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Don’t Leave This Out of Your 2016 Business Plans!

December 14, 2015 by Lizabeth Phelps

As a coach, consultant, trainer or speaker, are you considering something new to offer: a new presentation, new program or even entire new business brand as 2016 approaches?

Nearly all businesses, large and small, leave out a crucial ingredient in planning their “Next Big Thing” and not only does it put their new idea at great risk, but their entire business.

What is it? Telling the future.

If you want your upcoming idea to take off, you must be ahead of the curve. You must offer something that is 10X better than anything else out there. I don’t mean incrementally better—10%—I mean ten times better. And you must have something to say that stops people in their tracks.

What’s going to do that? Where is your “exponentially better” idea going to come from? And the message that will turn heads?

Not from anything that’s out there right now.

It’s going to come from the future.

Future possibilities look really good to those still here in the present. Think of how magical the hoverboards of 2015 looked to Marty McFly in Back to the Future. You want to invoke that kind of awe in your customer.

Think how powerfully effective the messages on climate change are, when scientists project into the next century and see probable calamity? You want to invoke this kind of action from your customers when you tell them what the future will look like.

How might you have felt back in 2000 if you’d been told that in a few years, you’d be able to ditch your camera, video camera and computer—and have it all on your phone for just $100 a month? You want to instill that kind of excitement in your customer because you see the future and will take them there.

The fact is, if you want your business to endure in this hyper-accelerated world we’re in right now, you must produce something that will not only out-last it but out-think it.

In short, you need to be a futurist, who can see the phenomena that are emerging right now and anticipate how they will unfold over the next decade.

I have just released a workbook for sparking your Next Big Thing. A large portion of Section 2 stretches you to think 10X farther into the future than you’re doing right now. This kind of contemplation is not something you can set aside and do another day. The future is a crucial building block for anything you’re about to release to the market. Click here to download your free copy here.

Open this “idea-book” and start playing! It’s fun, yet it’s serious business, too.

This is how serious: According to Yale professor Richard Foster, in the 1920’s the average life span of an S&P 500 company was 67 years. 10 years from now, according to research done at the Babson School of Biz, more than 40% of today’s top companies will no longer exist.

If that is true for well-capitalized Fortune 500 companies–imagine what could happen to you. Only businesses who can see the future have a chance of being there when it arrives—why? Because they’re adapting to (and creating) it now.

To read my 10-year projection, “Will I (And All Experts) Be Out of a Job in 10 Years?” click here.