Where will you be a year from now? Where will you be living? What will you be wearing? How much money will be in your checking account, your savings account? What business will you be in?

What consequences flow from these questions, or a more practical question; where will you be tomorrow? Who will be your clients? What will they say to you? What will you say to them? How long will you work tomorrow? What time will you wake up, when will you go to sleep, and what will you do in-between?

What is your life plan? How about your annual plan or your monthly and weekly plan?

My real concern is to assist you in thinking about your business, but don't all these plans fit together with the business square plan to make a life quilt?

In order to fulfill your dreams there needs to be a serious step taken. Like the game Simon Says, where you learned as a child, "Take ONE Giant Step forward". What I'm referring to is the purposeful stride of making a plan; a plan of rising up the steps of the ladder of life to reach the attainable top, as YOU define it.

No one should circumscribe what you see as the top. Earl Nightingale often writes of the successful person as "anyone who is realizing a worthy ideal". And the ideal is absolutely self determinable.

In business, the strategy is to develop an action plan to follow which will be successful. Investigation of the possibilities is the first priority.

If you are a salesperson, to whom will you see to sell your product? What is your product? Who buys it more than others? Do you call on people who only buy a small amount of them? Shouldn't you call on people who need to purchase large numbers of your merchandise?

If you are in the mortgage business, do you call on accounts who can only refer one potential client to you a month. Isn't it better to call on someone who could refer at least one prospect every day? Where do you find these referral sources? If you seek to call on real estate offices, you'll find the most success in the MLS listings. If you are a wholesale representative, look up the closings that took place to see which company makes the most loans.

After you have determined which companies you will call on, you'll then want to determine how often you will need to see them, how often they will need your service. Retail loan officers want to think about seeing each of their accounts at least once a week. Wholesale reps should think about making their calls (physically seeing an account) at least bi- weekly.

The reason that I ask you to think about this plan of action, rather than insist on it, is that General George Patton, of World War II fame, said to not tell people what to do, but let them know what was expected of them, and they would figure out the way.

I have a plan, a well thought out plan, one that has been modified, amended, challenged, denigrated, but most often followed with success. The plan requires you to make a weekly list of a fixed number of people who you will call on (visit) at a certain time each day, each week, each month. This plan must fit into the overall plan of doing business along with your life plan.

It is possible that you might not like my plan, as difficult as that is for me to believe, but if that were true, then maybe you have a plan for me to learn, and to share with others. Feel free to try me.

And what about the use of a plan? Do you find that difficult? Is it because once you have made one, you feel obligated to never amend it, never massage it? Plans are guides, not absolutes. When someone is building a house, they often can make changes in the way it will look when finished. The key is to think out the finished product and be flexible enough to move walls, enlarge rooms, suppress colors, and convert windows. The finished product is still a house, and with proper love becomes a home.

Many people find it difficult to write down any plan because they do not believe they can change it, but any plan is amended many times. Do it! Don't just think about it!

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