Goals: Why You Should Set Them and How You Can Achieve Them

Hello everyone and welcome to the December Webinar, the last webinar of the Cleantelligence Software Series for 2017. Some of you who listen regularly may have noticed we've been on a hiatus for the last few months, but now we're back to finish out the year and help you start 2018 on a positive note. Thank you for listening to my presentation today and a special thank you to those who have registered and are attending live. Today is Thursday, December 14th and it is a cool 31 degrees Fahrenheit here in Provo, Utah. I got this picture this morning from our local news station to show you what it looks like outside Clean Intelligence Main Office it's very hazy. There's snow. Snow yet? Or not much snow yet, but there are plenty of Christmas lights around, including in our lobby here. Wherever you are, I hope the weather is alright and I hope you're enjoying your holiday festivities. As a reminder, this webinar is being recorded and will be made available shortly at cleantelligent www.cleantelligent.com webinars. I encourage you to watch this webinar again at your leisure and also to check out our previous webinars. Here's some by me, by our Director of Customer Experience, by our Vice President, and others. You'll find valuable content specially prepared to help you in your cleaning business. For those of you who are listening live, you will receive a free ebook Just In Time for Christmas, which I will tell you more about during my presentation and at the end. And to receive updates about our upcoming webinars as well as access to the accompanying ebooks, please subscribe on our webinars page Today I would like to talk about goals. This may seem like a broad and even trite topic since there is a lot of goal oriented literature materials, but with the new year almost upon us, I think it's appropriate to discuss goals and how they can help your cleaning business. And I hope there will be some takeaways from goals in your personal lives as well. Here's a brief overview of what I will cover today. While I intend to focus on how to set goals and then how to achieve them, I'll also discuss the need for goals, including the why. I'll describe a metric for setting goals that many of you may be familiar with. Smart or smarter goals. I'll give you some strategies for actually reaching your goals and I'll explain what to do when you fall short. I'll try my best to apply these things to your cleaning business, although much will also be for your Personal life. As I said, my name is Bradley York and I am the Director of Marketing here at cleantelligent. I hope you don't mind me getting a little personal as I introduce myself. When I was a teenager, I was active in Boy Scouts. As you can see from this picture here. Over several years, I earned a variety of merit badges, I performed community service, and I fulfilled all the requirements necessary to earn Scouting's highest rank of Eagle. I am very proud of that accomplishment. Some years later, I completed a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree, which required a lot of time and a high level of commitment. I am also very proud of these accomplishments. I share these things with you. Not to brag. Well, maybe a little, but to show what is possible when you set goals and work hard to achieve them. And while it's true that great accomplishments often require help from other people, I was no exception. Great accomplishments can happen when we stick with our goals. Let me give you another example. Going to brag just a little bit more. Between 2012 and 2015, Clean Intelligent won four Issa Innovation Awards. One each year, we also won two Issa Best Customer Service Awards. None of these awards just happened. We earned them because our developers set goals to create the best products, our marketing team set goals to communicate our best benefits, and our customer support team set goals to provide the best service. Everyone at Clean Intelligent did their part. Earlier this year, we decided to compete for our fifth Issa Innovation Award, this time for our new Business Intelligence features. Some of you may remember me talking about this in my last webinar. No one had ever won five innovation awards, and this year we were up against stiff competition, some heavy hitters with excellent, innovative products. But thanks to our intrepid marketing and customer support teams, and thanks especially to many of you who voted for us, we won the award. Here we are being presented the award by Howie Mandel at Issa Interclean in September. And here we are. When we receive the trophy in the mail. I'd say it's a much cooler trophy than any of the others we've won so far. Again, these are some of the amazing things that can happen when you set high goals and then follow through with them. Would any of it happen? Would any of it have happened without a plan or without visualizing it in advance? No, I don't think so. So why should we set goals? Put simply, goals give us a way, a path to achieving great things. But what if we're content with our lives, with the way our businesses are running, or with our past accomplishments, what if we see no need to change anything? Let me repeat some advice that I gave in my previous webinar where I discussed innovation. I quoted from a book titled Conquer the Chaos, which is an informative read for small business owners. Authors Clayton Mask and Scott Martineau wrote, your business is being subjected to factors beyond your control. You might be completely satisfied with your current situation, but it won't last. If you choose to stand still, those outside forces will rush past you, leaving only chaos in their wake. Mask and Martineau explain that if we aren't actively trying to change things and grow our business, the following will happen Competitors will steal your customers, your employees will stop innovating, your products and services will become outdated, your technology and processes will fall behind those of your competitors, and your income will drop. In other words, if we don't set and achieve goals for our business, we could lose everything we built and ultimately someone else will come along and take our place. I hope you see the need for goals in your cleaning business, but what about in our personal lives? To answer this, let me refer to a popular children's story that I think most of you are familiar with. A little girl named Alice was trying to make her way through a mysterious place called Wonderland. In the woods, she came across a Cheshire cat, as depicted here with a mischievous grin. After some unnerving and no doubt creepy small talk, Alice said to the cat, would you tell me please which way I have to go from here? The cat replied, that depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice said, I don't much care where. So the cat said that it doesn't matter which way you go. So I invite you to infer from this what you will if you don't care where you're going in your business or in