Camille: Are you tired about talking about business yet?
Camille: Never. Never.
Camille: No.
Camille: Welcome to episode 22. Today we're gonna talk about what are good business goals to have. Yeah.
Camille: How do I know? What are they? Why do I care? All that good stuff.
Camille: We're gonna deep dive on this because it is business goal setting time. And in a previous episode in December, this was episode 17, we talked about what goes into making a plan, setting goals? And it was a high level process of how you sort of create your plan.
Camille: So if you wanna look back at episode 17, if you haven't listened to that already, we did touch on sort of a bigger picture process, but I'm just gonna talk about goals themselves now.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille: We talked in the process over outcomes as well about, you set the outcome goal. But that, that goal really requires a focus on process in order for you to achieve it.
Camille: So we already talked from that perspective. So now I wanna drill even deeper into just, but then if the goal is still important, how do I know if it's good or not?
Camille: Because it does matter. There is such a thing as a bad goal. Which my first question then for you George, was have you ever in your professional life had either been assigned a bad goal or set a bad goal for yourself?
George: I have an example of one that I was thinking of, but as you were just talking, you brought about some other points that makes it even clearer to me why it was a bad goal.
George: Long time ago I worked at Sun Microsystems and most of my managers there wonderful. It was one really bad exception and this guy worked for me and we were collaborating with another company was Netscape. Time building their new Mozilla browser long time ago, back in the 16 hundreds. And this guy just kind of came into the organization, became my boss, didn't know anything about them, but he just wanted power basically.
George: And so he gave me this goal of going and getting control of certain things, certain technical aspects of the project that he wanted me to go and assert control of and get rest control from Netscape and give it to Sun. That was the goal. The thing about the goal was that it wasn't really a goal, it was just things he asked for.
George: Kinda like recently in the recent United States Speaker of the House negotiations, these people were asking Karen McCarthy for all these things. They were not goals, they were just requests or demands. And that's what he had. He had a demand. There was no process about how to go about doing it. I didn't know why he wanted those things, but it was my mission goal task. I mean, he goal me on it whether I was successful or not. And there's a whole story about how that played out, which played out terribly.
George: Although the Netscape people knew me really well and they would pull me aside and say, what is your boss talking about? We don't understand him. Can you please explain to us what's going on? A long story about that.
George: But the goal there, it was really a poorly stated goal. Like I kind of knew what to do and I didn't know if I accomplished it or. But I had no idea why or how it fit in or anything else that you were talking about. We didn't have a process for working it out. I didn't know how it fit into strategy or anything like that.
Camille: Yes. I think that's one of the main ways I see bad goals happen is that they're actually not even goals, they're just tasks or, things that we want to do.
Camille: I often see people write a goal as the work that you do to achieve the goal. Yeah. But not the goal at like, but what are we trying to achieve by doing the thing? Yeah. Right.
Camille: So it's like, this year our goal is to implement X software. Okay, but why are we implementing it? What is the actual goal of that thing? And without that, there's a lot of different ways you could execute on this task.
George: That makes me think, well, there's, I, I'm, maybe you already have this. What, what's a question I can ask myself to determine the thing that I'm, I think is a goal, as a goal, or not.
Camille: Yeah. So let's go through this and maybe come back to that question at the end and see if we've really answered it.
Camille: Yeah. Okay. Cuz a lot of what I wanted to do today was just talk about some very specific examples for people cuz sometimes that's just the best way for us to understand what does a good goal look like? How would I know?
Camille: And Sometimes the goal is I just need to accomplish a thing. But we really have to have it tied to a what? What is its significance? Why is it important?
Camille: So we're sort of starting off here with the bad goal example, which speaks to the, why does it even matter, right? Why does it matter if we set goals at all, much less a good goal versus a bad goal? Yes. And if you have a bad goal or don't have goals at all, it can lead to wasting time and money.
Camille: Because you're gonna be working on stuff that doesn't actually matter in the end. Your example is a perfect example of, wow, George spent a lot of time on something that wasn't actually helping to advance the company forward. Wasn't serving the company goals. Because of that, because your time and effort is used somewhere else, it's gonna slow down your path to achieving your long-term goals.
Camille: Because, oh, I was over here doing this other thing. It wasn't actually helping my long-term goals, but I got distracted and worked on it and now I just set myself back cuz I was working on the wrong things.
Camille: It's also can be really demoralizing. So I see people sometimes set a goal and they have a hard time stopping the work on that goal because they're like, but I committed to the goal and I have to finish it. And if they get committed to it, even if they know it's the wrong goal, they feel like they have to see it through, but then they're kind of demoralized cuz they're like, oh, I did all that work, but it's not actually helping me the way I thought it would.
