You Can Still Achieve Your 2019 Goals (Step-by-Step)

The end of the year is probably my favorite time of year when it comes to talking to business owners. I love this time of year because it’s awesome to hear how entrepreneurs are sprinting towards achieving the goals they set three quarters ago and to hear about how they’re going to take what they learned this year to make next year even better. Getting to have those conversations with people and supporting the work they’re doing are literal parts of my own “why”. 

Quick Side Rant. 

There’s a difference between someone just complaining/daydreaming about what they’re going to do to finish strong versus the grit and resilience that comes from an entrepreneur who’s already mid-sprint. Talking shop with wantrepreneurs is the opposite of my “why” and it kind of makes me sad. Sad because, more often than not, the wantrepreneurs have the best of intentions but they overthink, worry too much about being judged, or are waiting for everything to be perfect before they take that next step. Then nothing happens. They don’t show up, they don’t solve a real problem, they don’t put their businesses out there, and they continue to just stagnate in place waiting for the New Year to announce a new plan in which they will ultimately also do nothing.

Yikes, I depressed myself right there. Back to the positive and to support those that are willing to continue to work even when it gets hard!  

End Side Rant.

If you’re mid-sprint right now or at the very least are just about to start that sprint (I mean the “step up to the line and on your mark” kind of about to start.) I’m going to give you two things that will help keep you focused on your momentum so you can pour as much energy and focus on the work that matters most for you and for the people that you serve. They’ll take a little time and honest reflection to set up but you’ll be able to reference them often to help you guide the decisions you’re going to have to make quickly as you push through your year-end sprint. 

They are the Purpose Statement and a Change Agenda. Stay with me here, it’s not just business buzzword nonsense, I promise. 

Building a Purpose Statement doesn’t have to be like setting your business’s Mission, Vision, and Values. It can be more fluid and change as the business your building changes. A good Purpose Statement will have you scanning what’s going on around you in real-time and allow you to specifically articulate why people need you more than any of your competitors. It also gives your audiences and target customers a reason to engage with you, to follow you, and to keep them coming back to you. It’s not generic aspirational fake authentic nonsense either. Purpose correlates directly to a measurable value created or delivered and is made up of three parts. 

Objective

Here’s where you’re articulating your goal. A purpose statement for your year-end business sprint could be a target number of customers you’re trying to serve, a revenue target, a goal around hiring an employee or your first virtual assistant, or even where you want your business’s standing to be in relation to your competitors. It’s got to be clear though, no vague “to be the best” or “have the greatest customer service” nonsense. It can describe why you’re in business but make it a function of you being of service for people - think the message under a McDonald’s sign that lets everyone know they’ve served billions of burgers. 

Advantage

What are you doing now, in this sprint for example, that makes you different? How is the work that you’re doing unique and worth keeping the attention of someone who sees your Facebook Ad for more than four seconds? Yes, we’re talking about competitive advantage but in more of a micro-every-day-action-taking way. I don’t want you to think about what makes you the best choice for someone in the big broad strokes that are more akin to your Mission, Vision, and Values. I want you to think about the real-time topical every day things that make you a better value than any of your immediate competition. Why should people care about you? How is your process the best process for solving your customer’s problem? Clear over clever wins every time here. 

Scope

A Purpose Statement for a year-end sprint has to keep the activities you do laser-focused. Getting clear on your scope means being strong enough to tell people what you won’t do, what you can’t do, or where you won’t do. If you’re in a business that sells multiple products, offers multiple services, etc it means figuring out which few you’re going to give the most focus to over the next 60 days. Articulating the value, the specific solution you’re focused on delivering is taking the idea of the Pareto Principle and ruthlessly committing to developing that 20% work that will create the 80% results in your business - from your goal from customers served to dollars in the bank. It means for a little while there might be parts of your business that are on autopilot or projects that you had the best of intentions to get to that get prioritized for after the New Year. 

After you get your thoughts on Objective, Advantage, and Scope put together the challenge is putting it all together into one cohesive statement. (No more than two sentences.) This statement will be the guide you’ll use when you get to that point in your work where you look up and are wondering what to focus on next. It’s that crucial point where you’re emotionally riding the line between the positivity highs that comes with seeing that you may pull this off and hit your goals and the complete apathy that comes from extreme burnout. At that point is where your Purpose Statement will keep you grounded and pushing on. Its format should look like this: 

Purpose Statement: I or we will [insert specific goal like: earn $XX,XXX, sell 100 online courses, hire two employees, etc.] by years end by [insert specific differentiator that makes your solution relevant to people right now] in [insert a specific scope like using a mile radius so, serving your immediate community within 15 miles from where your work happens]. 

