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Article 30

Goals and why they're vital to success

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02 January 2007 | Category: Business

Happy new year everyone! Hope you had a wonderful holiday season.

I’m a big believer in setting goals. If you don’t do this, there’s no way to measure if your life is heading in the direction you want it to go. Every year, I sit down and have a hard think about my personal and business goals.

First of all, I think about my personal goals. Why do I nail these down before my business and work goals? Because I believe that business and work should help you achieve your personal goals, not the other way around.

I divide my personal goals into four areas:

  1. Mind
  2. Relationships
  3. Body
  4. Financial

After I’ve got those written down, I move onto business and work goals. I haven’t divided these up into categories, but if that interests you, feel free to do so.

Make them measureable

A really important part of setting goals is to make them measureable. You want to know for sure if you did or didn’t achieve them at the end of the year.

Here are some examples of measurable goals (good):

  1. Excercise three times a week
  2. Read one book a month
  3. Achieve $10 Million in company revenue

Here are some hard-to-measure goals (bad)

  1. Be more pro-active
  2. Increase network of contacts
  3. Be more positive

At the end of the year, you want to be able to look over your list and know whether or not you succeeded.

The most important thing about setting goals is that it allows you to step back from your life and look at the big picture. Are you happy with where your life is going? Are you becoming the person you always wanted to be?

Setting goals is a great way to pro-actively move towards being who you always wanted to be! Here is a sample of my 2007 goals:

Personal

  1. Exercise three times a week
  2. Read one book a month
  3. Save £____ per month

Company

  1. Increase profit by 30%
  2. Have DropSend up to $20K revenue per month
  3. Have £_____ cash in the bank

Feel free to share some of your 2007 goals below!

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Comments

  • http://www.redvodkajelly.com Jacob Wyke

    1) Blog at least 3 times a week.
    2) Call 1 different friend each week to keep in touch.
    3) Take control of my email – always finish the day with zero email in my inbox (process or archive into different action folders).

  • Ryan Carson

    1) Blog at least 3 times a week.

    Nice one Jacob. I’m going to aim for every day. Yikes!

  • http://www.izeo.co.uk Tim Benjamin

    I’ve been having a bash at this over the last few days, too. Once I’ve created my annual goals, I then break them down into quarterly ones in order to add a sense of immediacy.

  • http://www.thoughtandtheory.com Dennis Eusebio

    I’m sure most people know about this, but 43things.com is a great site to help people achieve goals just like this. I’ve been using it for more business oriented goals lately but its also good for personal ones.

    Great tip about making them measurable. It helps bring down the “head in the clouds” goals i usually have and rarely achieve.

  • http://blog.juvely.com/ James Deer

    Here are mine!
    1) Go to the gym every other day!
    2) Get Juvely(http://www.juvely.com) my app finished!
    3) Have a 2nd app in the works!
    4) Keep in-touch will old college friends!
    5) Eat Healthier!

    Hopefully this time next year i will be able to look back at this comment and feel satisfied with myself!

  • http://rod.innovatebig.com Rod Ebrahimi

    Nice work Ryan.

    I look forward to seeing you accomplish all this and more. Sharing your goals and dreams is a great way to get everyone involved towards accomplishing them.

    In addition to the weekly goals I set with those I work with, here are the high-level things on my “living” and evolving list:
    * forgo tradition to pursue challenges that spark passion
    * share information about how to apply Internet technologies on a shoestring to solve real business and social problems
    * work on building revolutionary products and services that have positive social impact
    * adopt and implement bleeding edge technologies
    * actively pursue all forms of culture shock
    * embrace the thrills of success and failure in building entrepreneurial enterprise
    * work with others to help them achieve “success”
    * strive to do the right thing
    * surround myself by people who consistently amaze me

    keep up the great work and best wishes in 2007 and beyond!

  • http://www.altstudio.com.au Colin Burns

    I recently completed a business “Growth Development” course in which we focused on, obviously, how to grow our businesses. One of the things they suggested is not to rely solely on revenue as a target. Ultimate if you have $1M in revenue, but it cost $999,000 to get that revenue you shouldn’t have bothered.

