Back to normal. If you think about it, that is a really odd phrase.

What is normal anyway? I definitely know normal for me probably isn’t the same as normal for you.

What I realized when I was thinking about the idea of normal, is that "normal" changes every day as we grow and change.

With the start of the new year, comes a fresh start for your mindset. January is a huge goal setting month for business owners and entrepreneurs. We’re all feverishly charting, planning, and mapping out our 2010 goals and what we are going to do to make them a reality by year’s end.

By setting goals, planning product launches or new programs and services, and creating marketing plans, we are committing to making big changes. And, by making big changes, we will be transforming what is considered "normal" today into something completely different by year’s end.

I challenge you to write down what you consider to be normal in your business right now, what things you tolerate because it is normal, and what actions you take because it is normal. Then I want you to write down how you are going to change what you consider "normal" to improve your business and improve your business mindset throughout 2010.

As an amazing woman Maria Gamb says, "Change the norm. Change the world."

About a year ago a very smart business woman asked me, “How are you going to get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is?” That question has stuck with me and now is one of the very first questions I ask my clients when working with them on creating and mapping out their Big Vision Road Map.

After all, how will you know what actions to take if you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish?

How do you know your short-term goals will help you move forward and toward your big, long-term goals?

The answer to all of these questions starts with the exploration and creation of your Big Vision Road Map, which not only outlines where your journey will end, but how you are going to get there and what possible stops you may make along the way.

A highly effective road map has three levels of information and guidance:

1. The High-level Overview
   This is your overall big vision of who you want to be, where you want to be, what you want to have achieved, what you will be doing, how you will be known, etc. When working with my clients on this phase, we look not only at the surface elements, but at the behind-the-scenes motivators and drivers of each element.
2. The Mid-level Process Map
   This is the comprehensive breakdown of your high-level vision into tangible actions and achievable goals. These are incremental progress steps, that when accomplished, move you closer and closer toward making your high-level vision a reality.
3. The Micro-level Action Plan
   This is the further breakdown of your mid-level goals into individual smaller objectives you need to achieve on your journey to your big vision.

Remember, like any journey you take, the is the possibility you will hit construction, traffic, delays, detours, and maybe even a flat tire or two. The key is to keep making progress, even if it just baby steps, to get back on course and moving toward your big vision.

The answer to all of these questions starts with your Big Vision Road Map.

Your big vision isn’t just a guide to knowing when to say to say no, make a change, or say yes. It is also a fantastic tool to help you stay motivated and track your continual progress.

Simply breaking your high-level vision down into several smaller, incremental steps, can help you change your mindset from “How am I ever going to accomplish all that?” to “I can totally do that!”

Think of it like the game of Sorry.

With Sorry, your objective is to get all of your pieces to your home base first. So when playing the game, you strategize and plan, making a little progress toward your goal on each turn. Eventually, one at a time, you get each piece to your home base and accomplish your objective.

With your big vision, your objective is to achieve all of your individual tasks and goals to make your vision a reality. So when working on your business, you strategize and plan, making a little progress toward your goal each time you achieve something or complete a task. Eventually, step-by-step, all the pieces are moved into place and your big vision becomes a reality.

Want to know one more similarity between making your big vision a reality and playing a game?

THEY BOTH ARE FUN! While both do require strategy, planning, and evaluating the competition and beating them to the next move, they both also can be very rewarding and fun.

Here are a few of my secrets to keeping the journey to my big vision fun:

• Break down your big vision into several smaller parts so it isn’t so overwhelming
• Assign progressive tasks and goals to each of the smaller parts, laying out a plan of action
• Acknowledge the big vision, but focus on getting the smaller tasks and goals done one at a time
• Check each small accomplishment off my big vision to-do list, showing myself the progress I am making
• Celebrate the completion of each and every task and goal to reward myself for the hard work and make the journey more fun
• Invite others to join in your journey as accountability partners and help you celebrate your goals

Do you have any tips to make the journey toward our big visions more fun and rewarding? If so, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear about it!

For me, I approach my business in sort of the same way. I decide what I want to achieve, I set a date of completion, and I jump right into the planning and implementation needed to make it happen. Ten years ago, I never would have guessed that I would be running my own business and loving every second of it – It took me a while to figure out I was an entrepreneur.

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with a fabulous lunch at the Bistro 33 restaurant inside the brand new Mercedes dealership in my home town. It was delicious and I highly recommend it if you’re local. With a giant water feature in the shape of the Mercedes logo pouring down from the ceiling of the second story into a planter on the ground floor, the beautiful cars to check out, and the shop and car lot on the roof of the building (not visible from the street, this dealership definitely lives up to the Mercedes standard.

During our long lunch, I had a chance to reflect on the past year and talk with my husband about all of the changes that we have gone through in my business since my last birthday.