To give you a simple example, if I use me and let’s say I’m looking for people to hire me to help them create their own Purpose Statements mine might look like… 

Purpose Statement: I will help 10 professional service businesses create their Purpose Statements by years end by keeping them out of the wantrepreneur zone and prescribing real actions they can take right now that align with how they do their best work. The businesses I’m committing to serve will be those in my immediate community no more than 15 miles from my office. 

You get the idea, now it’s your turn. Well, don’t leave yet. Let’s talk about what you do with your Purpose Statement once you create it. 

Once you are happy with your Purpose Statement now it’s time to set up the rest of your sprint’s guardrails. Enter the Change Agenda. This Change Agenda will help you figure out what you need to adjust in your business (temporarily) so that you can be as effective as possible with all the time, energy, and resources you’re putting into achieving your goals by year-end. The goal is to keep it simple, clear, and Purpose Statement-centric. If you’re reading this and thinking that you don’t need to change anything, I’d argue that the environment (includes processes and systems you use) in which you work is just as important as how hard you work. So don’t skip this part! 

A Change Agenda is just three parts. We’re going to talk about it in three conceptual chunks but you format it however works best for you. From bulleted lists to tasks on a Trello board, it’s all good. Now that you’ve put some real effort into the Purpose Statement let’s work on creating an environment that sets it, and you, up for success: 

Are there parts of your business that you think you want to change?

If you’re coming into the year-end ready to burn what’s left in your fuel tank that probably means you have some ideas on what you’d like to do differently next year. That’s great! The goal with the Change Agenda is to think about how you can roll what you’re doing now into what you’ve learned over the year. If there are things you want to try, stop doing, etc. this is a great point to give it a go. The caution here is that sometimes implementing change can take way longer than you think, especially if it has to do with using a new fun tech tool or creating new processes. I’d save implementing the new CRM for January and focus on the little things you can do right now that are easy to implement and that will be useful in the future. 

What were you doing that you need to change to make it through this sprint?

After you prioritize the areas you want to see changes it’s time to get super-specific. Your Purpose Statement will require you to be laser-focused with your resources so you’re going to have to make some tough calls around how you allocate your time and money. You might have to change up the subject matter of the content you’re producing, increase the amount of content you’re producing, adjust the amount of money you spend on supplies, rearrange your work schedule, delegate a little more so you can focus on meeting new people at your local Chamber and Young Professionals networking events etc. You should think about all the things that happen in your business, everything that you consider work. Then strip away, minimize, and reprioritize any initiatives or processes that don’t support your Purpose Statement.

What do you want your business to be doing post sprint? (Sometimes businesses pivot depending on the outcomes of a process like this. And, that’s ok!)

Your sprint is going to eventually end and you are going to have all kinds of fun data to review. You’re going to be able to see what your entire year looked like, the impact of all your hard work over the last few months and, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by having data that supports how unimportant some of the stuff you were doing was. How your business operates and how you help people is a dynamic process. The tastes and expectations of your customers will change over time which means you need to be comfortable with change too! Check-in with yourself and your business every once and a while as you’re working through your sprint and leaning on your Purpose Statement. Make note of what’s working and what’s not, what you like and don’t, and document opportunities you can make time to explore after you finish achieving your epic year-end goals. Come the turn of the year you’ll be able to choose a direction for your business that best aligns with what you decide is important to you and how you believe you can be more efficient in delivering on your value. No worries if that means you permanently leave behind processes, products, and services (and sometimes people) that got you to where you are now but won’t get you to the impact you want to have in the future. As always, the more specific the better - see Purpose Statement. 

You made it! 

As of the writing of this post, there are 61 days left in 2019. That’s plenty of time to put your head down and work towards something epic. The best part of all this is that if you’re honest about the process and are committed to the work you’ll be in great shape even if you don’t end up hitting your goals. You’ll have real and actionable data you can use to refine who you serve and how you help people next year. Maybe you even see that some of the stuff you were doing wasn’t helpful or relevant to your business at all. There’s only upside here! Plus, taking a post like this and taking action means no one will ever mistake you for a wantrepreneur...so there’s that. 

Prepare for 2018 Like a Pro

The last few weeks of the year are always interesting productivity and business growing monsters. It’s a balance between enjoying the holiday season, not giving up on your goals and trying to get a hold of people who may or may not be checked out already. What I love most about these few weeks though is that they are great for putting your head down and sprinting towards making good on your 2017. The close second to that is that they are also great times to reflect a bit in your business. 