Camille: I'm not really getting the outcome that I was hoping to get from it cuz I just chose to do a thing. So I went and I spent all this time and energy, and now I'm just kind of like, wow, I'm exhausted and I haven't actually advanced myself forward in the direction I wanted to.
Camille: Without having goals at all or good goals, ultimately we will tend to work on way too many things. Especially as business owners, we're gonna try and do all of the things at once. We always feel like we're behind. We always feel like our business is like I'm still don't have my business up to this level I should have by now. And we're definitely shoulding all over ourselves all the time about what our business should or should not be able to do at this level at however many years in or whatever.
Camille: We think there's a lot of comparisonitis looking at what everybody else is doing and feeling like we're not up to snuff. So we pile on so many things for us to do in our business. So if you don't have a focus on just what are the select few things that I'm really gonna prioritize and set as my goals for the year, you're gonna set yourself up for just a very stressful, overwhelming year.
Camille: That's what's gonna happen. Yeah.
Camille: And in the process of goal setting, I do often find the first round that my business owners feel overwhelmed at first, and by the end of the process they're like, oh, this is doable. I see how it's now doable. Now I feel like I can actually make real progress really, because we've gotten very specific.
Camille: So a good goal setting process will have that outcome. You say really like you're surprised.
George: So I'm imagining how this goes and I'm imagining somebody goes in the first round of goal setting and they just word salad a bunch of stuff, and they look at it and it's like, wow, there's too much, I can't do all this.
George: How does it get from there with like no fewer things to do to them feeling good and like it's manageable. That's what I'm wondering in my head.
Camille: Well, there's a lot of pieces to how you do it and we're not gonna really talk about process as much today.
Camille: Okay. Cause we have talked about that in the past.
Camille: But I will just say that part of it is having somebody like me to walk you through that conversation of how do we hone in on what's most important to work on now is actually gonna serve your business long term. And we will talk about examples of all this today.
Camille: So what's really serving your business long term versus just looks like a shiny, fun idea. How do we weed those out?
Camille: And what feels most critical in this moment? And that usually means we've started with doing a SWOT analysis and a business assessment to actually see what's the business look like today so that we know what's most important to work on next.
Camille: Okay. So there's lots of things that go into that, but you have to, you have to know both where you're headed, but also where you are currently. So a current state and then an ideal state is how we think about that. What's my current state analysis? What's the ideal state I'm trying to get to? And then what's that next logical move I should make to get one step closer to the ideal state? That's the process in a nutshell.
Camille: So today I wanna talk about some examples though, because when we go through this and we go through the process, not all goals are equal, and they shouldn't be. So there are long-term goals and there are short-term goals. There are big breakthrough goals, and then there's stability goals.
Camille: How we think about goals matters as well. So goals is just another tool to help us move things forward and hold ourselves accountable and get good stuff done, get the right stuff done, basically. It's a tool to do that. And it can be deployed in all these different ways. And so that's really what I wanted to talk about is not thinking about a goal as a single thing, but as a tool that's in your toolkit for running your business, and how do you actually use it well? That's really how I sort of think about what goals represent. Okay.
Camille: And just like any tool, it can be used badly. All tools can be weaponized, is the main thing that we always talk about with my clients. And I get surprised often when we talk about a specific tool in business and how sometimes they turn it against themselves or turn it against their business and weaponize it in some way.
Camille: And I'm like, wow, how did that become a negative? Mm-hmm. So it's really important to always think about the tools is this is a tool and I get to choose how I best use it.
Camille: Let's talk about this idea that goals are not all equal. So let's first talk about this from the perspective of a long-term versus a short-term goal.
Camille: Okay. So a long-term goal the first question I would ask is, what do you want your business to look like in five years? So it's many years down the road. You don't have a crystal ball. You can't be exacting in this definition, but you have some sense of, I really want my business to be able to do this and look like this, and you're really anchoring back to the whole purpose and mission of your business.
Camille: When you're doing this, so what do, what do I want this long-term vision to be? And it's a way to provide really clear direction and it will inform your short-term goals. So that's why we start with long-term, like where are we actually headed? When I talk about what's my ideal state, that's really what we're talking about.
Camille: The ideal state of my business some years down the road looks like this. So when you're doing that as a business owner, you might start thinking about your exit strategy. So if you are thinking, you know, hey, in 10 years I'm gonna be thinking about retiring, are you selling the business?
Camille: Are you like, what's the plan? Your exit strategy for your business? So some long-term plans are gonna be thinking about that. Other long-term plans are gonna be just really focused on growth. Am I gonna have X number of locations or employees or a level of revenue? And these can tend to be more qualitative or descriptive and aspirational than they are really hard numbers.