OH MY GOODNESS! Last year at the same time I was working on my website, starting my ezine, pondering a blog, and making a serious plan of action for growth and expansion. This leap into action was launched at the eWomenNetwork Internatonal Conference in 2008 and catapulted into serious implementation at Alexandria Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop later that year.

This past year has been a HUGE foundation building year for both myself and my business and I just want to say thank you to all of you who are reading my ezine and sending me your kind praises, and engaging with me on the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There is no way that I would be I business today with out your support and I am lpoving every minute of it.

I also want to say thank you to all of you who have supported my BIG IDEAS - and matter how crazy or out of reach they may have sounded. I totally embraced THINKING BIG last year and it is very exciting to see many of those exact ideas and visions becoming a reality. (Check out my speaker site www.jenniferbourn.com)

With only goal goals, it is easy for entrepreneurs to feel overwhelmed and actually put off the work that needs to be done to reach those goals because they seem big and scary. Big goals can seem intimidating and without a plan of action, many of us have not idea where to start and what to do first. The key for me has been to THINK BIG and then create a serious, step-by-step plan of action with my big goals broken down into several smaller goals.

By breaking down your BIG goals into several smaller goals, you not only have a much more clear and focused plan of action, but you will be able to celebrate your progress each step of the way and actually see the progress your are making to make your dreams and goals a reality.

If you have any insights on how your break down your big goals or have a success story on how you have tackled large projects, I’d love to hear from you!

Best Wishes & Incredible Success,
Jen Bourn

This past weekend, I attended the eWomenNetwork International Conference in Dallas, Texas. To the right is one of the photos snapped of my friends Heather Atherton, Kristi LeGue, and I at the Gala celebration on the first night.

From speakers, to breakout sessions, to networking, this year I truly felt like a powerful underlying message was being communicated – THINK BIG and Invest in Yourself.

Thinking big isn’t just about setting a goal. It is about opening your mind and heart to the possibilities that lay ahead. It is about opening your arms to the universe and saying, “I accept.” Now, what is meant to happen for you may not come at the time you think it should, or in the way you think it should, but it will come when you are ready for it, and when the world is ready for it.

Thinking big is about creating a vision of where you want to be in one year, three years, five years, and even in ten years, and then creating a step-by-step plan of how you are going to make your vision a reality. It is about looking at what you are, and are not willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals. It is about understanding how hard you are going to have to work to get to your destination and being willing to put in the time and effort.

To succeed, entrepreneurs need four things: determination, passion, a big idea, and action. Thinking big is about knowing you can do anything and achieve anything you put your mind to as long as you are willing to never give up and go the distance. It is about saying NO MORE NO, ONLY HOW! It is, according to Lisa Nichols (The Secret), about saying NO MATTER WHAT to one thing and going for it until you achieve it, stretching so far to reach it that you don’t even recognize yourself!

In order to think big and truly believe you are capable of achieving your goals, you must invest in yourself, in your skills, and in your mindset. You need to give and serve yourself first, to ensure you are giving your best to others. One of my favorite quotes from this past weekend was from Lisa Nichols. She urged us to, “Fill your own cup until it overflows, then serve others from your saucer.”

How does this apply to you? Often times as entrepreneurs, we are so focused on giving and serving others – our clients, our prospects, our children, our spouses, our friends, our volunteer organizations – that we leave very little time to serve ourselves. We work and work to give and share and provide, and in the end many times we are left exhausted, burned out, and drained. You may even feel at some point like you have no more left to give.

So, I urge you from this moment on to serve yourself. Make yourself a priority on your to do list. Nourish your mind, your heart, and your soul with good food and valuable information. Take time to rest, replenish, and relax so that when you are ready to tackle a new goal, you have the energy and the fuel you need to make it happen NO MATTER WHAT!

Are you thinking BIG?

10. You Hired Your Friend’s Kid.

You’ve heard all about how he is great with computers and is a tech genius. He took a design class in high school or maybe a couple courses at the local community college and he has done a couple websites. Your friend mentions this a few times and you see a chance to get your website done and save some money. At first you’re excited, and then you start to realize that developing a professional polished website that works isn’t as easy as you thought. Soon you’ve spent hundred of dollars and you’re unhappy. You don’t even want to tell people your have a website because you’re embarrassed. So not only did you waste your money, but you wasted your valuable, billable time and lost out of some potential new business.

9. You Used Free Do-It-Yourself Software.

You knew you needed hosting of some sort and you decided to buy it before consulting with your web designer/developer. In the process of buying hosting you saw a cool tool to design your site yourself. Awesome, right? I mean how hard can slapping together a website be? So you used the free tools, maybe took a class on HTML, or you bought a template to work on. Good for you. But then you start to wonder why the search engines aren’t finding you – in fact why no one is finding you. And you begin to wonder why your site isn’t converting visitors into customers. The bottom line? Go ahead and dabble with HTML and put together a website for fun, or learn enough to make some quick edits on the fly. But when it comes to your business, if you want a site that will attract attention, get remembered, bring in new business, and get the results you want, you should hire a professional. I mean you wouldn’t cut your hair yourself would you? Heck no! For that head-turning, double-take, fabulous cut, you go to a trusted professional.

