What does the new year have in store for your business?
Well, you can leave it all up to chance or you can start setting goals for yourself!
Setting goals is one of the easiest things you can do to keep your business on the track YOU want it to be on. Otherwise, you’re just letting your business ride the waves of whatever comes your way. You need to be the captain of the ship, not just a passenger.
In this post I am going to give you five EASY tips to setting and working towards your goals in the new year.
1. Write your goals down!
It may seem pretty simple, but actually writing your goals out for the year gives you a plan for what you want to accomplish. Just keeping that list ‘in your head’ means you can lose track of what you are trying to accomplish. Whether you physically write it out on a piece of paper or a white board or keep your goals in an electronic file, just be sure to write them out!
2. Make short term goals and long term goals
While having goals that you’re going to reach by the end of the year is great, it’s also good to have short term goals that you can achieve along the way so that not all of your goals are big projects.
Your short term goals can even be things that help you reach your long term, yearly goals.
Examples:
Short term goal: meet one new person in my industry IN PERSON this month
Long term goal: book 25 weddings by the end of the year.
3. Create goals of different difficulty levels
Having hard to achieve goals is a great way to push yourself, but making all of your goals difficult can leave you feeling like you haven’t accomplished anything.
If you create goals with a variety of difficulty levels, you will help yourself in the long run by both pushing yourself to achieve greater things while at the same time giving yourself a sense of accomplishment along the way when you reach the easier goals
This ties into the previous tip about having short and long term goals. You may also consider creating goals with different difficulty ‘tiers’. Think of it like a video game…
Easy level: Book 15 portrait sessions this year
Intermediate level: Book 30 portrait sessions this year
Expert level: Book 50 portrait sessions this year
You get the idea…
4. Keep track of your goals
One of the reasons I mentioned writing down your goals in the beginning of this post was because you’ll want to come back and check on your goals regularly.
Set aside some time each week (15 minutes should be plenty of time) to check in on your goals and see how you are progressing towards them.
I like to break down goal progress into three segments: monthly, quarterly, and year end.
Keeping a journal or spreadsheet will help you track your progress.
5. Reassess your goals and your approaches to them
As you check in on your goals each week, you will get a sense over time whether you’re going to reach them.
If you’re finding that you’re not on track to reach your yearly goals, you may need to change your approach. That might mean reevaluating where you advertise, what you blog about, marketing, branding, etc., but you will already know what IS NOT working.
The thing is to reassess your approach, see what works and what doesn’t, and adjust what you’re doing accordingly.
BONUS TIP: Create new goals along the way! If you find that you’re rapidly approaching one goal – set a new one.
If your goal was to book 20 weddings and you’ve almost hit that in the first half of the year, add more levels of difficulty. Create another tier for 30 weddings.
Don’t cross out your original goal and create a brand new one. You ACHIEVED that goal. These are bonus levels!