Camille: Okay. Like, it's pretty much impossible for me to say in five years my business will make X amount of revenue. Hmm. That's a really hard stretch. Right. But yeah, you can certainly put a, a marker out. Like, yeah, a million dollars sounds great, or $5 million sounds great. So that's why I say it's oftentimes it's much more of a, a descriptive, like, this is just how I want it to look more than exactly what it will be doing.
George: You know, I'll often hear a goal, a long-term goal, revenue goal on the order of in three years we're gonna double in revenue, or in three years we're gonna go from, you know, 2 million to 5 million. So the next level.
George: When I hear those, I always think, yeah, that sounds great. It's aspirational. I have no idea where you came up with that particular number. Right. That's what that sounds like, like what you're talking about to me.
Camille: It sounds really good to say, like, I'm gonna double my business in the next five years. Yeah, yeah.
Camille: And it feels good. And I think that's okay. I mean, if I said I was gonna quadruple it, I might question like, wow, that, yeah. I don't know if that's feasible. And it depends on the business size too. Like when you're just starting out, you can have a period where you have some pretty exponential growth.
Camille: Mm-hmm. But then for some business owners, so for example, if you're, if it's just me and I'm a solopreneur and I've decided I don't wanna have employees, I'm gonna max out as a service provider on how much revenue I can make, cuz I'm just one person. Yeah. So there's also decisions in there, right?
Camille: That's why the long-term view is important because it's, am I actually trying to get to 5 million? Am I okay with what that means? Because it means I can't do it alone, or I have to completely change my business model to sell other bigger things. I mean, really, I probably just can't do it alone.
Camille: That's why it's what do you want it to look like? So it's doubling revenue. Lots of stuff comes with that. But if your business is already pretty big and robust, even for a small business owner, and you're like, yeah, we could, we could handle doubling our revenue with some minor changes, but we have a great infrastructure, then it's not that big of a deal.
Camille: So yeah, you're right. It usually sounds good. But it's one of those, when we talk about, you know, we don't have control over outcomes, you really don't have control over that.
Camille: That's not the point, though. The point is it's gonna inform the activities and the other goals that I set, the short-term goals that I set, cuz that's what I'm driving towards, which is a very different approach than if I say I don't wanna double my business.
Camille: I actually just wanna sustain. , I'm where I'm ne need to be and I just wanna keep this going for the next five years. Okay. You'd do different things, right? Yeah. That's why the long-term goal is important, cuz it's starting to inform what kinds of things you're going to do or not going to do.
Camille: And I do have business owners who are like, Nope, I don't wanna get that much bigger, maybe 10% bigger, but that's it because they know that the next level of growth is going to change their way that they work. They're gonna have to hire people, more people, and they don't wanna do that cuz that's just not a, a part of the work that they enjoy doing.
Camille: Totally fair. Then they're making a smart business decision because if you do go into hiring employees and you don't wanna do that. No fun. Yeah. That's the long-term goals.
Camille: Then, short-term, I think of the longest short-term goal, if you wanna think about it that way, would be an annual goal.
Camille: Fastest turtle. Yes. The fastest turtle. So you'd be annual goal is the start of your short-term goals. And then those goals should be broken down into quarterly or even monthly goals.
Camille: I usually have people focus on establishing quarterly goals in their business that they're pursuing, and then at the monthly level, it's usually just what are the priorities for the month that will help me, me achieve that quarterly goal.
Camille: Yeah, some people, people do set monthly goals depending on what the goal is. This is where not all goals are equal matters and why setting goals is something that as a business owner you should practice and get better at so that you can set better goals for yourself.
Camille: So if you find that you're not very good at setting good goals, cuz you don't meet them or they're not helpful to you, it's not because setting goals isn't a good process. It's just, there is some practice required in order to get good at it. And it's part of why I exist is to help businesses to get good at that so that they can really use goals as a really great tool in their toolkit.
Camille: And not just have it be this, like, I have this hammer, but I really don't have any idea how would I make it, you know, hit a nail. I don't know how to do that . So it's like that.
Camille: These are also thought of as sort of the milestones, the short-term goals are the milestones on the path to achieving your long-term.
Camille: Okay. Yeah. If I make this next move, it gets me closer to the long-term. And so things you wanna consider are sort of the current state of your business. Like I said before, where am I now? And then how much farther forward do I wanna advance my business toward my long-term goals? That's what these short-term goals are like.
Camille: What's the next move I'm gonna make? I sometimes talk about this as what's the next target condition? In the lean performance improvement terms. Oh really? So I have, I have my current state and then I have my far out there, ideal state some years down the road. And then I'm setting, what's my next target condition? What do I want things to look like next?
Camille: And you're constantly focusing on that evaluation current state, cuz your current state changes all the time. So now I gotta reevaluate, hopefully my next current state is what my last target condition was. I'm moving towards the next target condition. Now that's my current state. So then what's the next target that takes me closer to my ideal state?
