CREATE: Create a vision board and big goals for your small business start-up

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As I’ve been planning my small business throughout the past year, I’ve needed a lot of help navigating and starting my business start-up.

So, I decided I needed my own planner and playbook if I wanted to make money from my small online business. Not only did I need help planning for my future successes, but I also needed to know how to manage my marketing and content creation.

I invested in CREATE An Intensive Biz Playbook & Planner: Scale Your Online Business, Create Explosive Growth and Build a Brand You Crave. It’s helped me stay focused and consistent with my business strategy along with showing me what to really focus on throughout my learning process when starting my small business.

In CREATE, there are two sections that I will be drawing from in this blog post: “Your Vision” and “Your Goals.”

“Your Vision” is in the first part of CREATE while “Your Goals” are near the end. While I do suggest going through CREATE in chronological order, I will be writing about both of these sections together to help you form a strategy for your vision, even if your vision or business start-up is still in the developing stages.

Your Vision

Your vision should be what you want out of your business or life. Vision boards are more of an aesthetic than a plan. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan in place to reach that vision.

When I think of vision, I think about Marie Kondo. When envisioning your space free of clutter, you should be able to describe what you want your space to reflect and be able to do for you. The same should be similar for your small business and personal life.

You might be confused as to how to start a vision board or envision a vision for yourself or your business. Here are a few tips that Meera Kothand suggests in CREATE:

Separate your business and personal visions

Your business and personal visions should remain separate. If they overlap, that can be helpful, but duplicate them rather than combine your visions for both.

Your personal vision might encompass around health, finances, and independence. Determine what you want your life to look like after you stop working. You should revolve your personal goals around hobbies, aspirations, and your well-being.

Your business should revolve around what you want to accomplish professionally. One of my business visions is to supplement my income by half my full-time paycheck. You should be able to envision your visions as an aesthetic but still make them defined.

Are your visions fighting against each other?

Just like you might have duplicates in your personal and business visions, you might have conflicting visions.

An example of this would be growing your business in a way that doesn’t reflect what you want for your personal life. In my business, I want to grow and assist other small or starting businesses, but I don’t want to delegate design tasks for others to complete for any clients I procure. I want to be the sole designer for those clients at this point so creating an agency or outsourcing isn’t part of my business vision at the moment.

Make sure you are streamlining some of your visionary goals between your personal and business visions, but they don’t have to be completely the same. My vision of being more active doesn’t have a place in my business vision but it might help me have more energy for more projects despite taking some time out of my day to accomplish this vision.

Challenge yourself

Your vision should be a challenge for you to reach and well outside of your comfort zone.

I know part of my vision is to have like-minded friends and acquaintances in my personal life, but I tend to be a homebody and introverted when confronted with large groups. I challenge myself by attending small-group fitness classes, entrepreneurial groups, and developing stronger relationships with my coworkers.

You don’t have to be stressing about each vision, but make sure there is work involved on your side. Your vision should be earned, not gifted to you.

If you are anxious about reaching for a vision, start small or find a partner with a similar vision to hold you accountable.

Your vision is not your own

When I envision other visions that can relate to my small business start-up, I usually think about starting a full-time, self-sufficient, and remote graphic design business. Not only does that vision sound very isolating to me, but it also seems like it promotes much more selling and pitching to clients.

I admire graphic designers that can start their own agency or work remotely and have multiple clients at one time. But that vision is not mine.

You must determine what you want to do and how you want to execute your business on your terms, not on someone else’s.

Reach for descriptive visions

When I developed my visions, I took to heart how CREATE encourages, descriptive and measurable visions.

This technique can be used for your personal and business vision. If you envision having animals and pets in your life, determine how many, which animal(s), breeds, and anything else you might need to know. If you envision starting your own business, clearly define how many clients, how much revenue, where you want to work, and everything that goes along with your vision.

If you don’t have all the answers, don’t worry. Research your visions and be flexible about how you can achieve your vision. Know your ideal scenario but know what you can control and what you need to leave up to chance and circumstance.

Your Goals

Now that you have your vision firmly in mind, we continue to Your Goals. As I mentioned, Your Vision is at the beginning of CREATE while Your Goals are near the end.

Goals are the process and stepping-stones to your vision.

Once you determine your vision, you should be able to determine a goal to accomplish your vision. Even if you are still trying to determine your vision, making a goal to achieve it will help you plan for any changes or surprises in your vision.

Think big

In CREATE, you are asked to create 2-3 Big Picture goals. I would stick with business goals rather than personal, as that is the goal of the workbook.

One of my big-picture goals is to supplement my income by half of my full-time income in one year. To do that I need to create a stream of income that totals around $800.

That’s a lot of money to be earned when it’s not connected to my bi-weekly paycheck. I’ve been looking into remote, freelancing, and passive income revenue streams to achieve my goal, but, to me, it’s a worthy goal and can assist me in other financial endeavors I want to accomplish.

Define your business goals

Drawing on my previous point, I defined that I would need to earn $800 each month in addition to my full-time income.

You can have a vision that says you making money from your own business, but without defining what that income is and where it is coming from, your vision is unachievable. You need to clearly define and quantify what your goal will be to achieve your vision so you can take actionable steps to achieve your vision.

Once you clearly define your goal, determine other aspects that impact your goal, such as in my case, my current rates and income.

Describe your plan: future and present

Next, CREATE will have you strategically plan and break down how to accomplish your goal to achieve your vision.

For my goal, I needed to determine what my current rates were to establish how much time or how many clients I would need to procure to accomplish my plan. Considering my ability at math, I needed to have some help but I could create a gameplan based on my current situation.

Now that my current situation was established and evaluated, I could plan out my goal more strategically and determine how to proceed with my goal.

Create a strategy

The next step in Kothand’s Big Picture Goals is to create 3-5 milestones to complete your goal.

I might determine that I need to work on getting half of my goal’s revenue by a certain date along with reaching out to so many clients every month. Maybe I determine that I need to raise my rates at a certain point or produce a passive income avenue. Whatever those milestones are for your big-picture goal, connect them with an amount and with a date.

Your strategy will help you develop a timeline to achieving your goal. These milestones are set to break up your big-picture goal into smaller pieces.

Plan accordingly with due dates and timelines

Now, CREATE has you develop a timeline, both in quarters for your business strategy along with precise due dates for individual big-picture goals.

With an individual page set aside for each big-picture goal, you can break down each of your goals as much as you’d like to achieve your vision.

I know I struggle when it comes to personal deadlines sometimes. If it’s an outside force, such as a payment or project deadline, I tend to be fine, but when it’s a personal goal, I tend to put other priorities before myself. Writing my goal’s deadlines and timelines help keep me accountable because they are written and others can find and ask me about them.

Need more help in creating a vision board and turning your visions into goals? Join my e-newsletter to learn more about setting goals for your small business.