It’s a great time to be a little honest and a little raw about the level of effort you put into your business this year. In this post I’m going to share with you an outline you can use to review your efforts this year or as an agenda for year end conversations you may be having with your team. 

Before jumping right into the outline I want to share with you a bit of a framework you should follow first if you really plan on getting anything useful out of this reflection exercise. 

Prepare 

This is a big one most businesses owners I talk to just gloss over. They gloss over it because they think that everything they need to think about in terms of what their business did over the course of the year is just floating around in their brain. Wrong. What’s floating around in your brain are the misremembered experiences and perspectives you’ve help through the year that your brain chose to hold on to. It’s your view of your business through either rose colored or excuse tinted lenses. If you’re going to take this reflection seriously you need to have an objective view of what you were or weren’t able to accomplish. So pull out those financials, bank statements, social media dashboards, etc. 

Set the tone 

Sounds simple but it’s important not to skip. You shouldn’t be going into this exercise looking for only the things you did wrong. You want to celebrate the things you did right too! This reflection process should be about identifying where you can continue to grow in your business and how your current capabilities and capacity map against the goals you want to set for yourself in the coming year. 

Review performance expectations

Whether you actively think about it or not as a business owner you have a job description. These are the task, responsibilities and actions towards outcomes you committed to when you started the business. Reviewing the expectations you set for yourself everyday will help to measure your performance against the reality of growing a business. This is where being honest is important because it’s easy to rationalize why something you committed to didn’t get done when you’re the one holding yourself accountable. The real test is being honest about the dedication or commitment you showed up to work everyday with. Again, don’t get bogged down if you had a spell or two of lacking enthusiasm every time you sat at your desk. The entrepreneurial journey is less of a check mark and more of a rollercoaster - it’s about the patterns of activity over time that really matter. 

Notes on goal setting 

There are a million and a half ways to set goals. Finding the one that works for you is important but regardless of what system you use I want to make sure that you are setting goals in targeted areas, that build on your strengths, that develop you as a professional and finally that are aligned with your values. If you’re setting goals that don’t matter to you or that you can’t commit to then it doesn’t matter what’s at the end of that rainbow because you’re never going to get there. They should stretch and challenge you but not be so far out of your abilities or habits that you just chalk them up as a loss subconsciously before you even start. #newyearnewyou

Make sure you schedule time to follow up

It’s unfair to expect that you can do this work now, file it away and just figure that you’re on the right path without checking in at this time next year. My recommendation is to break your goals and plans out by month so that you can check in along the way. It’s ok if your course changes over time because you’ll be actively assessing what’s important to you and your business and what’s not. Following up will help fight the self sabotage (something that I am super guilty of) and help you build momentum as you start to hit benchmarks and see real growth. Plus, you’re executing on one of my favorite sayings of all time - “What gets measured, gets managed”. 

So now that we’ve set the stage below here is some swipe copy you can use to run your year end review conversations. This works as a self reflection exercise as well as a conversation with your contractors, team members or employees. The headings should apply to most people and I’ve added some question primers to help you think through those headings but feel free to add or subject the reflection questions based on what feels right for the body of your work in 2017. 

Agenda for Annual Review

Planning/Teamwork

What did you accomplish? What worked well? What didn’t? 

Attitude Toward Assignments

Where there types of work that you enjoyed more than others? Types of customers? Where your employees or team on board with what was asked of them? Did the work you do feel authentic to you? 

Knowledge of Duties

Did you feel like an expert in your job? Did you have the technical skills to deliver the value you promised to your customers? 

Your Community

How connected were you to the community you serve? What kind of connections did you create? Where did you add value to the networks that you are a part of? 

Working Relationships and Cooperation with Other Personnel

Did you play nice in your sandbox? Where their situations or relationships that could’ve gone better? Did you (and your team) create an experience or environment that encouraged people to do their best work? Do you feel like you managed your time, team or expectations appropriately? 

Operations 

Did you have a system for moving your business forward every week? How did you measure success or growth? Is that a fair way to measure it going forward? If you breakdown your work process are there places where you might be able to delegate or create efficiencies? How much time did you spend working in your business vs. on your business. 

Response to Assignments or Body of Work

Were their projects or works delivered that you weren’t proud of? Were proud of? What went well? What didn’t? 

Conformance to Work Schedules, Assignments and Instructions

Did you deliver on time every time? Were you honest about the time you put into your business this year? Do you plan on working more? Less? How can you work smarter? Did you manage your customers expectations of your work deliverables and timing? 