Camille: Yeah. So those are your short-term goals. What's are these target conditions I'm trying to get to?
Camille: You're considering your current state and that target condition, how far you wanna move forward, and then you wanna focus on also different areas of your business, which I'll talk through in a minute.
Camille: When you do this, narrow your focus so that you're doing a few things well. And this is where people get in that trap of, I got so many goals I wanna go after. And you gotta really focus on, on doing a few things well, making sure it's aligned to your long term, and then using the standard smart goal framework.
Camille: So smart goals are, it's the acronym for Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-bound. And that's how you can look at whether this goal is well written, is it specific enough? Can I measure my progress towards it? Is it action? Is it relevant to my long-term vision, to my strategy, to my business mission?
Camille: And of course, your time bounding it. I wanna achieve it by next quarter or end of year. So use that framework to help you write better goals.
George: How small, how fine grain is okay for short-term goals.
Camille: That's a really good question. Sadly I'm gonna give that horrible answer of, it depends, but in this way.
Camille: So when I mentioned that with my clients, they set their annual goals and then we break those down into quarterly goals. So every quarter they've got a very specific focus. This is what I'm really working on this quarter. And once they get those quarterly goals, then I sort of walk away from the goal language and move more into priorities, like what are the priorities for the month?
Camille: Huh, and what do I need to focus on? You could think of those as goals as well. At that level, it's sort of up to the business owner and what really drives with them. Yeah. Cuz some people just really like the idea of goals and some people just like the idea of priorities. It's like this personal preference of the language and what feels good. You know what I mean? Yeah. Some people really resist some of the different language, so I always sort of accommodate, like I always tell just whatever works for you. As long as the main objective of I know what the few things I need to do well are, and I know how to determine whether I achieved the outcome I wanted to achieve.
Camille: As long as those things are happening, I kind of don't care whether you call it a goal or a priority or whatever. Because at that level it could be less of a goal. Like how we were talking about earlier where you say, that wasn't really a goal, but more just a thing to do.
Camille: Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes at the monthly level, it's just things to do in order to achieve the quarterly goal.
George: Okay. I have a related question to that then, and this what's the difference then between goals and to-do items. Like when I think about on a daily basis, I don't personally think I have daily goals.
George: That's not true. Usually, most of the things I have on a daily basis look like a to-do list. What's the difference there?
Camille: Yeah. So I think if you're really going to get, you know, into the weeds about the terminology, I would say, because we talk about the smart goal framework, I would apply that to it.
Camille: Okay. Have I really said this is a specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound goal? Or is it just a thing I need to do in order to achieve that goal? I need to go get new batteries today. Right, I mean, if you wanna call that a goal, good on you.
Camille: But at some level, I think what we have to do is say, I have a goal that's really involves several activities. So that's one thing I would say is any given goal you have should involve doing several things, right, in order to achieve it, there's not just one thing I can do. I got a bunch of things I've gotta do in here, because otherwise it makes the point of setting goals kind of meaning.
Camille: If everything is a goal, then suddenly it gets all watered down to where goals are meaningless. The point of having goals is so that I really can get clear about priorities. I can really be clear about what I should work on and what I shouldn't. So if I have a goal with a set amount of activities, then I can decide whether my task of going to buy the batteries is really important or not.
Camille: Mm-hmm. Like, oh, I just kind of want the batteries. I don't actually need the batteries. I just want an excuse to go to the techie store so I could shop for things. But it turns out it's not part of my goal, so I'm not gonna go. I know that's a silly example, but you know what I mean.
Camille: Totally outed.
Camille: Yes. That would never happen to you.
Camille: Okay, cool.
Camille: Definitely think about it also in terms if you're looking at setting goals, another reason to make sure you don't just call everything a goal, is you do want to be measuring and reflecting on the performance of that goal. Hmm. So the more of them you have, you've just created a lot more work for yourself in just tracking the progress on like a million things.
Camille: Yeah. So that's why at some level, I really like people to flip into. I've got my priorities clear. I know what work I'm supposed to go. And service to the goal. And that's kind of where creating project plans shows up. Right now I have a little project I can create and I have all these tasks that I'm gonna do in order to achieve this goal.
Camille: And also it ensures that the goal is actually focused on what your desired outcome is. And then within that, the tasks are the process focused things like now I'm gonna focus on the work to do to get to that outcome because now my job isn't just to achieve goals every day. My job is to create a process that I continually do to work through the project plan.
Camille: Or maybe it's a recurring task I'm doing every single day that's gonna help me achieve that goal so I can process and outcomes we talked about. I might have an outcome goal of getting X number of clients, you could write a smart goal around that, right? Yeah. But then my priority every day is I'm gonna reach out to three people and have a conversation.
