Painting a Future: Turning Your Retail Dream Into a Workable Plan

A palette full of dreams but a blank canvas?

As someone in the paint retail industry, it’s challenging to see many promising entrepreneurs brimming with dreams of building a strong, sustainable business, but all they do is dream.

You may be familiar with the type. They attend trade shows, sign up for free webinars, invest in paid training, and sometimes even hire a mentor or two. Yet, they seem to be on a treadmill, making no real progress towards their dreams.

Is it sheer laziness? Not at all. It’s a more significant hurdle. They’re unsure about transforming a dream into a plan, and so, they remain stuck.

A Long-Term Vision is Your North Star

If you’ve ever been asked, “Where do you see your paint store in five years?” you might have thought it an odd question. Yet, as a business owner, that could be your most crucial consideration.

Without knowing your long-term destination, it’s impossible to draw a roadmap to reach there. You need to establish your ultimate goal so that you can gauge your progress daily, weekly, monthly, and annually to ensure you’re on the right path.

Set Up Milestones

Once you identify your ultimate destination, you can sketch out a plan to reach there, setting interim goals to keep you on track.

For instance, if in five years you want your paint store to run autonomously, allowing you to take a 6-week holiday annually, then several elements need to be in place before this can materialise:

• Income to cover your travel expenses
• Passive income to maintain your business while you’re away
• Staff who can manage your store in your absence

With these requirements, you can then work backwards from your five-year goal and create milestones along the way. For instance, if you’ll need an annual income of £75,000 to fund your travel plans, and you’re currently earning £30,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this:

• Year 1: £35,000
• Year 2: £40,000
• Year 3: £50,000
• Year 4: £60,000
• Year 5: £75,000

With these milestones established, it’s much easier to pinpoint exactly what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily targets.

Break It Down: Small Goals, Big Wins

Telling someone they need to move from £30,000 to £75,000 in five years might seem overwhelming. After all, that’s a £45,000 increase, and most people would instantly deem it impossible.

However, when you break it down as we have done, and further into smaller steps, it suddenly becomes less intimidating.

In the first year of the plan we’ve outlined, your income needs to increase only by £5,000. That’s less than £500 per month! That’s achievable, isn’t it?

You can further break that down by week: £500 per month is just over £115 per week. If you sell just five more pots of Fusion Mineral Paint, or a beautifully painted coffee table, or even a couple of premium paint brushes and brush soap, you’ve reached your milestone.

That might mean sending an additional email to your subscriber list, investing an extra £10 per month in social media ads, or perhaps collaborating with one more local decorator. The point is, reaching this much smaller goal is far more manageable than pondering that five-year plan.

So, what’s your grand dream for your paint retail business? How can you break it down into attainable milestones, feasible goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you certainly can), you can accomplish anything in your business and life.