Priorities

Every day ask yourself: what are the most important things I can do to grow the business and increase long-term profits?

If you’re unsure about the answer, here it is: spend your time developing your vision, your marketing strategy and managing implementation.

Over and over I hear people tell me that they’re too busy to clarify their vision, they don’t have time to work on their marketing strategy. The result is that they and the rest of their company waste most of their time and only accomplish a fraction of what they could if their work were focused.

Without a clear vision and a marketing strategy to achieve it, you and your staff will be shooting in the dark. One sales manager who signed up for my coaching told me that he woke up each morning with no idea who to call or whom he should be selling to. He didn’t know what direction his company was heading in. As you can imagine, sales were suffering.

Your role as the leader of your company or your department is to point the business in the most profitable direction and then create a map for getting to your destination quickly.

Action Steps

When you start your day tomorrow, don’t look at your To Do List. Before you even check your email, make a Not To Do List. That’s right; list all the things that you, as the owner of the business, should not be spending your time doing.

Now make a second list of the tasks and projects that will require or benefit from outside expert help.

Third, list the tasks or projects that only you, with your talents, brains and experience can do and want to do.

Here’s a short sample to give you the idea:

Not To Do

Tactical work to delegate to others

• Sort and respond to most emails
• Deliver products and services
• Make sales calls
• Follow-up with prospects and customers
• Manage web site

Use Experts To Do

Areas where your company doesn’t have sufficient in-house time, experience or expertise

• Taxes and accounting
• Developing marketing strategy
• Copy writing
• Layout and design of marketing materials
• Legal advice

Only I Can Do

Short and long-term strategic planning

•       Development of vision
•       Creation of strategy
•       Oversight of strategy implementation
•       Management
•       Contact with your most important clients
•       Reviewing the numbers and direction

Ultimately the success of your business will be determined by the role you play in it. Get a handle on your time by checking your Not To Do list daily and focus on the strategic tasks that will help you lead your business to the top!

2. Eliminate Multi-tasking or Switch-tasking

Remember the VP of Marketing with the open door policy? I want you to picture what happens every time someone walks in his door.

He stops what he is doing, listens to their question, provides an answer and after they walk out he has to pick up his work where he left off. It takes time to collect his thoughts and recover his concentration. Even someone doing clerical tasks will be less efficient and productive if their work is constantly interrupted.

I’m the big cheese in my small business and if I’m working on a strategy, a product or mapping out a sales sequence, I can’t jump back and forth between answering the phone or emails and doing complex “big thinking” tasks. Neither can you.

Trying to do everything at once is a great way to feel busy, but you’re minimizing the amount of work you get done. For example, research shows that software engineers take an average of 15 minutes to start a task, become engaged in it and start being productive. Interrupt them even once every 12 minutes and they’ll never finish anything, or certainly not do their work well.

According to time management guru Dave Crenshaw, most business managers lose 40% of their time to switch-tasking or multi-tasking. He’s referring to the amount of time it takes to regain focus when you’re regularly interrupting one task with another.

Let me repeat that because it is so important. Most business leaders are wasting 16 or more hours a week because they are constantly switching from one type of task to another; from email to phone calls to face-to-face-conversations to writing to a zillion other tasks. The more technology we add to our work lives, the greater the tendency to switch-task has become.

But the solution is simple. Organize your tasks by grouping like tasks together. Do them sequentially during the day or week. You could free up 16 to 20 hours a week!

Action Steps

What are the primary causes of switch-tasking in your day?

Identify them and group your activities to minimize switch-tasking.
Here are a few ways to reduce time wasted due to switch-tasking:
•       Only check your email once or twice a day
•       Schedule incoming and outgoing calls
•       Don’t use instant messaging. Turn it off!
•       Schedule open door times.

3. Use Time Blocking

You’re sitting in the movie theatre (you finally organized your time well enough to get out of the office! Congratulations!). Just before the movie starts, you turn off your cell phone so you can enjoy the movie uninterrupted.

That’s time blocking, pure and simple! You set aside a chunk of time to do something you value and made sure you wouldn’t be interrupted or distracted. People do this weekly for various reasons and yet rarely apply it to their workday. Time blocking can help you get more work done each week.

Look back at your list of top priority activities, the ones that require focus and concentration. These in particular are the tasks that never seem to get done. Now, block out time each and every week to work on those tasks.

One of the most common things my coaching clients tell me is that they never have time to work on their marketing strategies. John, the CEO of medical supply company was no exception. So I asked him when during the day he was at his freshest and would best be able to make progress on the planning and big thinking tasks he needed to get done.

John said that in the morning between 7am and 11am is when his head is clearest. Then I asked John why he wasn’t using that time to work on his marketing strategy.

