If you’re like most business owners, you want the new year to be (a ton) more fruitful than the last. Okay let’s be honest, you want it more than your next breath. Maybe you even make some goals for the new year…for revenue, staff growth, profitability, and more. If you’re like me, maybe you also have goals for other areas of your life- like spending time outdoors every day, breaking into acting, and getting hard exercise at least three times per week. But the big quandary for many entrepreneurs (for everyone actually) is how to actually meet those goals.
Because unless you’ve got a system in place for meeting your goals, they’re likely to exist merely as hopes and wishes. Without a system, all you can ever really do is work more and work harder toward the aim of meeting your goals. Mmmm…working longer and harder…less than terribly inspiring, no?
Relax, friend…there’s a better way (queue the sigh of relief).
Here’s a simple system for creating goals and having them stay alive for you as real and reachable year round so that you’re far likelier to meet them.
Step one: set the goals. This is the easy part because it’s the part most of us are used to. For example…maybe one goal you have is to generate an additional $100K in sales this year. Sounds delicious, right? Great. Write that down on Dec. 31st as “we’ve earned an additional $100K this year”.
But here’s the rub though- saying it, writing it exuberantly on your white board, or even chanting it reverently to the statue of Ganesha or Jesus you dutifully keep your altar won’t actually make it happen…no matter how much incense you burn while you do it. But then you probably already knew that from experience, didn’t you?
See, there’s some stuff that has to happen during the year to have your sales be $100K higher by the end of the year. Like, real, tangible things. Shocker, right?
Here’s where step 2 comes in…
Create milestones. Open up your calendar and set up some milestones that must have been reached throughout the year in order for the end-of-year goal to be realized. For instance, it follows that for most businesses, that if they want to have a $100K increase in sales by the end of the year that they must have had to have made $25K more per quarter along the way. Right?
So for this step you’d need to take last year’s quarterly earnings, and write down that number plus $25K on the final day of each quarter for the upcoming year. These are your quarterly earnings milestones. This way you know that if the last day of a given quarter arrives and you haven’t made at least last year’s earnings plus an additional $25K then you’re off track for reaching your goal. It’s not rocket science but it is a good way to keep you aware throughout the year.
Okay, we’re closer, but there’s nothing new here, right? You’re still stuck wishing and hoping whilst working longer and harder at this point as you reach desperately and blindly for the quarterly carrots on the calendar, right? Right.
That’s where step three comes in…
Figure out specifically what there is to do to reach your milestones. Okay, so now you’ve got your goals and your milestones in place on your calendar. Now you need to close your eyes and imagine that it’s the date of the first of your milestones…like, pretend that’s actually the current date. Then, look backwards at the past three months, and consider what actions there are to take in order to be where you are right now. What specific actions must you had to have taken? Be creative and look around and the different areas of your business.
Doing this will create the opportunity for your imagination to go to work. Maybe you’ll realize that your current sales force is maxed out and that you need to bring on another sales person in order to effectively manage the leads you’re now getting. Maybe you’ll also see where you could put a specific system or two into place in order to save time, increase efficiency and free you up to pursue entirely new opportunities. Maybe you’ve noticed that e-mail is draining your time and productivity and you’ve been meaning for a while to start checking and responding to e-mail only twice daily (if you haven’t been meaning to, maybe you should).
Great. Now you’ve got some real, actionable things you can write into your calendar and actually do that will move you forward toward reaching that first milestone!
Do the same thing for each of your milestones for each of your goals, writing down the actionable items in your calender on the date “by when” you’re committing to have done it.
Step 4: Live by your calendar. Arrrrr, matey! Your calendar is the treasure map by which you’ll navigate your business to the riches you seek! Now maybe the riches aren’t an extra hundred grand in sales for you at all…maybe it’s four more hours per week with your family, losing 20 pounds while having more energy, or spending an extra two days per week making a difference in your community. Whatever it is for you, this system can help you reach your goals.
Step 5: Get accountable. It’s all-too-easy to get spun out in a dozen different directions that may seem perfectly important and worth pursuing. However, if you want to reach your goals then you need to do what you said you were going to do by when you said you were going to do it. But if we have only ourselves to answer to we can easily justify taking a week-long or month-long diversion down some very distracting rabbit holes and potentially get (way) offtrack. Sound familiar? We’re weasels like that. Yes, even you- right there, in that chair of yours.
If you’re tired of weaseling your way out of what you say you want in life then try being accountable to someone else for a change! This works for the same reason that we’re far likelier to go to the gym if we’ve got a gym buddy we go with..because we don’t want to look bad, of course! Maybe you want to enlist your spouse as your accountability partner, or a a fellow entrepreneur. Share this system with ‘em and see if they’d be up for working on it with you. Hint- this would be a dream-come-true for most biz-owners.
Step six: Write and e-mail a “Create and Complete Report” with your partner each day (or at the very least, each week) and have them. Looking at the milestones on your calendar, take 5-10 minutes at the end of each day, list out what you’re committing to accomplish for the following day, along with what milestone and goal they pertain to. Then on the following day’s Create and Complete report, mark next to each item whether you did it or not, by simply typing “done” or “not done” next to it.
If you didn’t do something don’t write why you didn’t…that’s an excuse or an explanation (not to mention a time-waster). You’re merely reporting to your partner whether you did what you said you were going to do or not. Regarding your word in this way is a powerful habit to get into! The mere fact that you know that you’ve got someone else out in the world who is listening for and expecting you to do what you said you would is enough to seriously invigorate you. You may also find yourself trusting yourself more and more to follow through with what you said you would do in other areas of your life, too! Uh…bonus!
If you’re finding that you’re consistently not doing what you said you would, then there’s an opportunity to look at that. Are you over-committing or just blowing off what you said you would do? Do you need to recommit yourself to your word, increase your efficiency, or just commit to less? Tweak as needed.
Good luck, and happy 2012!