How to Set Business Goals That Actually Drive Results

All right, welcome back to The Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here. I am your host. We are going to get jumping right into things today. If you haven't checked out The Daily Mastermind quote of the day, jump over to the Instagram or the Facebook page at The Daily Mastermind. But yesterday we talked about business goals. We talked about why business goals are important. And I wanted to follow that up because I had a bunch of people reach out to me and I had individuals asking me about some of the specific goals that I've set in my business as well as some methods that I've used. So I want to take a few minutes today and I want to talk with you about that. And I want to follow up our conversation yesterday. So here's the deal. I know that, you know, it's important to set goals in business. And if you haven't really set your goals in business, you've really got to dig into those and you've got to kind of get specific about what you're trying to do here. So keep in mind that, you know, there are a lot of different types of business goals. And if you really want to succeed, you can't just set any old goal, you know, for your business. You've got to set goals that are relevant, realistic, and in line with what you're hoping to achieve. So what's the different types of goals that you can set in business? Well, I wanted to first today talk about five of the most common types of business goals. and then I want to talk to you about a few methods that you could use to set those goals. And I think this is something that will really help you. So unless you're driving, you know, take a few notes. I'll try to post some of these in the show notes as well. But let's talk a little bit about that. The first method or the first type of goal you need to set is your income and profit goals. This is by far the most important goals of the business and that's to increase your profits. You know, there's a lot of different financial goals that you can set for your company each of them focus on ultimately boosting that bottom line. So while the most common income-based business goals are goals focused on what you're earning, you want to set an amount of revenue and profit that you're looking for in a specific time frame. And you can also use these goals to help you cut your costs as well. But some great examples of alternative income profit goals revolve around lowering your costs of your suppliers or investing in automated software or outsourcing certain tasks in order to reduce your overall costs. For example, I've outsourced to some virtual assistants in the Philippines. I've used Fiverr. I've used different types of things in order to lower my overall costs of doing business. but setting good income and profit goals are really the basic foundation of where you need to set goals in your business. Now another way a second way that you can set goals is around customer service You know no business can survive without amazing customer service So due to the sheer amount of competitive businesses out there it critical that you ensure that you providing awesome or excellent customer service And if you're not, your customers won't think twice about heading over to your competition. So you've got to set goals around improving your customer service and make a commitment to improve your response time, your ways of communicating, you know, and even provide compensation of some kind to your unhappy customers. I mean, you've got to find ways to make it right if you do have issues that you're dealing with. But these are all great examples of customer service type goals that you can shoot towards. A third area of goal setting would be goals around your product and service. Now, in order to be successful, you've got to have great products and services. And it's not just to have existing products that you want to focus on doing better with, but to create new products. Product development is a great area for business. And so if you set your goals in the area of products and product development, for example, maybe you want to launch a new course. Maybe you want to come out with some new things that will help to increase the lifetime value of your customers. But either way, setting progress or setting product goals in your business is a great goal area to focus on as well. A fourth area to focus on would be like your productivity goals. If you want to boost every aspect of your business, productivity and motivation goals can be great. These can relate to both you or your employees. So the more productive you and the people that you work with are, the more successful the business is going to be. So there's a lot of ways to boost your productivity in the workplace. For example, you might set goals to improve the working environment. The nicer work environment that you have, the better employees are going to work. And so this might be taking time out to spend time building relationship with your employees or buying lunch or doing things that'll help to motivate people like stretch goals and spiffs and incentives. But productivity and motivation goals are really good things to be able to grind and drive your business to more success. And then the other thing you may not have thought about is think about setting expansion goals because once your business is doing well you can start to focus on expanding your business figuring out ways to push the business forward and grow it even more these types of goals you know typically require the most work because technology has made it easier to expand now but there's still a lot of challenges that you'll overcome in order to implement expansion goals you know you might set some new targets for expanding your markets or investing in new business ventures or maybe expanding your product offering but expansion goals is just a way of thinking about another area of goals So when you think about