your personal life, then you don't have to set goals. But if you do care where you're going, whether it's toward better revenue, better relationships, or better health, then goals, or rather the right goals, can help you. So let's jump in into how to set goals. As I mentioned earlier, there's a vast amount of literature and materials about goals. Some individuals have made careers helping others with business and personal goals. It will be difficult for me to do justice to this topic, but I will share with you some things in this webinar that I like and that have helped me. First, some general principles. As I mentioned a minute ago, you first have to decide where you're going or your goals will not matter. You need motivation to reach your goal. For instance, a goal to read 10 books next year is meaningless if you don't know why you're doing it. A goal to boost your revenue is meaningless if you don't know what to do with the extra money. Start your goal setting by thinking about what you would like to accomplish. Maybe you're reading books to learn a new skill. Maybe you want more revenue to pay off debts or give your employees raises. Don't set goals for the sake of setting them. Do it with a purpose. Once you've decided what you want, you need to articulate your goal as clearly as possible. This is especially true if it's a big goal. Then again, if it is too big, you need to refine it. For example, if one of my goals is to be healthier, how do I do that? What does that even look like? I may have a good motivation for it and I may be able to visualize it, but what does it mean exactly? This is where I would like to present a metric that many of you may also be familiar with. Smart Goals. The SMART acronym dates back almost 40 years and has some variations, but generally stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. And more recently, some authors have added new criteria, evaluated and reviewed or recorded. Now, these are a lot of guidelines to consider. I think they're mostly self explanatory with the last two relating to evaluating the success of our goals and then recommitting to do our goal if we fall short. Do our goals have to include all of these things? Not necessarily, but they do help to clarify our goals. As an example, here is a goal that many of you may have. I have it as well to increase my company's revenue. This is a worthy goal. But if we apply the smart goal criteria, it could become something like this. By the end of 2018, I will increase the number of my clients by 10%. As you can see, I've made this goal more specific by focusing on gaining more clients. I made it more made it measurable by providing exact amount 10%. I made it achievable based on the number of my clients. So if I have only 10 clients, I only need to add one more. It's relevant to me if I am a building service contractor and it's time bound by giving me until the end of next year. And of course I'll review my goal at the end of the year and determine if I want to set it again or perhaps even raise the amount to 20%. I should point out that there are many ways to apply the Smart criteria. And in the case of boosting revenue, you can obviously set multiple goals. Now I'd like to show a few more examples and give you the opportunity to apply the criteria yourselves. Here's a list of some good goals for a cleaning company that I found on cleanlink.com Increase the use of green cleaning products and equipment Reduce the volume or quantity of cleaning products used in your programs without sacrificing cleaning effectiveness. Third goal Reduce energy and water usage at your customers facilities Increase the number of customers or square footage using your green cleaning program Increase training and number of employees with degrees and professional certifications and increase charitable donations and volunteerism. I'm going to give you guys a minute and let you apply the Smart Criteria and rewrite one or more of these goals. You may add in whatever details you wish, but that's something to think about. And again, there are multiple ways of rewriting these goals based on the Smart criteria. You can add in any details you want or time constraints, but I hope as you set your goals in the future that you think about how you can apply the Smart Criteria now that we've clearly defined our goal, we need to visualize it. Our goals must be at least written down, but to truly visualize them, we need to see in our minds the process of completing them and the aftermath. So how will we reach the goal? What will happen when we reach it? What will happen if we don't reach it? I encourage you to get creative as you visualize your goals and and a great way to do this is with a vision board. A vision board like this one is simply a space to collect words and images showing your goals. It can be small and simple, or big and complex. Many people use vision boards to plan and prioritize their goals, and many have found great success in doing so. I'm not going to say much more about vision boards other than there are no rules for them and that everyone does them differently. But if you'd like some suggestions, I encourage you to get our forthcoming ebook called Success with Vision Boards. In this ebook, we'll give you a few more examples of vision boards and we'll share some success stories. It's a great gift and we'll provide it as an exclusive benefit to those who are watching this webinar live. If you're not watching live, then subscribe to our webinars and send us an email. I'll give you some more instructions on how to do that at the end of my webinar. Now that I've talked about motivation, clarifying your goals and visualizing them. There's one more thing that you should do. Share them with someone you trust. Telling someone about your goal encourages you to be accountable for it, but it also provides a support system for you. And if it's a company goal, it encourages everybody to be involved and to share in the success. Many goals, as I mentioned earlier, require help from other people. Don't try to do everything by yourself. Up to this point, I focused mostly on the process of setting goals without really discussing what it takes to accomplish them. Let me address that now. I mentioned earlier that you need motivation as well as a clear definition of each goal, but you also need an action plan, especially if it's a big goal. