I grew up in a really great little town by the name of Dallas, GA, a rural community 32 miles northwest of Atlanta. I grew up in the 1940s and 50s in economic times that were far less robust than they are today. Many of the folks who lived in what we called the "out in the country" were farmers who had to work 12 to 14 hours a day to barely scratch out a living. In those days, many farmers didn't own a car or truck, so it was not unusual for them to ride into Dallas on a farm tractor or in a wagon hitched to a workhorse to pick up provisions for the coming week.

To give you more of an idea of what economic conditions were like back then, the minimum wage was well under $1 per hour. A worker would toil an eight-to-ten-hour day in the local cotton mill for $40 to $50 a week. Yet in my hometown, in communities "out in the country" and in other communities around the country, there were individuals who were did extremely well. They bucked the economic trend.

Isn't it like that in your community: there are business owners who are starving to death, but there are also those who seem to always do well regardless of economic conditions.

I'm reminded of a famous quote from Wal-Mart's founder, Sam Walton. One particular year when a recession was predicted by virtually everyone in the news media, Mr. Sam commented to a reporter: "If there's a recession coming, I've decided that I won't participate."

Walton is also well known for another applicable quote: "High expectations are the key to everything."

Every entrepreneur I ever read about seemed to rank "high expectations" way up there when commenting on how they achieved such lofty levels of success. When I started Lee Resources in November, 1987, I remember sitting down and writing a BIG number on the bottom line of my profit plan for 1988. It was more than double the amount I earned in my last year as a corporate officer in my former company.

It even scared me a bit staring at such a BIG bottom line number, but I put my fear aside and moved on to the next step: planning how many billing days I needed to sell and how much I had to generate in product sales to make the profit plan come true.

The final step was coming up with what marketing activities I would implement to sell the billing days I needed to meet my income goal. It was actually a fun process. Then came the hard part: implementing my plan, which required a lot of personal discipline.

At the end of 1988, I exceeded my income goal by about 20%. Wow! I thought. This planning stuff really works. That experience gave me the confidence I needed to convince my clients to follow a similar profit planning process.

Now, 2007 is just around the corner and I am still following the same process.

How about you? What are your expectations for 2007?

Have you developed a game plan?

If a slowdown is predicted for your market, are you going to participate or are you going to buck the trend and figure out how to get a larger share of your market?

Step #1: Begin by writing down the amount you want your business to earn in 2007.

Step #2: Ask your salespeople to list each existing customer and each prospect on a spreadsheet and predict how much they believe they will sell in 2007.

Step#3: When planning operating expenses, begin by listing each of your people vertically on a spreadsheet. In the next column, list how much they earn right now and in the next column, how much you plan pay each employee in 2007, and for the ones you plan to give a raise in pay, plug in the new level of pay in the month the raise will go into effect.

Step #4: Review operating expenses from 2006 and estimate how much you plan to spend in each expense category in 2007.

Step #5: Now back in to gross margin. In other words, if you know how much you are planning to earn, how much you're planning to sell and how much you're planning to spend, how gross margin will you have to have to make the plan come true.

Step #6: Hammer out a marketing plan that will give your sales force the support it needs to achieve the company's sales goal.

Yes, there is something magic about high expectations. And frankly, I don't totally understand it, but when you think big, bigger things happen to you than you think small.

I believe one of the biggest deterrents to success in life is down deep inside not believing you deserve success. Or that you are destined to struggle financially. Or that double digit profit margins are for other business owners and managers, but not for you.

I can speak with confidence about this planning process from firsthand experience.

I guess that's why David Schwartz entitled his famous book, The Magic of Thinking Big.