Camille: Okay. You could technically call that a goal, but that's a priority and it's really a process in order to achieve the goal I'm trying to achieve. Yeah. So if you like the idea of every day I have got goals that I knock out, then good on you. Go for.
Camille: I don't typically set my clients up that way. I set them up with mm-hmm. Big quarterly goals, and then we break it down and we, then we really focus on what is the process to get there, what is the work that we need to do in order to make that big thing happen? Yeah. I find that to be easier for people to take on than little micro goals. Yeah, I think so too.
Camille: It also helps differentiate something that's of significance that is at the outcome that I maybe don't have full control over versus the microtasks that I mostly do have control over.
George: Oh, interesting. Yeah, I get that. That's huh. That's really cool. Can you say that again?
Camille: The other way to think about the goals versus the tasks or the process is the goal is typically got some measured outcome that I don't fully have control over. Yeah. If I want X number of new customers or clients, there's a lot of things I can do to improve the odds of me achieving that goal, but I really don't have control over whether people choose to buy from me or not. So I don't really have full control over that thing.
Camille: And most goals are like that. In fact, I'm trying to think if there's a goal that you would set that you have full control over the outcome. Like, does that even exist?
Camille: Oh wait. A goal where you do have full control over the outcome?
Camille: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Can you think of one? Okay. If anybody listening right now can think of a goal where you, you do have full control over the outcome? I don't agree with that. I don't think you do have full control over that.
Camille: Why not?
Camille: Because I think our bodies are way too complex little like machines in order have full control over losing X amount of weight by X time. Cuz that's a smart goal. It has to be by a certain time. It can't just be, eventually I lose 10 pounds. It has to be, I do it in six months. Yeah. I don't think I have full control over that. What if I get sick? What if I have a condition?
Camille: What if somebody brings
Camille: chocolate cake to work every day?
Camille: I might not have control. No, I'm just kidding.
Camille: So as people are listening, if they can think of a goal that you would have a hundred percent control over, I'd love to hear it. Go to thebeliefshift.com and leave us voice message.
Camille: Cause I wanna know Yeah, if this exists. Me too. Because now I'm gonna be racking my brain about it. Okay. Me too. Yeah. Okay.
Camille: So moving on.
Camille: That's long term versus short. Then within your short term goals, the next thing to think about, and we've touched on this before, is the idea of a breakthrough goal, which could also be thought of as like projects or a stability goal, which I think of also as just performance of the business.
Camille: So a breakthrough is a significant change. It's a stretch, it's a disruptive goal, but in a good way. It's really focused on some growth or transformation of your business, and it's typically something that if you didn't set it as a goal, it wouldn't naturally happen on its own. You wouldn't just work on it.
Camille: A stability goal is really about maintaining or doing continuous incremental improvement in your business. So this is where KPIs come in. Key performance indicators. Okay. I have key performance indicators around my revenue, around my customer service, and we'll talk more about the areas of focus in a second, but you have these goals that are, I really do have to still keep my eye on all of these basic functions of my business in order for it to maintain its stability.
Camille: That's how I keep Yes. Keep the basic performance of the business happening. Breakthrough is how I elevate the business in a jump. Like I have a nice little leap of something in my business.
George: Absolutely. I like the term stability a lot. At my work, there's a lot of people who talk about keep the lights on goals.
George: I don't know why, I mean, I get it, but the term always rubs me the wrong way. I've never stopped to think about why, but I mean, just replacing that with stability or performance goes much more satisfying.
Camille: I remember you having that term be used a lot too to keep the lights on and I never liked it either because it always felt like keeping the lights on is kind of like the doing the bare minimum.
Camille: We're just gonna keep keep the lights on. Yeah, exactly. , it's like that's all we're gonna just, the lights are gonna be on. No. Stability is about more than just the lights are on. When I think about stability, it's not also just maintaining status quo.
Camille: This is where continuous improvement comes in. I've still gotta be making small incremental improvement. Yeah. Let's say I have an incremental growth goal financially. I just want 1% increase in growth next month.
Camille: Yes. Right. That's all I want. It's not big. Yes. It's totally feasible for me. That's all I wanna do. That doesn't require me to do any breakthrough thing. I just gotta do a couple new things to make that happen. Yeah. But I'm still just ticking it up a notch. Right? Yeah.
Camille: A breakthrough would be like, I need to double my revenue. Yeah, like that's big. I gotta do something very different that's gonna be disruptive in my business. The activity I have to do is gonna be significant in order to make that happen. Mm-hmm. And also the stability goals are usually things that are already in play in your business.
Camille: , I'm already doing my social media marketing, but I should definitely have measures of perform of my social media marketing to make sure I'm getting the return on my investment of time and money into that work. Yep. So that's why it's stability. It's also making sure that there's not wasteful stuff happening in my business.