His answer was the same one I hear from most people. He said that he checks his email and his phone messages first thing in the morning. Then he goes to work responding to these and pretty soon he’s frazzled, stressed out and the morning is gone. What’s wrong with this picture?

Here’s what I told John and it’s a good reminder for most of us. Just because an email is sitting there in your inbox or you have a phone message in voicemail, doesn’t mean that you need to answer it right away. If it’s the first thing in the morning, it’s already sat there all night, and unless it’s a full-blown emergency, there isn’t any reason it can’t wait a few more hours.

Action Steps

Use time blocking to schedule when you:

•       Do your best thinking on marketing strategy
•       Answer email (save it for before lunch or for the end of the day)
•       Meet with employees to answer their questions or give them guidance. You’ll be amazed at how many of those so-called urgent questions they needed you to answer they’ll be able to answer themselves while they are waiting to talk to you.
•        Block out time for key tasks that never get done because the daily minutia takes over.

Stick to the schedule and your time blocking and shut off all the things that distract you — just like you’d do if you went to see a movie.

4. Delegate

How can you make the shift from being your business to running your business?

Are you up to your eyeballs in work? Are you spending dawn to dusk doing marketing, administration and fulfillment? If you are, you’re wearing too many hats and it’s time to relinquish most of them.

When I first started my marketing business, I spent my time writing, building and improving my web site, boxing and shipping my marketing courses, providing one-one-one coaching and a host of other tasks that kept me busy six days a week. My hard work paid off and my business grew — up to a point.

Then I got smart and fired myself. I fired myself from a whole host of job responsibilities that were holding me back.

Several years ago, I reorganized my business and virtually kicked myself upstairs to a corner office. I let go of all administrative and operational tasks and hired an assistant, Ros, to manage email broadcasts, product delivery, customer service, project management, PR and new product development.

And here’s what I discovered. Ros and now my current second in command, Jessica are far better than I ever was at handling the whole host of administrative tasks that are needed to keep the business running. (More often than not, when I stick my fingers into trying to schedule my calls, or the details of fulfillment, I mess it up.)

Effective delegation is the key to freeing up your time. Delegate and you can focus on the leadership-level thinking you’re supposed to be doing and your staff can focus on what they do best, implementing your ideas.

Typically when I ask a client what they think their time is worth per hour, the number is close to a thousand or more dollars per hour. And they are right. If you want your company to make two to twenty million dollars a year, you as the owner need to provide leadership worth a thousand or more dollars an hour.

But in far too many small and large companies, senior managers spend upwards of 18% to 40% of their time doing clerical work. They could easily find someone else to do such tasks for $20 to $40 an hour.

How about you? Are you working below your pay grade? If you are, you’re undermining your chances of being successful.

I know, you’re thinking, “I’m trying to grow my company and don’t have the resources or the cash flow to hire any staff/more staff/anyone but my cousin who will work for peanuts.” But you’re dead wrong.

If you had ten more hours a week to finally get your marketing strategy together, develop new relationships with clients and oversee the implementation of your upsell strategy, for example, how much more money could your company make?

You’d make in excess of an additional thousand dollars a week. You’d more than cover the cost of hiring either a virtual assistant or full-time employee to do all those tasks which are below your pay grade.

The simple truth is if you are serious about seeing your business grow, you can’t afford to put off delegating any longer. The CEOs of the largest companies are master delegators.

Some small business owners have a hard time delegating substantial work after being in control of every aspect of the business, but take it from me; the first week you do it you’ll pat yourself on the back.

Delegating administrative tasks and web site maintenance freed me to focus on the core of my business, where my real passion is, and to pursue another passion. I was able to work from my ski home in Vermont for the first time. My sales grew to record levels and now I head for Vermont  every winter.

Action Steps

Relinquish all those time consuming administrative tasks.

Go back to your Not To Do List.

Turn those lists of tasks into lists of skills your support team needs to have, and then into job descriptions. Then go out and find the talent you need so you can focus on growing the business instead of being the business.

Go back to your Use Experts To Do List

Get referrals from friends or colleagues or do your own research and screening to find the expert outside help your business needs to grow.

In any business there are always more ways to attract better clients and make money, but you can only identify and implement them if you set aside the time. You and I have only got once to get it right, so make the pledge to yourself not to fritter it away.

You’ve got plenty of time to accomplish your goals, if you use it wisely.

Speaking of using your time wisely. Since last month we’ve added dozens of new resources online in the Insiders’ Club. We’ve added tools to help you improve your marketing and get results, but they’ll only save you time if you use them. Login at: www.marketingforsuccess.com/ic/login

Additional Resources

• Dave Crenshaw’s book, The Myth of Multitasking available on Amazon.com, It’s one of the first gifts I send to new coaching clients.

• If you haven’t done so already, download the free report, The New Profit Rules at: http://www.marketingforsuccss.com/dlnr.html

• Want to put your business on the fast track to success? Occasionally I have space in my one-on-one coaching program for ambitious business owners and managers of marketing and sales.

