Make 2025 Your Best Year Yet: Set Goals and Create a Roadmap to Success

I love productivity stuff. I find it really interesting. And it's as well we always make our December sessions around productivity and goal setting and planning and strategic stuff. Because I think it's really important to refresh your approach to goal setting and stuff every year before as you come to do your goals and plan out your year, I think it's really important to refresh on how you're going to make those effective and how you're going to put a plan in place to make sure that you're reaching those goals. So when it gets to around December time, particularly in our business, we really start turning up the strategic planning. We have meetings about, you know, how we're going to grow the business, what kind of things can we do to add value to our clients? And we have like hour long, you know, multi hour long meetings, several of them. We've already had two and we've got another one planned in just on what we're going to be working on in the next year and how we're going to make that achievable as well. So that's what we're going to be talking about in today's session. How to set the goals, but then also what strategies can you implement to make sure you are meeting those goals as well. So let me bring up my slides. Sorry, I've not got my slides up. That's what we're talking about today. We're not just setting goals, but we're creating a clear pathway to get those goals met as well. So, so how many people, I mean, you can do hands up in the comments, you can say, yes, this is me. How many people get to the new year and they make a New Year's resolution and they try really, really hard with it for the first couple months and then by like end of February, March, they've kind of given up or they've gone back to old habits. And I'm going to hold my hand up there as well because I do that. I have done that in the past and I'm trying to be better. But it's just a way of life that sometimes that is what happens, that you try and make these goals and you, you start out on it for. You start out really well and it, it just fades away or you lose the motivation or something happens in your life that sets you back and then you think, well, I've stopped now, I might as well not bother repicking that up. So yeah, definitely got a couple of people in the comments saying that is, that is 100% me. So it happens, you know, we can't be 100% productive all the time. We are not machines. But there are things that we can do to try and improve that productivity and to try and improve the way that we approach our goals to make sure that we are, you know, making strides consistently and routinely towards meeting those goals. We don't just set the goal and kind of forget about it. So, first of all, let's talk about a couple of things that often make us struggle to meet those goals. What kind of things are stopping us from meeting those goals? So, first of all I've got on here is lack of clarity. If you don't have a really clear, specific goal that you're working towards, then it can be really difficult to, A, work towards it, B, know whether you have actually made any progress on it. And so, and so it's much better to have a really, really specific, clear idea of what your goal is. So something that's quite vague, like if, if it's your goal in 2025, I want to get fit, I want to go to the gym and get fit. That's a good goal to have, but it's really vague. Okay, so how are you gonna know when you have achieved this fitness? What are the. The metrics? What are the measurements? How are you going to be able to tell when you've done that? And what does going to the gym and being fit look like on a weekly kind of basis? You know, what, what things do we need to do to get to that point? So I want to get fit is really vague, and it's not very helpful. You know, if your goal was something like, I want to boost profits, I want to get more clients, really good goals to have, but it's too vague. You need to have more specificity. So instead of saying, I want to go to the gym, I want to boost profits, I want more clients, we're going to add specificity to those to say, I want to go to the gym three times a week, and I'm going to track my progress. And it may be that you have a specific goal. You know, I want to lose X amount of weight, or I want to be able to lift this amount of weight in the gym, or I want to gain 12 clients, one a month over the next year, I want to boost my profits by 20% over the next year. So we want that specificity in the goal to help us. When we don't have that clarity, it's really difficult to see what progress we're making. And that can help that. Can you know, it can lower our motivation because we can't see the progress. It may be that you are making strides towards it, but because you've not got much clarity on the kind of milestones that you need to get through during that process, you can't see the pros progress that you're making, and you lose that spark and that drive and that motivation for it. So it's really important to have that clarity. It's also super helpful to have that clarity to reflect back on a regular basis on the goals that you're working through. So that if after, like, let's say a month, when you give up on your New Year's resolution, if after that month you reflect back and you think, what were the roadblocks that stopped me? What were the challenges? Why have I not reached that milestone that I wanted to reach? If you can look back and reflect, you can then adapt whatever you're doing and try and turn it around. Because obviously, what you've been doing for that previous month hasn't worked. Whether it's been a, you know, an external circumstance or something, or you just didn't have enough time or, you know, whatever the challenge is, you can reflect back on that and. And adjust how you are working towards that goal. So it's really important to have that clarity so that you can have those measures and be able to see your progress and adjust your strategy if things aren't going the way you want them to go. So lack of clarity is a common problem. The next problem is overwhelm. And this can affect us in several different ways. So first of all, it may be that you're trying to work on too many projects all at once.