By the Numbers

What did this years quantitative data look like compared to last years? Are there any patterns of note? How are you going to use what you learned this year for next year’s: budgets, calendars, sales activities, inventory management, content planning, engagement, and other trackable metrics?

Goals for Next Year

What is important to you? What do you care about? What value are you going to deliver to people? How are you going to measure success? How are you going to get people to pay attention to you? 

That's it! 

Keep the notes before the agenda and the agenda in mind when you're thinking about how you're going to prepare for 2018 and you'll be setting yourself up for success because you're doing it from an honest place. There's no worse feeling then looking at the New Year all bright eyed and bushy tailed only to set goals that will doom you from the start. Don't forget to make this process your own. What I've outlined for you here really is the bones of a process. Some of it may not apply to you or your team and that's ok. Just take some time, mentally prepare to be honest and set good goals to help launch you to your next levels of success in 2018!

3 Tips For Better Year-End Strategic Planning

This is a fun time of year for me. This is the time of year when I get to read, talk about and experience the wonders of all kinds of year-end strategic planning (and review) processes. It’s a blast because, for the most part, most people get it terribly wrong. They get it wrong because they follow dated template frameworks that don’t apply to their businesses, seek answers to self-referential questions and spend hours doing something that feels like work but will probably never have any real impact on their business.

My goal in this post is to give you a few quick and dirty concepts you need to consider to get the most out of your strategic planning process this year - hopefully not just a template. So before you tape your over sized Post-It notes to the walls or crack that new box of dry erase markers let’s talk about a few things.

1. Your strategic plan is not your step-by-step how to run your business manual for the next year.

It’s also not a budget. You need to think about strategy more simply and in terms of the choices you need to make that will get your business in front of the people that matter most - your customers. While budgets, cascading goals, benchmarks and actions are important it should all stem from the choices you make about the specific customers you serve and how you will serve them better than anyone else next year.

Take Away: In the strategic planning process don’t let your thought process or conversations go down day-to-day operations rabbit holes. Save the breaking down of specific responsibilities, tasks, benchmarks for later. Use something like the Balanced Scorecard (link takes you to Balance Scorecard website) to help focus on the broader financial, operational, people and customer perspectives.

2. Your strategy (or strategic plan) is not going to be perfect and that’s OK.

You’re strategy can and probably will change over time and that’s a good thing. You’re eye on the prize needs to revolve around revenue (not just controlling costs) and your customers. You want your business to be able to adapt to the changing needs and expectations of your market while honoring your vision. That means there’s always going to be a little bit of uncertainty in your planning. Give yourself permission to be OK with uncertainty as long as you’re setting up benchmarks along the way to test your strategy assumptions about your customers and the market you’re serving. If you were as addicted to Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares” as I was you’d know one of the things he commented on most was the inability of restaurateurs to update their menus. So, to quote Chef Ramsay, don’t be an “idiot sandwich” and shoot for less-than-perfect.

Take Away: Don’t fight over what you can’t predict. If you run into spots where assumptions feel murky because they are based on future outcomes then you should set up times to revisit in the follow up in the next weeks/months/quarters. Conversations about what you can’t control can be draining and detract from the process.

3. Start quantifying.

Getting to the heart of making good decisions means getting to the heart of the data in your business. I’m sure (hoping really) that you had goals set for yourself through this past year. List them out and how close you were/are to achieving them. What do your sales figures look like? How big is your market? What are your margins? Who are your best customers and how many of them did you serve? When going through the strategic planning process it’s easy to get distracted by the big broad brushstroke topics. It’s easy to set goals of just “doing more” of certain activities in the next year. What’s hard is getting to the nitty gritty of your business. It’s getting real about what worked and what didn’t in a quantitative way and being honest about how you spent your time/resources/money this year. No one likes to admit to making bad choices or mistakes but you need to get real about where you are now if you’re going to give yourself a fighting chance to get better. Remember, when it comes to data and planning - garbage in = garbage out.

Take Away: Have the data of your business ready before you go into the strategic planning process. Spend some time getting re-acquainted with what’s going on in your business. This is more than just running some blanket financial statements. Look back at what you decided were key performance indicators in the past and, as honestly as possible, figure out where you stand today.

Whatever your strategic planning process looks like it’s my hope that you think about the three concepts I’ve listed above. At the heart of this process you’re announcing what’s important to your business and customers, setting goals and priorities and trickling that information down into the eventual actions and benchmarks your business needs to take to be successful. Please don’t just use some generic out of the box framework because it feels easy. Make sure the frameworks and tools you choose are relevant and will authentically support your business.