How To Work Backwards To Set Your Business Goals
Today I want to share my thought process for setting SMART business goals with you.
[bctt tweet=”Start with your money goal and work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. #eventpreneur” username=”@mahoganeyjones”]
I like to work backwards from a financial goal to daily to-do lists. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that I want to buy a new event furniture in my inventory. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, I’ll bump the goal up to $600. In other words, I need to add an extra $600 (or more… more is always better) to my monthly bottom line. Once that’s done and I am seeing that level of income on a regular basis, I’m ready to order my new event furniture.
Once I know how much money I have to make, I start to think about different ways to do just that. I could find more clients for one or several of my existing services. For example, if I have an onsite coordination package, I would have to make 1 extra sale per month. From there I can work backwards. If I know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the service within the first month of signing up, I need to add 600 new subscribers to my list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to my site. If that’s my plan, I know that my daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month.
Of course that’s not my only option. I could also create an information product or eBook each month and sell it to both my existing and new subscribers. I could create a higher priced item so I need to make a lot more monthly sales to reach my $600 goal. For example, if I create a nice $10 product, it would only take 60 sales per month to pay for the inventory.
Now I have a concrete goal to work towards which is signing one new Onsite Coordination Package per month. My daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to join a discovery call to book onsite services, a short report about why onsite coordinators are needed to build a targeted sub lists of people interested in event coordination in general. Then I start driving traffic to the content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about onsite coordination. I may even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel.
Of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I could approach previous clients to answer questions for an interview style post, or even do a webinar, all of which would of course promote the service. By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort, it won’t take me long to get that one new client per month that pays for my new event inventory payment. Because I really want that new inventory, I’m going to be motivated to get it done and grow my business by those extra $600 per month. In fact, chances are great that I’ll overshoot the goal by several hundred dollars and be able to start gaining rental income I can continue to grow month after month.
