How to set and achieve your 2021 business goals

It’s important to have real, specific goals in your business. 

These goals can be financial, personal, or apply to a specific skill you need to develop.  It can sometimes seem overwhelming to determine goals, and even more overwhelming to think of achieving them. Here are 4 tips to help you to do both.

Ask yourself what your objective is.  I like to plan my activities around specific objectives. There are typically two main reasons why people start a business; 

• To make an impact
• To make money 

Making an impact could relate to the number of people you want to work with each month or year, and your financial objective could be a specific amount you want to earn.  So ask yourself what is the objective that you want to achieve? 

As you’re setting your goal for the year, consider whether you want to have one main goal which is then broken down into smaller steps or, several goals that you want to achieve over the course of the year.  Knowing this is part of you keeping focused on the end result you want to achieve.  

Once you’re clear on your objective you need to get specific.  What does making an impact mean to you?  What is the financial goal that you want to achieve?  What is the specific pound amount?  

Write it down.  For example, your goal may be to make an impact by working with 1,000 women this year.  As you’re writing down your goal, define what working with means, and the specific result you want the women that you work with to achieve.  That will help you to get clear on the products and services you need to create to help you to achieve your goal.  

In order to achieve your goal, you need to know what’s involved in completing it.  To do that you need to break down your goal.  To use the example above, in order to find 1,000 women to work with, you need to define who those women are.  Which means that you need to create a profile which sets out the criteria for those women which includes things like their age, their marital status, their desires, their pain points, their ambitions.  You may need to carry out research to better understand these women, so you may therefore include a goal which involves you creating some market research questions and then deciding how many women you want to interview and how you will approach these women.

Once you’ve identified those women you’ll need to then determine what the product or service is that you will be offering to them to help them through whatever pain point you’ve identified for them, and then you’ll need to create it.

That’s a really simplistic overview but there’ll be more involved in you breaking down your goal, like identifying where you will find these 1,000 women.  Will you speak on stages?  Appear on podcasts?  What do you need to prepare in order to get booked on stages on podcasts?  Identify all of the steps involved and then break everything down into smaller, actions.

Be honest about how much time you have. So many times it’s tempting to set goals we can’t reach because we just don’t have a grasp on how much (or how little) time we have. Also, hours on paper seldom work out exactly right in real life – you need some breaks (no one is a machine), and life happens. 

For example, if your kids are in school from 8am to 3pm, you may think you have seven hours to work that day. But if you’re honest, it may be more like five by the time you factor in lunch, bathroom trips, driving to and from the school if you drive your kids, and so forth.   My tip is to overestimate how long you think it will take you to achieve your goal and then make a note of the time that it actually took.  In business there are certain tasks that you’ll likely be repeating, like writing a blog post, emailing your list or creating your social media strategy.  So it’s helpful to make a note of the time it takes you to complete those tasks so that the next time around, you can better plan your time.

If you’ve been honest in the above exercises, achieving your goals will be much easier and likely. Still, you can be as detailed and careful as you want on strategy lists and such, and still have trouble reaching your goals. So it may help to keep the following in mind.

• Keep track – Keeping a record of your business ventures, expenditures, income, and overall progress toward your goals can help you get a handle on how well you’re doing. This can also help you see areas in which you need to improve and areas where you excel.
• Accountability – get an accountability partner, goal buddy, or whatever you want to call them.  Someone who holds you accountable for reaching your goals.
• Marketing – As I said above, your goal should relate to you either making an impact or making money.  So factor this in when setting out your business goals, that means including within your plan how you will market and promote your business.  That way you can always make sure that you’re making money, making an impact, or both.  

I’ve created a FREE 5 day video series where I breakdown 5 of the main things to focus on in your business.  This will help to give you a clearer idea about what areas of your business to pay attention to as you start creating or adapting your 2021 business plan.  You can sign up for the video series here.