George: Yeah, I completely agree. I really like the framework too, about long-term versus short-term and how you broke it down. That gives me a good framework too, for giving myself permission to make longer term goals that I may not achieve, but I'm very clear about why I'm doing them. That's great.
Camille: That does make me think of one more thing I think I would say about the stretch goal idea. It's true that the long term it can be much more aspirational.
Camille: Yeah. It should still be like reasonable. Like I said, you don't wanna be like, I'm gonna have a $50 million business in three years if you're not even a million dollar business. Yeah.
Camille: It's more aspirational. It almost has to be because you really can't just do math and come up with, you know exactly what you think that should look like.
Camille: Yeah. And I like the idea that the long-term goal is, is a motivator as well. Right? Like the aspiration of it is exciting and so it keeps motivating you to do the next thing and do the next thing. Yes.
Camille: Now, when I think about stretch goals, I think of that a little bit differently. Because I do like for people to have a stretchy quarterly goal.
Camille: Not everybody agrees with this. This is my own philosophy about this, but I love to get my business owners embracing the idea of setting a quarterly goal that is feasible, but it's gonna take some effort. It's on the edge of, I'm not quite sure if I could do it, but if all the stars aligned, yes, because I would rather somebody miss a stretch goal than achieve an easy one.
Camille: Because they're gonna go farther. If they missed the stretch goal. Yeah. But that requires them to have a certain mindset of not holding themselves to account and judging themselves for missing that stretch goal. Yeah. And instead being able to recognize the progress that they made along the way.
Camille: Remember when we were talking to Jim several episodes ago, and we talked about how he continually kept missing his goals, but he kept achieving his long-term vision and his business. Yeah. And remember that very clearly, this is what we mean.
Camille: We would set stretch goals for him and he wouldn't make them, but he made a ton of progress. It wasn't that he wasn't making progress in his business. He wasn't hitting that exact goal at that exact time that we had set for him. Yeah.
Camille: And in big business, you tend to get. The slap on the wrist for that. And I think this is one of the ways where in big business, because there's so much, you know, whether it's bonuses or whatever, get all tied into that. Or a board of directors approving a plan gets all tied to whether you can actually achieve it or not. They end up setting safer goals than they could be and could be advancing farther if they were willing to actually stretch themselves and be okay with, Hey, we got 90% there though.
Camille: That's incredible. Cuz that was much farther. If I had to set a goal, I was sure I could make, I probably would've only done one that was 80% there. Yeah. Right. So I got this 10% better performance because I pushed. Yes. That's my theory about that. Not everybody agrees with it. I have definitely worked with people who were like, Nope, I need an achievable goal, or I'm gonna g be totally bummed out, but Oh, I see.
Camille: Sure. Okay. But not many people, most people I run into, they, they, they can get into that idea, especially small business subjects. Cause they're like, nobody else is judging me. They don't have a board or a whatever. It's just you and me, so let's just celebrate your wins and not worry about the specific goal and timing and all that stuff.
Camille: Yeah. So that's my thought about stretch goals. Cool.
Camille: All right, let's camera through here these key areas of focus. So there's I've listed six key areas of focus for the categories of types of goals you should have. Yeah.
Camille: So you should have goals in: growth, operations, financials, customer satisfaction people, and also your own professional goals as a business owner.
Camille: So in growth, that's things like your marketing strategy or your funding strategy. Operational improvements, how you're gonna handle growth, right? If I have more customers, do I have the capacity to do that? Or investments in things that will manage growth like tools or apps or new locations or even employees. So those are some areas to think about new growth. Okay.
Camille: In operations, it's things like your basic processes, standard operating procedures, your productivity, do you have the right tools and apps to do the right work? And for some industries, it also includes things like safety and compliance. Oh, yeah. Depending on what kind of business you're in.
Camille: Financials, that's things around job costing, your pricing of your products and services, expense management profit margins, cash flow management, things like that. And obviously revenue.
Camille: Customer satisfaction would be reducing wait times increasing response time to service requests, customer loyalty, things like that.
Camille: People is, you know, your people, employee engagement, your hiring processes, your onboarding succession planning, and even vendor contract relationship management. So I just kinda like to put all the people turnover. Yeah. Churn. Turnover. Yep. Stuff.
Camille: And then professional, you personally, as a business owner should always be have some goals around not all of these outlet once obviously, but these are ideas, business acumen, productivity planning, leadership, your own personal job satisfaction, things like that.
Camille: So those are the areas you can think about if you're thinking about like, where should I be setting goals in my business. Those are good areas for setting good goals in your business.
Camille: But do not do all of them all at once. No, that's too much. Those are just ideas. So I hope you didn't just try to write down a whole list and try to set goals for all of them, cause that will be super overwhelming. But maybe a couple jumped out like, oh, you know what I really should have a goal around improving my hiring processes because we kind of aren't really great at that right now.