business goals try to categorize them into the areas of profit, income and profit, customer service, products, productivity, and expansion. If you do this, what you're going to find is that it gets you thinking outside the box and it gets you working on goals that you wouldn't normally set because sometimes we, even with goal setting, we get a little stagnant in what we're doing. So those are different areas to focus on for your business goals. Now let's talk about methods for setting your business goal. Because if you're not sure kind of where to start, one way of setting goals or one type of goals for certain business may not be good for every business. And so let's talk a little bit about just methods that you can use to set your goals. And look, there's a lot of different ways to set goals out there, but one of the most proven and successful ways that I've found is to use that acronym SMART, S-M-A-R-T, business goals. And this acronym SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Because every business goal that you set should follow those rules. All of the goals have got to be specific and measurable. They also need to be attainable and relevant, but they've got to have a specific time frame around them. So many times I see individuals or even in my past businesses, I've set goals, but I haven't made them specific to a time frame or measurable. See, if you can't measure the results, you're really going to frustrate yourself setting goals. The other thing I wanted to mention to you today is that you've got to break your goals down. An easy way to figure out which goals to focus on in business is to break them down. If you're struggling to come up with specific goals, then it's definitely important for you to break them down to the smallest unit and write those goals down. You know, if you're talking about income or profit, that might be pretty big for you to kind of get your arms around. But if you break them down to specific sales and specific products or specific areas that you can focus on, what is, like Gary Keller says in his book, the one thing, what is the one thing, what is the one domino that you can knock down that if you do that, all the other dominoes will continue to fall down as well, if you use that analogy. So when it comes to setting up new goals, it's a good idea to review your old ones. Look at where you've set your goals in the past. Did they work? Did they not work? Were they areas that drove the needle? Did it move the needle? Did it drive the bottom line? Don't forget that the goals you set now should also be easily reviewable, right? And what I mean The reason by that is you got to be able to not just measure these goals but you got to be able to review them periodically every quarter so that you can see if your goals are working well And I can emphasize enough I mean look you got to write your goals down With so much technology available at your fingertips it easy to try to set your goals digitally, but it makes a big difference. Trust me when I say writing your goals down physically, it gives you a different level of commitment. It gives you a different level. It's kind of like journaling. When you're typing up your journal or in an app, it's one thing, but when you sit down with pen and paper and you write down your goals or you write down in your journal, your brain starts to think even more detailed. And so I can't recommend enough to physically write your goals down. And then the other thing is make sure you feel good about the goals that you set. When you're setting goals, you need to make sure that you have a good outlook on them. Don't just set goals that you think are achievable, but you're not passionate about. Because the more passionate you are about your goals, the more likely you're going to achieve them. So don't make the mistake of setting goals on something that you hate doing. If you do this, you're going to find it really easy to put those goals off. Believe me, I've done that. And there's a lot of ways that you can find to incentivize yourself on the goal setting that you're doing. So these are some of the things I wanted to talk to you about today. Break down the different types of business goals you want to set. Break down and be very specific about the method you use for creating your goals. Make sure that they're specific, they're measurable, they're attainable, they're relevant and time-bound. And I'm going to really double down and emphasize the fact that they've got to be measurable goals. It's very important that you not only see goals. Look, I know all of us have set goals. We've heard about goals. We know we need to set goals. But trust me when I say these are the methods that you're going to use to grow your business. Setting goals and being specific and measuring those goals and reviewing them. Be specific with your intent. Don't just do things to do things. So that's what I wanted to talk to you about just to follow up our conversation from yesterday on goal setting for your business. And later this week what I'm going to do, I've got an interview that I'm going to be dropping that I think you're going to find some big value in. I'm going to hit you with some more marketing techniques and tips and then we've got we've got a couple of new things that we're gonna be launching in the fall and so I'm looking forward to kind of telling you about our our mastermind organization as well as some of the free resources if you haven't downloaded the daily mastermind mobile app go do that because we've got some great resources we're gonna be dropping in there for you just stuff for on the go stuff to help you stay inspired and motivated with everything that you're doing so that's my message for today I I hope you have an amazing day. I really want to hear from you. Please DM me over at The Daily Mastermind on Instagram or Facebook. And I look forward to talking with you again tomorrow. Have an amazing day.