How to Make 2025 the Year You Finally Hit Your Goals

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here. In today's video, I'm going to be giving you the three steps to think bigger and achieve more in 2025. So happy new Year, everybody. This is the first video of 2025. I'm here recording this on a Sunday, so apologies we missed the last week's video. I've had my family out here in Dubai over the last three weeks, which has been really nice. So yeah, need to get back into consistent videos. So hopefully this will be the consistent format. So what we're going to cover today is the three practical steps to help you think bigger and achieve more in 2025. And I was thinking about this in terms of it's a new year, new May, new start, new goals. And a lot of people start off with what I actually think is two bigger goals. So I think when you are an entrepreneur and you've started your business, you've already started with goals in mind and big goals to achieve more in your personal life and business success. But what I think it' important to cover is I think most people get stuck because they stay in the comfort zone. So one of the key reasons why people don't achieve goals is their fear of failure or really not trying hard enough because they're in their comfort zone. So that starts with environment. So environment's key in terms of who you're hanging around with. I've talked about plenty of times before about you are the average of the five people you hang around with most. One of my old mentors, Jim Rohn, used to talk about that a lot. But most importantly, having goals that you know, even subconsciously that you feel you can achieve them. So instead of focusing on massive, vague goals like saying I want to be a millionaire or multimillionaire, what you could actually genuinely improve in your life and business in 2025. So let's say, for example, if you're 100k revenue, maybe you're aiming for 300k to 400k this year. So you're not going to get to a million pounds or million dollars overnight. Sustainable progress will beat crazy ambitions. So setting like realistic goals in areas that you feel you can control. So I would be focusing on like three core areas in your financial, personal and business. So for example, financial goal might be increase my profit and revenue by 25%. So your take home pay after tax, increasing that by 25% will be way more realistic and achievable than trying to double in size every single year. The second thing would be on the personal, can you delegate 10 to 20 hours a week, 10 to 20 hours a week of work to free up your time. So I've talked a lot about delegation. I did a lot with all my businesses was how can I delegate? But also at a not bigger cost. So when you have a remote team, one of my companies is remote assistance AI where we can actually help install operations VAS marketing VAS personal assistants into your business so you can actually free up your time so you can work on high value tasks. One of the key things that you want to try and focus on in 2025 is if you can free up 10 to 20 hours of work week in your week, that's going to help you be able to scale more effectively and be more strategic in what you do and then also making sure that you can enjoy life as well. Because it's all well and good growing a business working 60, 70 hours a week. But you need to enjoy the freedom that that's going to give to you as well. So when I, my recruitment agency, this was 10 years ago, I did it with building it in mind that I still wanted to have holidays every year. I wanted to work a four day work week. But yes, in those four days I was probably working eight to ten hours a day. And even when I was off I was still learning, I was still interpersonal development and thinking about business. But it's very important that you have that personal time to yourself as well. So breaking down your goals into small wins. One of the books that I would recommend reading for this is Atomic Habits by I think James Clear. Quite a simple book for habits, but he talks about like small habits lead to big changes. And the same applies to goals. Like if you break them into manageable steps, they are much more achievable. So small wins are important because what it does, it's a bit like when you're doing deals or you're making sales if you get consistent rhythm. So sometimes if I've got my sales team and they're actually not performing in a week, I want to create momentum. So we might do special incentive price offers. We might do something just to get more momentum and get that machine moving again. So instead of focusing on the end goal, breaking that up into monthly weekly milestones and smaller goals, this is what's going to help you get motivated when you can take them off. So I always like writing these things down in a notebook, a journal, every single week and every single month. So I start the year with the front of my journal, with my three year goal, sorry, my ten year vision, my three year goals and my one year goals and then I'll break them down into quarters. So when I first started one of my recruitment agencies, my initial goal wasn't to build a 7 figure business overnight. I just wanted to get to 6 figures. I wanted 100k in net cash reserves in my bank account as fast as humanly possible. Then I focused on landing one client a month, then it was like one client a week, then we scaled up from there. So for every big goal you can write down specific clients steps that you can take in order to achieve that. The next thing is focus on what moves the needle so you don't want to spread yourself too thin. So as an entrepreneur and business owner, look, you get so many opportunities, you get so many new tools to try on, too many different ways to do client acquisition to a new business to fulfill. You need to focus on those one or two things that will have the biggest impact for your success in your business. So you've got to learn to say no a lot of the time. The hardest part when you're going as an entrepreneur and for me, even in this year, my goals now in my business or all my companies are I know I've got certain vehicles in the company. My main business gets me to eight figures, but I know to get the nine figures it's not going to be through just scaling and doing more of the same. I know now I need to get in what I would call private private equity, like micro private equity and that's going to be buying other companies and buying revenue and EBITDA in order to quantum leap, jump to get to the 100 million. And the best way I can do that is going to be through leveraging debt, so bank debt and business finance. So acquiring companies that