Camille: So I'm gonna give some examples now, and maybe you have some too, you can throw in here, George, as I talk about this. So a long-term growth goal might be expanding your operations nationally by 2025. Hmm. Yeah.
Camille: Or it could be, I'm gonna sell the business for $2 million in 10 years. Oh, wow. It's a big, long-term goal.
Camille: Your financial, it could be, I want my profit margin increased by 10% by 2026, something like that.
Camille: Or our customer service could be, I want the highest customer review rating on Google by, you know, 2028.
Camille: So these are big, you can see how they're kind of aspirational, but also like they're tangible. Like, I will know if I'm making that goal happen or not. It's actually a measurable goal, but it's big.
Camille: Then short-term goals would be things like, I'm gonna open a second store by the end of the year. Hmm. I'm gonna launch a new service or product in q2. Or I'm gonna grow my email list by 200 people every quarter for the next year.
Camille: Operationally you might say you're gonna improve your efficiency by 5% for this specific process by the end of.
Camille: Or I'm gonna develop and implement standard operating procedures by q3.
Camille: Notice how all of these have a date. They all have a by sometime. You can't just say, and they all have a number. By 5%, by 200. So this is what makes it measurable and is the hardest thing for people to do is commit to a number. But really important because it changes your activities.
Camille: Whether I wanna improve efficiency by 1% or 5% matters when you start looking at the plan and how you're gonna do things, yeah, it informs the activities and it's important.
Camille: So financials examples would be, I'm gonna reduce expenses by 5% by q3, or I'm gonna increase my gross revenue by 3% to 500 K by the end of the.
Camille: So these are some examples of how you might set your short-term goals.
Camille: Now, within that, remember I said there's breakthrough and stability, right? So within some of those, let's talk about whether they would be a breakthrough goal or a stability goal. So in the growth goals, I would say what breakthrough goal is.
Camille: An example of that would be, I'm gonna open a second store. That's a pretty big disruptive thing to do. Yes. Especially if you only have one and you're just opening store number two. Or a new service offering. Also a big breakthrough goal. I'm gonna just launch a whole new service or a product.
Camille: A stability goal under growth would be something like, I'm just gonna continue to grow my email list with 200 people a quarter. If you're already, maybe if you're growing it by 150 a quarter right now, you're just making an incremental improvement. You're not changing a whole lot, but you've set the goal just a little bit higher. That's a stability.
Camille: In the financials, a breakthrough goal would be, let's say, I'm gonna reduce expenses. Sometimes breakthrough versus stability is determined by the strategy to achieve the goal. So if my strategy is I'm gonna transition to an entirely new platform or app as a way to reduce my expenses, cuz it means I'm gonna automate something, that could be breakthrough.
Camille: Yeah. But if I just wanna increase my revenue by 3% and I've already been on a pretty close trajectory of that, then that would just be a stability goal. I just have this little incremental improvement in revenue. We just need to make a couple more little sales.
Camille: And then in customer service example, a breakthrough would be I'm gonna implement a customer satisfaction survey. Whole new process. Whole new system, whole new thing. And stability goal would be, I wanna increase my satisfaction scores by like 5%. So I just gonna make some incremental improvements.
Camille: So that's how I think about breakthrough versus stability. And again, the reason it's important is because I see businesses take on way too many breakthrough goals and not focusing enough on stability goals. Hmm. Because the incremental improvements are boring.
Camille: They are just boring because they mean do what you do now a little bit. And that's not very exciting at the end of the day. Until five years from now when you realize, oh my goodness, it's totally paid off cuz look how great my business is. Yeah. It requires you to have a long-term perspective on the value of that goal that you're setting.
Camille: The breakthrough goals are exciting. It's new. I get to do a new thing and it's gonna be so satisfying when I can show people what I did right. And people are gonna cheer me. People don't really cheer you for achieving the stability goal cuz it's so small. Yeah. But I think those goals we really undervalue them.
Camille: We really should celebrate them more because that is actually how you are creating a high performance business. Your incremental improvement focus on stability goals is what will give you a high performance business. If all you did were breakthrough goals, it would just be a disaster.
George: Absolutely. Totally agree.
Camille: Before I talk about takeaways, I'm curious what your takeaways are and then I'll add all of my stuff in, cuz I don't wanna put words in your mouth.
George: I'll repeat what I said earlier and I'll state it a different way.
George: I like the explicit difference between longer term things and shorter term things. That's great. People often confuse the two or they don't have a way of understanding what's a more longer term goal and why am I doing that versus a short term. I think it's great.
George: Not all goals are the same. You said this, not all goals are equal, but that's a big takeaway.
