Happy New Year, everyone!
I’ve been watching everyone setting goals for the new year and I am no exception. The new year brings a clean slate and lots of promise for great success. Unfortunately, many goals go unrealized because we get bogged down in the daily details of what we need to do to run our businesses.
I want all of you to set goals that you can easily achieve. The immediate reward makes it easier to move forward and accomplish more. Many people set huge goals like “increase profitability by 20-percent in six months,” or “sign 20 more clients than I had last year.” These are both great goals, but you have to wait so long to feel the achievement.
I break my big goals down into bite-sized pieces that I can easily achieve. For example, if I want to increase my profitability by 20-percent in six months, I know that I have to either charge a bit more money for each client I book, or I have to reduce my expenses. Here is what my bite-sized goals would look like:
Reduce Expenses:
- Call my cell phone company to see if I can reduce my rates. (This is one of my biggest expenses that I can usually negotiate a lower rate annually.)
- Schedule out-of-office appointments in clusters to reduce gas cost.
- Review advertising expenses to make sure I am getting a good ROI. Call and negotiate contracts or cancel ones that aren’t performing well.
Increase Sales:
- Identify a product or service that some of my booked clients might be interested in adding to their purchases.
- Send an email to those clients and make a special offer for the product or service.
- Track how many clients add that product or service.
- Make that new product or service part of my offer to all new clients and raise my pricing.
If I were to accomplish the above to-do list, in six months I would easily reach my big goal of increasing my profitability by 20-percent. Each of these goals is easy to do, so I won’t have to wait six months to feel accomplished, and if any one of these tasks doesn’t work out, as in no one is interested in the new product or service, I will figure that out quickly and change my course of action.
Setting big goals is good, but making bite-sized goals will keep you engaged and constantly achieving success.
I’ve started a Facebook group for my colleagues and readers to help each other achieve their goals. If you’d like help setting bite-sized goals and making them happen, come join us! Susan Southerland’s Business Accountability Group I hope to see you there!
