It’s time to make some jaw dropping goals for your small business! If you’ve set goals in the past and they never worked out or maybe you, accomplished them but didn’t receive the result you were hopping for. This is the perfect goal setting tutorial you’ve been waiting for. Join me today I’ll guiding you in how to set your 2022 goals for your small business. I’ll show you how to choose goals that will actually create positive, valuable change and improve your business. Leave with full clarity on what you wish to achieve in your next business year. Wanna keep eating and relaxing whilst know how to pick your next years goals? Listen to this episode on The BrandMade Podcast instead! – Episode 017 on >>Apple Podcast<< or >>Spotify<<
The Importance Of Goals
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Goals are needed in any type of business small or big. Goals help us keep moving and looking forward, they also help us stay motivated. Goals help us bridge the gap between where you’re sitting right now and where you want to be, which is actually really exciting that your goals have the power to transform your business.
So today as already mention I will be just focusing on helping choose the right business goals by taking you through my own method that has helped me as a small business owner. Do come back for the next episode, where I’ll be helping you make a bulletproof plan to achieve each goal with actionable steps, and a progress tracker to keep you on track and accountable. But firstly none of that will be helpful if you pick the wrong goals, weak goal and or even misplace goal I’m making sure today you leave her with the a list of the most important strong and clear goals you want to achieve in your small business for 2022.
Changing the way you think about goals
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Firstly I’ve realised that there are actually 3 stages to the goal setting process, picking goals, making a plan for your goals and tracking said goals. Before I wrote this script I scrolled through a lot of blog posts and online articles on goal setting. I realise that they all try to cram all three goal setting phases into one blog post. I’ll be taking my time to guide you in how to actually discover and pick the right goals for your business, which could be argued as the most important step in the setting goal process!
Why it’s so easy to make bad goals!
So the majority of goal setting blogs posts tell us to think up a goal and then work backwards by make those goals more specific. Which I personally think is bizarre, we should be first and foremost thinking about the bigger picture and impact, the outcome we want to see, the results want to achieve in 12 months.
I think this where a lot of bad goals get dreamt up, because a lot of us accidentally focus on making an action or project as our goal, rather than make the goal the result we want to achieve. Actionable tasks can be easily mistaken as a goal, such as launching a podcast, or promoting an email list. These are actionable tasks to supporting you to reach and achieve your goal but they shouldn’t be considered as a true end goal.
What do you want to achieve?!
Therefore we need to start discovering what we really want to achieve, it might along the lines of, you want your income to increase next year through a second income streams? Maybe this time next year you don’t want to be relying on your 1 to 1 services as your only source of income. These should be the type of goals you should be creating, and I’m going to help you do that in today. So remember through this episode when I refer to a goals remember to think of it as our definition the result and or outcome you want to see and achieve in your business. If you haven’t yet I would highly recommend pausing this episode and first listen to the end of self-reflection episode, number 16. So that you can be acutely aware of all the things you don’t wish to repeat next year.
Discovering what results you want to achieve next year
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We’re starting of with an imagination excise, to get you more connected to what kind of results you wish to see within your business. Firstly this excises is about abundance not being realistic. Don’t tarnish any of your thought about what you want to achieve, with judgmental thought and questioning is this even possible, all that comes later.
So before we put pen to paper, join me by closing your eyes and just picturing your business 6 months to a year from now. It’s sometime easier to start of thinking about your regular workday routine. But remember to look closely at the difference you want to be seeing throughout the year. Have you stopped working with 1 to 1 clients? Have you got 1:1 clients but less? Are you fully booked? Think about the opportunities that you want to be accepting. Try to picture how your business finances look? Have you earned more, equal or less? How do you feel about you this? Because you might realise that actually 10% drop in my annual income is worth it if next year I can feel less overwhelmed and stressed. Try and imagine how you want your business to feel? Tap into the emotional side, if you felt like last year was a constant struggle maybe you just want to feel more at peace more at easy everyday. Start to mentally note all the changes you want to start seeing in your business. Feel free to keep running through different types of scenarios until the most desired results and outcomes, come into focus.
Time to take notes and organise your goals ideas!
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Now it’s time to slowly open your eyes and grab a pen and paper, start writing down all the results you wanted to have, and outcome you envision seeing, within your business next year. These are now all your potential goals. But as always please do remember to be specific, if you say I want to increase income or sale note how much. Remember to stay focus on write down the results you want to see not how you’ll do it
For example:
I want to see a 20% increase in my annual income.
I want to stop working with 1:1 clients,
I want see my handmade items to gain double the amount of exposure.
I want to feel far less stressed throughout the year.
I want to connect with my audience on a deeper level
Time to evaluate and examine the strength of each goal
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Once you’ve written all the results you want to achieve and experience in 12 months, it’s now time to evaluate their strength, importance and attainability. So your left with the greatest goals!
Start at the top of your paper and ask yourself the following question, if you answer any of the following questions with a no then that goal should be crossed off on your goals list. If you’ve included some personal goals like I want to feel less stressed these may be an exception to the rule. So refer back to the top of your list
Do I personally believe that this goal is important?
Will this goal truly strength and improve my small business?
Will this goal be just as significant to me now as it is in 6 months from now?
Will this goal actually create the type of change I want to see and experience within my business?
If I accomplished this goal will it improve my lifestyle?
Is this goal realistically achievable within a year?
(If no could it be achieve if this was my one and only goal for the next year?)
If I could only accomplished this goal in the next year would it be enough?
How many goals should you have?
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Once you’ve evaluated your goals list you should be left with far less options, and feel clear about which goals are clearly more strong, important and attainable. If you have more than three on your list still, you might need to repeat the evaluation questions and evaluated them a bit more harshly.
I know that right now a year sound like a heck of a long time but, take out weekends, holidays, admin days, client work days etc. The time you have in that year can dwindle rather quickly! I suggest that you have a maximum of 3 goals you want to achieve this time next year. But you can have just as little as one goal to achieve. Sometime this can actually be more benefit to you. Instead of diving up your time across three different goals you can just devote all your time and energy into one goal all year. Obviously if you do choose one goal make sure it’s one that obviously wont be achieve in 4 weeks or so!
Goal Setting Round Up
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I hope this episode has been a real eye opener to why some goals aren’t always good or how task can sometime be mistaken as goals! I dedicated a whole episode to this so that I could help you start on the right foot and choose the right goals! I felt after reaching online these phases can get rather over looked or mudded with specifics. I’m also well aware as a small business owner we can from time to time get a little caught up in what exactly project we want to start next or the next launch we want to do, rather than thinking about what we truly want to gain from it all. I really how this tutorial helped you and you feel much more confident in how you’ll go about thinking up your next year goals. Next week I’ll be making sure that these strong goals are aligned with a bulletproof so you accomplish all of them in 2022.