are maybe 20, 30 years old, that have got consistent cash flow, they've got a good foothold in the market and maybe their business owner is ready to retire. They're in 60, 70 years old and they want to exit and liquidate. And me maybe taking advantage of that opportunity and buying a company of 3 times 4, 4 times EBITDA and leveraging bank debt around about 60, 70%. I know that I can buy and acquire another 10 million pound business, then a 20 million pound business servicing as long as the debt service covers the profitability, then I know I can get to 100 million within five or six year period. Now that was one thing that I spent a lot of time over the last few months just reading a lot about this and I realized that instead of working hard in your business and always building service based businesses. A lot of my companies are service based because they're easy to start, they are low cost, low friction and high profitability. But also they are harder to sell and exit as well and the harder to get up past skills. So I've always been around about the 600k a month mark for quite some time and to break through the million a month mark is really tough to get it consistent because you sacrifice profitability, you have way more complexity, a lot more opportunities for things to break and most importantly, if you're in the vehicle that isn't exitable business, then it's actually not worth that time, energy and effort to squeeze that little bit extra. I would be better off focusing my time, energy and effort this year on things that I know got way more scalability. So for example RemoteAssistance AI, I know that that can scale up not just to recruitment agencies, but for any business owner that wants to hire remote talent that's got way more scalability. And the same with buying other businesses as well. So like I said, focusing on what moves the needle for you in 2025 is going to be crucial and then saying no to a lot of the other opportunities. So thinking to yourself, what is that one thing that you can do this week or this month that is going to create the most momentum towards your goals? So in 2025 I want you to drop a comment below what your 2025 goals are in terms of what you want to achieve in your business, what you want to achieve in your personal life. And I would always be thinking like when I go back to all of the times I've goal setted, it's always been writing down I want to be worth £100,000,000, I want to be worth £100 million, I want to have homes across the world, tons of things, like materialistic things and then like a nice family and a loving family and good adventures and experience experiences, but actually tangibly writing these things down. So the easiest way that I use to write the goals down, if you get stuck, I just start bullet pointing first on the page. So I just write down every single thing that I want to achieve and do in my life, whether it's you want to do a ski trip or you want to buy a certain car, you want to buy your dream home or you want to retire, parents or whatever it is, little to large, write them all down. And then I reverse engineer my 10 year vision of what I really want to do as a legacy. And if I was to look back on my deathbed and wanted to live a vibrant, full life of things I've achieved and contributed to the world. What those need to be, write all those down as a 10 year plan and then reverse engineer those into three year goals that are realistic and then your one year goal plan and put that at the start of your journal. So buy a new journal. I just bought a new one last week. And start fresh for this year so you can start stacking them up and commit to that, to pen and paper, because your subconscious mind will reinforce that way more when you're writing these goals down with your own handwriting and you're planting those seeds in your mind. But I would also say is don't think that you always have to have crazy big goals. So I went from a thing of like wanting to be a billionaire, then wanting to be worth 100 million, then once I was in business a long time it was like, well, let's just get to 10 million liquid first. And then when you get there, then I think, well, what is the point of the game? The game is just a game. So there's more to life than just money and materialistic things. I went through the stage of buying all of the Ferraris, the Lamborghinis, all of the watches, etc. And then I've tried to minimize those things now, but then, now I want to have a nice big manor house in the countryside in the UK and have a big base there. So that's like my next goal that I want to tick off. But you'll go through different transitions in your entrepreneurial journey. But I would definitely say that you have to go through certain things. It's not good listening to me or mentor to say don't do this, don't do that. On certain, like buying a Ferrari, for example. I heard that many times from Mentos, but I had to go through it and do it myself to think, yeah, after a few weeks or a few months, the fade wears off and if you don't love the car, then you're going to see it as a burden and another cost, but making sure that you have realistic, practical goals. And one of the things that I always did was it was money. So it was like how much profit I can physically make in my net cash reserves, bank account. And that was the best thing to measure. So my old mentor used to say at Dan Penier is like whether people love money or not, like it's the only thing that you can really measure for success because success and happiness, that can't be measured but success in numbers can be measured. So having realistic achievable goal outcomes and that comes down to profitability. At the end of the day, especially when you're a small business, all this revenue thing is vanity. So what you take home at the end of the month and the end of the year to make it all worthwhile, and then when you review your previous year, think, were you financially rewarded for all of the time, energy and effort and risk that you sacrificed and put in? If not, you know you need to change something in your operations or systems or in the vehicle that you're in in order to get to the next level. People outdate vehicles as well. So what gets you to six figures won't get you to seven. What gets you to seven doesn't necessarily get you to eight. What gets you eight doesn't necessarily get you to nine. You might need to change vehicles along the way. So I hope you found that useful. Give it a like a thumbs up and make sure you comment below. What you give me one goal that you want to hit in 2025 and hope you all have a fantastic year and I'll catch you all soon.