Among my current coaching clients are the CEO of a company that sells composting systems to large scale farming operations, a VP of Marketing for one of the largest hotel chains in the country, a business owner who provides Corporate Benefits Communications services to Fortune 500 companies, and a sales manager for a company that provides supply chain management services.

Interested in getting help with your business? Get the details at: http://www.marketingforsuccess.com/mentoring.html

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Every smart business person knows this, they know that they need to sell customers, their employees, their suppliers, their banker and even their spouse.

Yet, most people equate selling with used car salesmen trying to unload broken down or rusted out cars on the unsuspecting. They shy away from sales, never master the process, and miss out on success.

Charlie interviews Blair Singer, one of the most highly-respected sales trainers in the world. Blair, a former top salesperson for UNISYS, was selected by Robert Kiyosaki as a Rich Dad advisor and has authored two books in the best-selling Rich Dad’s Advisors™ series, Sales Dogs: You Don’t Have to be an Attack Dog to be Successful in Sales and The ABCs of How to Build a Business Team That Wins.

In the next few minutes, you’ll discover how to master selling and increase your sales and your income in this economy.

You may not long to go skydiving, but I’m certain you have an ideal lifestyle in mind. Are you living it yet? Why not? Isn’t that one of the main reasons you went into business in the first place?

Every entrepreneur and small business owner I know talks about working less and making more money so they can do the things they’d really love to do — travel, buy that sailboat, take the family to Timbuktu, live debt-free. But year after year, they’re still working way too hard and not getting any closer to living their dreams.

What’s Getting in the Way?

Of course, there are potential obstacles…. Don’t let yourself be one of them.

I’ve been there, working long days and seeing business grow steadily, but still not living the way I wanted to. One of the things I wanted to do was to spend more time on the ski slopes. I love to ski. Actually, I really love to ski.

We bought a condo at a ski area in Vermont nine years ago, but I was only getting there a couple of weekends each winter. I couldn’t get away to ski enough – I was working too hard!

I was very frustrated, and I knew if I waited too many years to live this particular dream, it’d be too late.

The answer was simple. I added broadband access to our Vermont home so I could ski and work there in the winter. I’ve been doing that for three seasons now and I’ve finally found the lifestyle I’ve been wanting for years. And my business is thriving too.

What was getting in my way?  ME!

I had convinced myself that I needed to work from my Connecticut office to keep my business on track. Once I let go of that idea, I had to overcome my fear that if I spent more time skiing in the winter, my business would stop growing.

Actually, it grew faster than ever before — and yours can, too.

Is It All In Your Head?

Unshackle your mind, and you’ve taken a big step toward achieving business success and your ideal lifestyle. And who’s in charge of your mind anyways? You are!

Almost every entrepreneur and business owner I know makes the same mistake: they focus on making money. They get obsessed with growing their business to bring in more revenue.

That’s what I did, and once you have that mindset, you’re trapped by all the details of running your business. You spend every day putting out fires and looking at the bottom line.

How To Get Unstuck

I’ve coached and mentored hundreds of business owners over the last twenty years. Their problem has never been a lack of ideas. But I’ve seen way too many clients hold themselves back by identifying all the rational, logical reasons they couldn’t live their dream. And they weren’t hearing their intuition, which was telling them they could reinvent their lives — or their businesses — and make it to the top.

Step 1 – Identify Your Own Negative Thoughts

Before I could achieve the lifestyle and the business success I wanted, I needed to relinquish a handful of ideas that were keeping me from just doing it. When I was able to let go of a handful of wrong headed notions, I was amazed at how simple it was to find the simple solutions the helped me live the way I wanted and continue to grow my business.

The biggest obstacle to creating the lifestyle you want is the banter in your head that keeps you from giving yourself the permission to do so. You know, the thoughts that keep telling you:
“My wife/ husband will kill me if I suggest….” In my case she suggested the solution.

“If I cut back on the number of hours I work, I’ll make less.” Not true. If you make better use of your time you could make twice as much in half the time.

“I’ve never done it before and don’t know how.” If I’d told myself that before I sold a website for almost a million dollars ten years ago, I’d still be struggling.

Action A:
List the 3 biggest concerns you have about changing the way you work and live, and giving yourself permission to seek the lifestyle you really want:

1. ______________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________
3. ______________________________________________

Step 2 – Use Both Logic and Intuition

When Yanik initially told his friends he was thinking of writing a book on sales letters and selling it online, they laughed at him. They knew he had no experience in writing, publishing or selling online, no idea how to set up a website — and had only a few thousand dollars to launch this business.

Fortunately, Yanik ignored his friends. Four months later, he was making $9,000 a month from the $29 ebook he wrote and was selling online (with essentially no overhead). With the help of his wife but no other employees, Yanik has now sold over thirteen million dollars worth of his info-products online.

