The Business Method That Drives SUCCESS!

Do you know that if you don’t ever set any goals, then you’ll never hit them? 

Sounds pretty obvious, yes. But a huge number of people running their businesses aren’t setting goals. 

But wait! I’ve been running my business for 5 years and I’ve never set goals, we’re doing just great! 

That might be true, but honestly - the day we started setting goals for our business was the day that we started making real progress.

So why should you set goals? 

Well to put it simply. If you don’t have any goals, then you’re like a ship without a captain - essentially a business without purpose. 

As soon as you set goals, then you have a reason to drive forward to reach them. 

So, what goals do you set? 

Well, there are 2 different sets of goals that I work with. Personal Goals, and Business Goals. 

My personal goals, for example, might be to make more money, whilst working less, and taking more holidays, so eventually, I don’t work at all, but I have a business that’s bringing in an income each month. I want to stash money away in a retirement account, buy a nice fancy car, move house, and take up snorkeling. 

Honestly, whatever your goals are - are your goals. 

Those goals, typically then drive the business's goals because you’ll need more profit to reach those personal goals. 

More profit means more revenue, and more revenue might then mean growing the business, more staff, more overheads, bigger offices, or whatever might come. 

So some goals for your business might be the Monthly Revenue, Monthly Profit, Financial Year Revenue, your EBITDA which I’d always recommend given that you might want to exit the business at some point, the value of your sales pipeline, and I’d also recommend tracking negative Customer Feedback and negative Staff Feedback. 

Then show the months of the year you’re collecting data from, and in front of those have your goal or your target that you want to hit each month. 

These are what I’d call my desert island KPIs. 

I could be on an island somewhere, and these stats would tell me how my business is doing. Revenue goes down, profit goes down. Bad.

Revenue and Profit go up, and negative customer or staff feedback goes up. Bad. 

You can do this with something as simple as a spreadsheet - but I do tend to prefer using a tool like Brightgauge which can track a lot of these stats automagically by pulling in data from your accounts and ticketing systems, just so you don’t have to manually pull these reports each time, and you can also see stats change as each month progresses. 

And if you’re really not sure what targets you should be setting here, if you’re not sure what your personal goals are, then some targets for you to consider, to improve your business. 

If you’re doing 500k revenue, try for 600k next year.

If you’re doing 20k profit now. Try for 50k next year.

Perhaps like me, you hit a revenue target and now realised you want to hit that same revenue, but make more profit! Then that’s your target. 

Maybe one of your goals that you track is how many days off you take each month! Then make that a goal. 

Honestly these goals and targets, at the end of the day - it’s your business. So set them to something that matters to you.

But always, always have a goal in mind. 

More from me next week, until then - consider subscribing to the newsletter for more and I’ll see you in the next one. 

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