George: Setting aspirational goals gives you permission to make choices as opposed to making sacrifices. So it fits into our belief shift framework of that. Yeah, I think that's a big takeaway there.
George: Those are my two big ones that I get from this.
Camille: I like that connection to that belief shift of it is more about when you are setting that aspirational goal, you are thinking about what are the trade-offs that I want to make? And what am I not willing to sacrifice in order to get to the thing?
Camille: The aspirational goals that we hear a lot of business owners have I know other business owners like, heck no, that's not for me. I don't want that. Which is so smart because they know what trade-offs they wanna make, which is different from what somebody else wants to make for so many different reasons.
Camille: As a business owner, you do have to personally make those choices, even though business is business and it exists to do one thing, which is to make.
Camille: But how you do it is up to you as the business owner, and that's where you have agency and can make some level of choices.
Camille: And that's why setting those goals are important and setting them well. So if you set a goal that sounds good, but then you start breaking it down and the work to get there does not sound good, it is not a good goal for you.
Camille: And I've seen people do that. They're like, I wanna do blah, blah, blah, and then they're like, oh, I didn't know it meant that. No, I don't wanna do that. Great, let's not do that then.
Camille: If you're gonna set a goal that's gonna have you do stuff that you're gonna commit to forever that you don't like, that's probably not a great way to go. Which is why so many diets don't work because you have to commit to a way of eating forever that we don't like.
Camille: Here's my takeaways for everybody. All right. Focus on setting both long-term and short-term goals. Yeah. When you're setting those goals, super small business owners, micro-business owners, are best served by having one breakthrough goal for the year.
Camille: If you are a little bigger or you have a bit of a team to support you, you could have up to three. But I love when a business owner just has one breakthrough goal, cuz that's usually what's feasible while also maintaining the rest of the business.
Camille: So then you want to also have just a few stability goals. Not too many. Three, maybe five. If you're bigger, you could have up to seven. But you really wanna control how many you have. Cuz remember the act of measuring them and working to improve them is still work. So you don't wanna set yourself up to have to measure too many things.
Camille: And keep in mind that you might pick something to measure, especially instability goals, you might pick something to measure and then find out that it wasn't a good measure for you, it didn't actually help you, and that's okay. Sometimes you have to experiment with these things to find the one that for your business is going to be helpful. Hmm.
Camille: You can Google this and find some good examples of goals that you might try out and see if they're really effective for you in your business. Of course. Specific to your industry.
Camille: Everybody has an opinion about this, so there's lots of help out there, but you ultimately should just try some stuff on and see if it really is helpful for you and what you're trying to achieve.
Camille: Again, not all goals are equal. Yeah, don't set too many goals. Focus on what year is gonna serve you business long term, and check that your goals are good by checking that they're SMART.
Camille: You're doing the Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time bound, that they're directly aligned to your vision. That they are achievable but maybe a little stretchy. They're not too big and overwhelming, but are super exciting if you actually could make them happen. Sometimes I like to add a little I to the smart goals.
Camille: SMARTi cuz I also want them to be inspiring. You can break them down into small bite size activities and they're gonna serve your business long. So both long-term vision and serve the business long-term, big part of this.
Camille: And so of course bad goals are, well, bad goals are not smart. That's kinda all I have to say. They're not smart and they're one hit wonders. And we had this in the planning workshop, there were some goals people were like, yeah, I know it's a crazy idea. I'm like, how's this tied to your mission? And they'd literally just take the post-it and just dropped it off the page like, Nope, that one's not a good goal.
Camille: But it looked fun. That's cool. These are some of the hard things we have to do. All right. Those are my takeaways for today.
George: Awesome.
Camille: You ready to go set some goals?
George: Examine some goals.
Camille: Yeah. You probably have goals to examine and work right now.
George: I do right now, it's fresh in my mind.
George: This is good stuff.
Camille: Good. I'm glad you are still liking the podcast, George, Win-Win.
Camille: I do.
Camille: So I think next time what we'll talk about is once you have the goals, then what do you do? How do I actually ensure I'm gonna stick with them?
Camille: We'll talk about that in the next podcast. Cool. Yeah, I like that. Excellent.
Camille: All right, George. Thank you as usual and have a lovely rest of your day. And everybody, thank you for listening. Hang out with us on Instagram, but mostly like I wanna hear from people.
Camille: I want voice messages. Go to: thebeliefshift.com click that little widget thingy on the side and leave us a voice message.
Camille: Oh, what was that question we asked them earlier? Oh, I wanted to know if you have a goal. You think you have full control over the outcome? I wanna hear what those examples are.
Camille: Yeah. I feel like it's gotta exist and I'm just not coming up with a good example. Cool. Try and give us some examples if you have one.
Camille: Awesome. All right. Thanks everybody. We'll be back in your years next week.
Camille: Bye.