Action B:
Take each of the logical reasons you previously listed for why you can’t achieve your dream lifestyle and explain why each is nonsense or is actually a great reason to make a change:

1. ______________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________
3. ______________________________________________

Step 3- Paint a Picture of Your Destination

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again; in order to reach your goals, you need to identify them, make them specific, and commit to them.

I have a friend who tells me over and over that he’s overworked and  needs a vacation. But he never sets aside the time or makes any travel plans, and something keeps coming up at work… and he keeps complaining about not getting a vacation.

The first step is to have a clear idea of what your ideal lifestyle would be. How and where do you see yourself working and playing? The more specific your description is, the easier it will be to create a plan to achieve your success.

For example, if you’re a ski nut like I am, you’ll want to figure out your schedule week by week, to guarantee that you have the time to spend on the slopes. In the winter, I schedule my client contact and calls in the afternoons so that my mornings are free for skiing and evenings for catching up with other tasks.

Action C:

Describe your ideal life in a few sentences. What would a typical day, week or month look like? What would you be doing? We’re not talking about a vacation here, but about what your integrated work/play life would be. Create an image of how you will be spending your time:

______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________
______________________________________________

Step 4 – Make Room

Have you ever told yourself you’re going to lose weight and then kept eating the same way you used to? The pounds didn’t come off when you still had those donuts every morning, did they?

Have you ever tried to get your staff to take more responsibility for solving daily crises, but still stepped in when crunch time came? No wonder they can’t solve problems without you.

Or made a new marketing plan without setting aside the time or resources to implement it?

None of these work. You can’t do things the old way and the new way at the same time.

People make this mistake all the time. They hear about an idea that sounds great and they try adding it to an already full schedule. They tell themselves that if they just work harder, they’ll get more done in a day. In fact, when you overburden an already full schedule, less and less gets done.

What’s the solution? There are two simple steps to reaching your goals:

1. Identify the behavior you need to change. This may be as simple as setting aside time each week to take a walk, develop a new product or to find joint venture partners.
2. Determine what you need to stop doing. What do you need to clean off your plate in order to create space for your wealth-building activities and for yourself?Do you need to stop reviewing your email first thing in the morning and instead focus on your agenda? Or stop answering the phone during certain hours so you have time to write that article or play a game of golf?

Every ambitious person who is serious about being successful is already busy. There’s no lack of things to do, but are you doing the right things?

Action D

Identify the tasks you need to stop doing. List 1 to 3 things you can delegate or eliminate in order to give yourself the time to focus on the strategic tasks you really want to do, and give yourself more time to enjoy life.

1. ______________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________
3. ______________________________________________

What About Creating Wealth?

Why haven’t I given you the blueprint to creating wealth yet?

Because the steps I’ve outlined above are the biggest challenges entrepreneurs and small business owners face. Master the previous three steps and making enough money to live your dream will be possible. In fact, that may become the easiest part of the equation.

Still want a simple strategy to create wealth? – Here it is.

Solve A Problem

Yanik Silver, this month’s featured interviewee, started out as a salesperson in his father’s medical supply company. He wanted to make more sales to impress his Dad. He also wanted to make his work easier, and he figured that if he struggled to write good sales letters, other salespeople were having the same problem.

That’s how Yanik’s first book, Instant Sales Letters, was born. Others followed suit and he’s now living what he likes to call an “Ultimate Lifestyle”.

Action E

Solve a problem. List 1 to 3 ideas for products or services that solve a problem. This may mean simply looking at your existing services from a new perspective, or coming up with related products or services. To develop ideas for new services or products, stick with the familiar, like Yanik did.

While launching a new product may look like a great opportunity, you can also solve problems by providing your target market with increased selection, convenience and/or service. This is what has made the online shoe store Zappos.com so successful, for example.

List 1 to 3 products or services and the problem they solve:

1. ______________________________________________
2. ______________________________________________
3. ______________________________________________

Ready to live the ultimate lifestyle? The people who make it, who have the wealth to work and live the way they want aren’t necessarily any smarter they you. And it’s not that they just got lucky.

The difference is they made a commitment to make their dream a reality and then they took action. You can do it to, but don’t put it off, get started today.

Additional Resources

• Yanik Silver’s sites:
www.yaniksilver.com
www.instantsalesletters.com
www.surefiremarketing.com
www.internetlifestyle.com/blog

• Timothy Ferris’s Four Hour Workweek
www.fourhourworkweek.com/

Worth a read, but take it with a large grain of salt. Timothy slaved away for years working 80-hour weeks before he was able to step back, delegate, keep making money and have the time to enjoy his passions. Most entrepreneurs I know aren’t trying to eliminate work completely but are trying to get their lives in balance.