8. You hired a Marketing/PR/Advertising Consultant Who Does Websites.

Ok. The title of this one alone sounds ludicrous. Would you hire a gardener to take care of your pool? No! Yes, they are in similar fields, but no they are not the same. Most marketing professionals who offer design services do so because to make more money. They outsource the work to a designer, mark up the project and then sell it to you. And then you’re left getting advice from a pseudo expert and the not actual expert. Plus if you hire a good designer who understands the marketing aspect, you’re duplicating costs! Now, iIn some cases this works great. I subcontract for select marketing professionals because I am brought in on the project from the first day and work directly with the client. The problem arises when the consultant is the intermediary. First, you must be careful your consultant is not outsourcing design work to third-world countries because they can make more money on the project with a cheap subcontractor (Remember the saying you get what you pay for). Second, you want to make sure your message, desires, goals, etc. are not getting lost in the translation from person to person. Don’t let your communications end up like the game telephone we all played as kids.

7. Your Website Design is Awful.

Kym Yancey commented from the stage at the eWomenNetwork conference in 2008, If you don’t take your business seriously, if you don’t value your business enough to have it designed by a professional visual communications expert, then how can you expect anyone else to take you seriously and value what you offer. If your website looks like it was done by a high school kid, was slapped together in a weekend or is just pain unprofessional people will not want to give you their money.

6. You Are Using A Splash Page.

Splash pages with maybe some Flash animation may have been considered cool when they first came out, but they are not anymore. If you’re using one of these on your website, you are loosing out on potential new business every day. Splash pages actually do more harm than good. They add clicks the visitor has to make to get to your information, they usually have no content the search engines can index, and they interrupt the flow of information.

5. Your Website Content is Missing.

If you have a basic website with maybe three pages and barely any content, you’re telling your visitors that you only have a site because some told you that you had to have one. You’re sending the message that you don’t think your site is worth paying attention to and you don’t really value what it can do for you, so you posted something pretty and just left it to sit there. What you need is valuable timely content the user can relate to. Deliver content they want and include information they need on a regular basis.

4. Your Website is Boring.

Your site is your opportunity for you to educate visitors on why they need you, what you offer and how you can help them. Answer the questions: 1) What can you do for me and; 2) Why should I care? Make sure the content is interesting and fun and add some personal touches too. People do business with other people they trust. Use your site as a launching ground for building new relationships, invited communication and interaction and have fun doing it.

3. You Forgot SEO and Traffic Building.

You can have the most amazing, fantastic, gorgeous website design ever seen, but if no one can find the site, it was a waste of money. Don’t forget to include in your budget various Search Engine Optimization (SEO), site marketing, and traffic building techniques.

2. Your Website is Too Generic.

You can have the most amazing, fantastic, gorgeous website design ever seen, but if you don’t stand out from your competition, you will not be remembered. A pretty site is completely different from a memorable, “sticky” site that stands out among the rest. A branded site communicates a completely unique selling proposition. It communicates why you are different, what sets you apart, and why your visitors need you. The worst thing a small business is to do is compete on price and that is what your visitors will default to if you don’t give them something else to focus on.

1. Your Website Didn’t Begin at The End.

The absolute first thing you should do when planning your website is to identify the primary and secondary goals of the website. Define exactly what you want to get from completing the project, what change or difference you want to see and what action you want the visitors to take. Be sure to clearly guide your visitors to take that action by communicating with “you” communications instead of “me” communications. If you jump right into the design and development of the site without addressing these issues, it more than likely will not give you’re the return on your investment you were hoping for.

As I grew up, from child to teen, from teen to young adult, and from young adult to mature adult (am I a mature adult – OMG!), I changed. My outlook and approach to life changed. How I dealt with challenges changed. My dreams and goals changed.

Isn’t this true with our businesses too? I know my vision for Bourn Creative today is drastically different from my vision at the start of my solopreneur journey. My business has grown in some areas more than others and my focus has changed as I pursue my passions and dreams.

What I have learned is that during times of change, the systems and processes, vendors and providers you use in your business need to be re-evaluated so you stay on top of your game.

If you are experiencing major growth right now, ask yourself:

• Are my service providers still the best option?
• Could I be serving my clients better?
• Are there better or faster options available to help me run my business more efficiently?
• Am I doing anything I don’t like to do?
• Is there anything I should or could be outsourcing?
• Are my systems and processes still adequate?
• Are there repetitive tasks that I perform that could be automated?
• Do I have a support team in place to help me manage growth

Asking yourself these questions during times of change and transition will help you streamline your business. Trust me – I am going through this right now! Sometimes the answers aren’t pretty, but once you face them and commit to take action, you will improve!

Do you have any questions to add to this list? Let me know!