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that you need to break up your big goal into smaller, more manageable goals. For instance, my master's degree that I talked about at the beginning was the culmination of many goals over several years of work and study. I actually spent what seemed like most of my last year of graduate school in the university library, which I'm showing here. To fulfill all the requirements of my program, I had to complete several semesters of coursework. I had to select a topic for my master's thesis, I had to conduct a research study with live participants. In connection with the thesis, I had to write up and publish the results of the study, which was the actual thesis, and I had to present the thesis to a committee of professors. The Oral Defense Some of you may be familiar with this whole process. It was undoubtedly the hardest thing I've ever done, but what got me through it was the help I received from many people as well as the breaking down of the process into individual tasks. Like I describe here. A recent book by Charles Duhigg called Smarter, Faster, Better says that people are most likely to reach their when they perceive that they are in control of the process. In my case, my master's program, I had a daily routine, milestones and deadlines that helped me make constant progress. When people don't have control or lose control, they lose their motivation. So if I had been asked to write a master's thesis without being given any structure or guidance, I could never have done it. So according to this book, we need to have short term goals and make progress quickly or we will never reach them or succeed at long term goals. As a general rule, don't set anything more than year long goals. And if you're just starting to set goals, start with short term ones, maybe one to three months. Cultivate success and build confidence as you reach these smaller goals. And finally, a question I have to address is, what do we do if we fall short? What if we don't reach our goal? I think everyone who has made a New Year's resolution has faced this situation. Obviously it calls for some evaluation and review as per the Smarter Goals criteria. If we attempted the goal and failed, I think we should consider what the goal has done for us. About a year and a half ago, I was presented with an opportunity to run in a marathon. I sheepishly declined, but I also decided to at that time, to set a more attainable goal of improving my physical fitness by swimming laps for two hours a week. I'm proud to say I have attained that goal at least at least most weeks. Now, that's not the same as a marathon, obviously, but it's but my goal, my revised goal does put me closer to a marathon, should I choose to accept that opportunity someday. So the best advice I can give you when you don't reach your goal is to evaluate and possibly reset the goal. If you sincerely attempted the goal, take stock of what you've learned. The knowledge you gain is still very valuable. Before I conclude my presentation, let me review some of the points I've made today. I hope you've seen what goals can do. Goals are powerful. They give us purpose and direction. Whether we're trying to grow our business or turn our personal lives around, goals can make a difference. Remember that the first step to setting a goal is identifying the reason for the goal. Ask yourself, what are you trying to accomplish? And as you write your goals, remember the guidelines that I gave to clarify them. Goals must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound, evaluated, and reviewed. Once you've established what your goals are, visualize them, including the process of completing them and the aftermath. Use a vision board or another way to creatively express your goals. Get help. Don't try to do everything by yourself. Share your goals and your progress with people you trust. If you're new to setting goals, start small and build a track record of success. And finally, if you're putting time and effort into your goals, don't be overly concerned if you fall short. Evaluate and revise when necessary, but make sure you learn something from the experience. In talking about setting goals for your business, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that cleantelligent software can help you as well. Many of you who are listening are already users of cleantelligent, and hopefully you've seen the benefits firsthand. For those of you who are less familiar with cleantelligent. It is operational software to help your cleaning business manage work orders, perform quality inspections, schedule cleaning jobs and more. You may be especially interested in our new award winning Business Intelligence features which show aggregated data of all of your previous work orders and inspections. Check it out if you haven't already. So how exactly can cleantelligent help you with your business goals? Let me show you how we helped Busy Rooms commercial cleaning company in Florida. They said with CleanTelligent we have been able to save 34% on labor costs which equals to around $17,000 per year. We project that by using CleanTelligent inspections our client retention will increase by at least 20%. CleanTelligence customer support team has really helped us with perfecting our business processes which has increased our productivity by at least 20%. Now, I can't say for certain whether Busy Room sets specific goals in advance to reach these targets, but I can say that goals like these can be made with your own team and in cooperation with your software coach here at cleantelligent. It takes planning and hard work, but you can do these things too. If you're not a clean, intelligent customer and would like to learn exactly exactly how the software can help your business and your situation, Please go to cleantelligent.com demo to request a free consultation. Our team of software consultants will help you find the right solutions for your needs. If you're already a cleantelligent customer and would like to learn how to use the software better, don't hesitate to contact the customer Support team at SupportleEngine Intelligent. As I said at the beginning, there is a lot of reference material about goals and goal setting. Here is a list of resources I used. I encourage you to find more if you're interested in this topic. Also, the cleantelligent website provides regular blog posts and webinars that address many topics that you may find useful. I encourage you to check these out as well. As I mentioned earlier, all live listeners of this webinar will receive the free ebook Success with Vision Boards. This is a great way to get you started on your goals, be they personal, business, or both. Expect that in your inbox in one to two weeks from now. If you aren't listening live, you can still get a copy of this ebook by subscribing to our webinars, which you can do on our website www.cleantelligent.com webinars. If you're interested in reaching out to me directly, here is my contact information. Feel free to email or connect with me on LinkedIn. I've also included contact information for clean intelligence, sales and support teams. Again, thank you for listening to this month's webinar. It's been my pleasure to talk to you today. Again, visit www.cleantelligent.comwebinars to view this and our other webinars. And please follow us on our social media, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn where we share the latest industry best practices, management tips and other things as we conclude 2017. I wish you all a happy holiday season and a prosperous New Year. Good luck in your business and in all of your endeavors.