    They suggested the following sentence/formula.

    Company Name plans to increase revenue from $____ to $____ by month, Year with profitability of ___%.

    From this simple sentence you should be able to get all of the financial information that you need. It tells us what the current revenue is and what you would like it to be at a specific time in the future. By showing the current revenue is shows us how you are placed to achieve your revenue goal. The profitability is the most important section of the statement. This helps understand the longer term prospects of the business. If profitability is only 5-10% then you might find your business struggles during some of the more lean times.

    Anyway, I hope this information might be helpful to someone in setting their business financial goals for this year.

  • Jake

    Business
    1. Achieve £5K gross profit per month
    2. Double existing client base
    3. Employ wife
    4. Stop working at 6pm

    Personal
    1. Go to the gym 3 times a week and enjoy it
    2. Halve my debts
    3. Buy a new car
    4. No alcohol on a week nights/some at weekends

    House
    1. Fix the tap in the kitchen
    2. Decorate lounge
    3. Fix the plug in the bathroom
    4. Put more art up

    That should do it..

  • Ryan Carson

    keep up the great work and best wishes in 2007 and beyond!

    Thanks Rob!

    They suggested the following sentence/formula: Company Name plans to increase revenue from $____ to $____ by month, Year with profitability of ___%.

    Great idea – I think I’ll use that :)

    3. Employ wife

    That’s one goal I’ve managed to achieve and it’s been amazing (however Gill is not just an employee, she’s a 49% shareholder).

  • Jake

    My wife will be 50-50 with me.. share and share alike ;-) = if fact she is handing in her notice today. So i’ll have ticked that one off in 4 weeks :-)

  • http://www.videosontop.com julien

    0/ Take some holidays before
    1/ trying to take over the world… :)

  • http://www.graphicdefine.org Daniel Schutzsmith

    Thanks for sharing Ryan! I always find it very interesting to see how others are motivated to greatness. Best of luck in 2007!

  • http://www.dkeithrobinson.com/ Keith

    Great post Ryan.

    I think it’s also important to note that you goals should be attainable. I like to make sure I focus on goals that are realistic. Also, people shouldn’t feel like they need to set goals only this time of year, goals are a good thing anytime of the year.

    I do almost the same thing you do. Here are a few of mine (I’m actually getting them down today, so this post was timely.)

    * Have people over to the house at least 3 times a month.
    * Write one (or more) page of fiction every week.
    * Exercise at least 3 times a week.
    * Re-do the master bathroom.
    * Take at least 1 picture a day.

  • http://www.egocheese.com/archives/2007/01/08/objetivos/ egoCheese, brian barbutti » Objetivos

    [...] Depois de ler o post do Ryan Carson sobre objetivos para o ano que começa, decidi fazer algo parecido. Concordo com Carson que é muito melhor definir objetivos numéricos do que abstratos, afinal é mais fácil de verificar os atingidos e os falhos. Por exemplo, é mais fácil se enganar com um “vou fazer mais exercício” do que com um “vou fazer exercícios 3 vezes por semana“. [...]

  • http://blog.prepressology.com JakeV

    1) Exercise 3 times a week
    2) Reduce debt by 1/3
    3) 3 blog posts a week
    4) Find a new job

    I have a more formalized list that I am working on currently. I hope to have it done this week. Especially the business aspects. It was easier to do the personal side for me.

    Wow…three Jakes on one blog. Crazy!

  • Ken

    I am absolutely curious but why 49%. I have been run through the ringer with 50/50 partnerships in the past. So maintaining control is something important to me now but I was curious as to why you did this with your wife? You can plead the 5th. I was just curious.

  • Ryan Carson

    I am absolutely curious but why 49%.

    We decided that someone had to have the final say. It makes decisions a little easier. However, I’ve never used my 2% advantage in real life :)

  • Jeff Ward

    RE: I am absolutely curious but why 49%.

    For business maintenance reasons it is good to maintain majority ownership. You can also assign those 49% as a different class of shares. Non-voting for example. It’s just easier for mundane things like setting up a bank account.

    Just my $0.02 CAD…

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