You’ve set your goals, now it’s time for execution. How do you make it happen? You plan it out!

Setting goals without a plan is like trying to go on your dream vacation without planning any of the details.

Back in college, my husband and his friends decided to pick up and go on a last-minute spring break trip to Myrtle Beach without planning any of it. They scraped what little money they had together and jumped in the car. You can guess that they didn’t have ample cash for a decent hotel or even food. All of them checked into one cheap motel room where my husband spent the entirety of the trip sleeping on a musty, dirty, floor. They sustained themselves off of McDonald’s and Natural Light beer. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best of trips.

Fast forward twenty years and we are planning our first spring break trip with our kids. We won’t be waiting until spring break to decide what we’re doing and how we’re going to pay for it. 

My son is dying to go snorkeling, so we found a travel agent to help us pick the perfect family-friendly resort in Jamaica where we can do that. We’ve researched it all months in advance to make sure that it has the amenities we want. We also chose an all-inclusive resort, so that we don’t have to worry about the food and we know it will be great. 

Most importantly we know how much the trip is going to cost. We’ve already purchased the flights and put a deposit on the resort, with the remainder set aside in our savings account. We know the financial impact.

Because we’ve planned everything out in advance, we’re going to have a great trip.

If you take the time to think through and plan out your goals, you can have your best year yet. 

However, if you wing it, you may experience the business equivalent of sleeping on a nasty floor, eating fast food, and drinking only the cheapest of beer.

So how do you plan your best year yet? You use a simple three-step process.

Number one - dream big. If you just chose an arbitrary revenue number as a goal, I want you to re-think it. 

Think about what you really want to do this year. How much do you want to pay yourself? What do you want to be able to do for your employees? Is there something you could do to better serve your customers? Think about what you want to be toasting to on New Year’s Eve next year.

Number two - map out the details. Now that you know what you want to do, you can start thinking about what needs to happen. Do you need to hire anyone? Is there a new piece of equipment you need to invest in?

From there you’ll figure out what the financial impact is. If you’re hiring someone - what will that cost you? What will the investment be for the new equipment? How will that affect your cash position? Your net income? How much additional revenue will the business need to generate in order to make it happen?

Number three - keep the score. The third and final step is the part of the process that you’ll carry throughout the year. This not only involves staying on top of your monthly financial statements and comparing goals to actuals, but also tracking metrics on a weekly basis. Tracking your key metrics on a weekly basis will help keep your goals top of mind and allow you to pivot and act quickly if things aren’t going as planned.

It also helps to keep everyone accountable and on the same page. For example, if a service provider has a goal to generate $20,000 of revenue a week, they would break that down into the number of appointments that each of their providers needs to have in order to hit the goal. Every staff member should have a scorecard with metrics that are applicable to their job.

Walking through this three-step process will help intentionally hit your goals. Cheers to your best year yet!

If you’d like help with this process, book a discovery call here.