[00:00:00] Fi Johnston
Have you heard that you should be setting goals in your business, but you're totally afraid to do it because? Either you're not sure what to do if you don't hit your goals and you're worried about being really disappointed that you didn't hit them, or maybe you just don't see the point because how the hell would I know what is gonna happen in my business in the future?
This episode is for you, my friend.
Intro
If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets. To making money in small business. The more we talk about money and the secrets that usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money.
My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money, secrets of successful small business owners. Let's go.
Acknowledgement of Country
[00:01:00] This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wie people of the Koan Nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and custodians of this land and water that I live, work, and play on.
I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present, and notes that sovereignty has never been seeded. This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
I'm Fi Johnston and I am the hope. Of the Money Secrets podcast, and every week I record an episode designed to help you make more money and impact in your small business.
So if we look around at the internet, the internet of large, the www worldwide web, I see a lot of content around the power of setting goals. I think we can look at the analogies from the sporting world, athletes who are constantly trying to. Better, their personal best, [00:02:00] or setting a goal of being able to run a marathon within the next 14 weeks or whatever it is.
We know that setting goals is a really established and well worn path, and we hear this in the kind of small business space too, that apparently we're all supposed to be out here setting goals. Then somehow hitting the goals and celebrating with Pina coladas on the beach or something. But I know that there's a lot of you out there who are really, I don't know if scared is the right word, but you're really hesitant to set goals in your business because you don't feel that you've been in business long enough, or maybe you don't feel that your business is organized enough.
Maybe you feel like there's just no way of predicting what's gonna happen in your business because your business is so hard to predict and you have really lumpy income, or it just feels really hard to look [00:03:00] towards the future and see what is going to happen. Another reason why I know a lot of people don't like to set goals is because they don't wanna let themselves down.
So they're really scared that they're going to set some incredible goal for. Maybe it's for your revenue, maybe it's for a marketing metric, like you want to get to a certain number of social media followers, or you wanna reach a revenue goal, or you want to reach a profit goal. And a lot of you tell me that this idea of not meeting your goal just makes you feel so crushed.
So therefore you decide not to set the goal at all. So let's address these different reasons why we stop ourselves from setting goals, when actually we really need a reframe around what goals are all about. So the first thing that I wanna talk about is this idea that, how could I possibly predict what was gonna happen in the future of my business?
And I'm gonna take you to the [00:04:00] context of setting a financial. Goal, we call it a financial roadmap in Good Money Club, and it is a tool that we use every single month to dream about plan and then monitor the finances of our businesses. And so many Good Money Club members and lots of business owners I've worked with in the past tell me, Hey, fee, I know that you want me to create this financial roadmap.
But it's really hard to predict what my business is going to look like because X, Y, and Z Maybe the reason why you think your business is hard to predict is because you work on projects. Maybe the income that comes into your business is really lumpy. Maybe the turnaround time from getting an initial proposal out the door to getting a yes.
Maybe the amount of time that takes is really long. Maybe your business is really seasonal. Maybe you just feel really [00:05:00] disorganized in your business, so you're like, I don't know how to predict what's gonna happen in the future. I'm just winging it here. Fee. And there's absolutely nothing wrong at all with winging it, except that it actually takes a lot more energy to wing it because of the amount of time that we spend feeling anxious and uncertain.
About what's happening in the future. So in the context of creating a financial goal or a financial roadmap like we call it, the point is not to accurately predict the future. It's not possible to accurately predict the future. And if you look at what happens in economics and kind of financial or fiscal policy.
On a government level, even they don't know how to predict the future. So why would we even try to predict the future of our businesses? It's a waste of our efforts, but that is not what we're trying to do When we are creating a financial [00:06:00] plan or a financial roadmap or a financial goal. What we are trying to do is to create the business that we want to have.
For those of you who don't wanna create a plan or a goal because you just don't think you're gonna be able to get it correct, that's not what we are trying to do. We are trying to design and map out the future business that you want to have. Another thing to consider is that. In the, one of the examples I gave there, there's a lot of people who think that they can't actually control the way that projects or clients or money comes into their business.
But actually we have a lot more control than we realize. We actually get to set the terms of how we wanna work with our clients. They get to decide whether they wanna work with us or not. That is absolutely true. If you have a fantastic reputation, great marketing, and a great ability to deliver for people, [00:07:00] you actually get to set the terms of how you wanna work with your clients.
You get to decide your capacity. So you might decide, I can take on three clients a month and I charge X dollars per client per month, and that is how I run my business. So when you are looking at the future of your business, you can actually say, oh. Rather than having this big anxiety soup about how much money is likely to come into my business in the future, you can actually design your business to work the way that you want it to.
Now, I know that some of these concepts can actually be quite confusing and complicated if you are feeling overwhelmed already with what I'm talking about. Please don't worry too much about the details of how you might put your plan together. I want you to think more about why you are so hesitant to put the plan together in the first place.
So we've addressed the idea that [00:08:00] accurately trying to predict the future is not why we are trying to create a financial roadmap. What we are trying to do is design the future of our business. The next reason why I hear a lot of business owners not wanting to create a plan or a budget, or. A forecast or a roadmap or whatever it is that you wanna call it, is because we're really scared of not hitting our targets.
We are scared that we are going to set a target of X revenue or X profit or X number of visitors to my website per month, or average order size on your Shopify website. And we are really scared that if we set a goal and we don't achieve it, we're gonna feel really, really disappointed. And I hear you.
One of my good money club members actually referred to herself as being in her Lisa Simpson era, wanting to get an A on all of her report cards, right? So a lot of business [00:09:00] owners really want that satisfaction of setting a goal and hitting it, and I get it. That is a real dopamine hit to go, you know what?
I wanted to hit 20,000 in revenue this month, and I did it. It feels amazing to hit our goals. But is not hitting our goal. A reason enough not to set one, I don't think so.
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I think that one of the benefits of setting a goal is that you now have a plan, an idea, a strategy, or a how you are actually going to hit that target, right? When you have a target that is backed by a rational kind of set of numbers.
So, for example, I wanna hit 15,000 in revenue per month, and I wanna work with three clients at a time. Therefore, if I charge 5,000 per client per month, I can hit my goal. That is giving your brain so much comfort because you just need to focus on bringing those three clients in. Rather than being confused, anxious, and feeling stressed and scared about hitting your $15,000 target, you can actually work backwards and say, cool, well, [00:11:00] if I wanna work with three clients a month, how much marketing do I need to do?
How many discovery calls do I need to book? What kind of percentage of yes do I need to get from those discovery calls in order to hit my three clients a month? So if you too, feel a little bit like Lisa Simpson, you know, really wanting to get an A and a big tick, a big green tick on all of your report cards.
I wanna challenge you to think about the fact that business is hard. We are not always going to hit the targets that we set ourselves, but if we keep setting our targets so low that we can always achieve them, what is the point in that If we are trying to just coast along and hit some. Really low and achievable target so that we can get an A on our report card and a green tick.
Is that really what we are here in business to do small business is hard. There's a lot about it that's [00:12:00] hard. Reaching for difficult goals and challenges is part of the DNA of being a business owner. Now, you don't have to set your goals to grow by 50% every year or whatever metric that might be coming into your mind now.
I do think that it's worth pushing through this idea that I don't wanna set a goal because if I don't reach the goal, I will be too shattered. And instead the reframe is I am working towards this goal that I've set for myself. I know how to achieve the goal, and because I've worked out how to achieve the goal, I can now have power over.
The levers that I can pull, such as marketing and sales and networking that are going to help me to actually reach that revenue goal that I've set myself. The third thing that I want to talk about in relation to setting goals, especially financial goals, is that the [00:13:00] setting of the goals is just the first part of the equation.
So once you've gotten out of your own way and you've realized that. If you are not trying to accurately predict the future, you are trying to design the future of your business and you've gotten over the Lisa Simpson part of you who wants to get a green tick against every single thing that she attempts, and instead, you are planning to put your big girl or big boy or big person pants on.
And work towards a target that feels a little bit scary and that you may not reach because that is part of growing as a human and as as a business owner. Once you've gotten over those concepts and you are now on board with the idea of setting goals, building roadmaps for the future of your business, the goal is just the starting point.
So what happens after we set the goal is actually even more important than setting the goal itself. What is the important [00:14:00] part? It's monitoring and tracking how you are going towards your goals. So going back to the athlete's analogy from before, let's say you wanted to run your first marathon in six months time.
What you would do is you would put together a plan to get from wherever you are now to being able to run 42 kilometers in one go across the next six months. That would include building up the amount of kilometers that you can run over time. And it would also, if you were doing it successfully, you would wanna be tracking how you are going towards that plan that you have put together to reach the ability to run 42 kilometers in six months time.
The same goes for your business. So once you have set your goal, whatever the metric is that you are working towards. The magic is in the monitoring, so you wanna have a process in your business, and you want it to be as simple as [00:15:00] possible so that you actually do it. This is one of the tricks that I've learned through being an online course creator for the last five years, is that simple tools that are easy to use are the ones that are the most valuable to my students, because if we can update something and sort of take it all in quite quickly.
We're actually going to use it and that is gonna benefit us in our business. So what we wanna have is a tool that sets out what our goals are and allows us to check in or monitor those, our progress towards those goals on a regular basis. So, for example, your revenue target for this month was $12,000.
You achieved 10,000. Okay, we've got some information. We're $2,000 down on our revenue target for this month. How could I actually make that up across the next 2, 3, 6, or 11 months that are left of the [00:16:00] financial year rather than getting to the end of a financial year or the end of a quarter, or however you are tracking things.
We don't wanna wait 12 months to know whether or not we're on track for our targets. So we wanna be checking in. Am I actually achieving something close to my targets? If not, why not? Did I overestimate the amount of clients I could work with? Did I overestimate the average order size that I would be able to achieve?
Or am I actually not doing enough marketing to achieve the results that I want to? So we wanna use that monitoring process, not as a way of, you know, berating yourself for not achieving a particular goal. But what we want to use that monitoring process for is to see what can I actually do in the future to get back on track with my goals.
Another very small tip I wanna give you about tracking your goals is that I am so much more [00:17:00] interested in the year to date result than I am in one month alone. So try not to focus too much on one week or one month of your results and try to be more interested in what your results look like over time.
So we wanna be tracking, yes, what happened this month compared to what we wanted to happen. But more importantly, where are we up to for the year to date? How are we tracking towards our year to date income goal? How are we tracking towards our year to date website traffic goal, or whatever it is that you are working on?
And most importantly, is there anything that I can change in the future to help me get closer to my goals? I really hope this episode has helped to reframe your idea of why. Setting goals is a really great way of building the future of your business. Why being Lisa Simpson and not wanting to get anything other than an [00:18:00] A grade on your reports is not a good enough reason not to set targets for your business, and that monitoring your results is.
Where the magic happens, setting the goal is step one. Monitoring the results is the difference between reaching and not reaching your goals. I'd love to know what you hear about this episode, so please reach out to me anytime. I'll see you next week.
Outro
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners.
If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast, but leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends. I hope you learned. Something. I hope you got a new perspective and I really hope you enjoyed the listening [00:19:00] experience.