And when you're working on three, four, five different projects, there's this old saying, the man who chases two rabbits captures none. So if you're trying to spread yourself too thin and you're working on two or three or four different projects all at once, you might make kind of minimal progress on each one, but you're not gonna get to completion on each one because your attention is spread too far. It's. It's distracted. So it might be you start working on one thing, and then you get distracted to start and go and work on the other thing. And that can be really overwhelming. So you're overwhelming yourself by putting too many things on your plate. So when it comes to goal setting, we need to make sure that we are prioritizing what we're working on and limiting the amount of work that we put as well, so that we're working to realistic amounts of work that we can realistically get done within a set period. So we're going to talk about a business roadmap and how many projects maybe you want to work on throughout a year as well. So overwhelm could, could be that. It could be that you're working on too many things. It could also be that you don't know where to start with a really big project. You've got a really big project. Like for example, you need to rehaul your entire pricing strategy. Okay, It's a big job and it's a daunting job and there's lots of things that will get affected throughout all of areas of the business. So it's something that because it's so scary and it's so big and you don't know where to start, you put it off and you say I'll do that next year or let me get this other things sorted first and then I'll do it. And we put it off because we're overwhelmed by how big the project is. So what we can do with those is break the projects down into actionable steps that we can routinely work on on a daily or a weekly basis with literal, step by step that I need to do this first, then this, then this. When we can break it down to that level and it makes that job so much more approachable and more manageable and it's, it lowers that overwhelm feeling that we get where I just can't start that job because it's just too difficult. Okay. So that could be a way that we're being overwhelmed. It's very easy as well to fall into a scenario where you are also overwhelmed with the amount of client work that you have. If you have a lot of clients or you have clients that have lots of work that you have to do for them, it can be that you're so overwhelmed with that work with the day to day runnings of the business and the client work, that you feel like you don't have the time or the capacity to spend that time and dedicate that time on the bigger projects in your business, on making the changes to strategies, on implementing systems, on boosting your marketing and all these kind of bigger goals. You feel like you don't have time to work on those because you're so overwhelmed with all of the day to day runnings of the business. And it's so easy to get stuck into this trap of working in a reactive way rather than a proactive way. So a bunch of client work comes in and you have to drop everything and react and do that work rather than sitting down. Strategically planning, filling out your, blocking your time and, and knowing exactly when you're going to work on each project and proactively planning that out. That's the, that's the way we want to be working so that we've got control over that. We don't want to be reactively working. Okay? So and if that is the case and you've got too many clients, then that is maybe one of your first goals is to try and reduce that workload or boost your prices so that you can manage the extra workload or bring another team member on. You know, review what is going on in your business and make those goals based on what is the priority. If you don't have the time to work on these other goals, then your priority needs to be to free that time up in whatever way it works for you and your business. Okay? So overwhelm is a really big one. We also have potentially no accountability. If you are a solo business owner or you have a really small team or you know, you outsource work or something on, and you're essentially, you're on your own for a lot of that. You might not have anybody holding you accountable for that work other than yourself. Okay? So when you don't have accountability, it can, you can lose sight of the larger goals in your business because like we say, you're doing the day to day work. You're kind of getting the, the day to day grunt work done, but you're not making those routine, frequent strides towards the larger goals that you want for your business. You're just getting the, the bare minimum work done because that's all you can do in that time and nobody's holding you accountable. So especially if you don't have a roadmap or a system that you are need to follow with agenda items and deadlines and tasks that you need to do. If you don't have that and you don't have any kind of accountability, you can, you can simply just get lost on what it is that you need to be doing to reach those goals. You know, maybe you have this goal in your head where in 10 years time I want to be at this point with my business. I want to have this amount of revenue or this amount of clients. But you've no idea on how to get to that point in 10 years because you haven't done the, the working back to make the road map. Okay? And nobody's holding you accountable to work towards those goals on a frequent basis. So another thing as well is that we can lose motivation when we're not held accountable. You know, if nobody's going to check that work, if, if there's not going to be any kind of consequence to it, immediate consequence anyway, we can lose motivation. And maybe it's a project that we would like to do that would better the business, but there are other things that we deem take priority in the day to day. So.

If you lose motivation, often something that really changed my perspective on, on motivation and how to get myself started on new tasks is I actually completely reversed the way I approach that with my mindset and I heard this from somewhere else and I can't remember where. But generally the way we approach work sometimes for most people is you will wait until you're motivated enough to do that task and then you will start that task. So maybe there's a big project that's been sat there and you think, I just, I don't want to get my teeth into it right just yet. I'm just going to wait until that motivation, that drive hits me and then I'll get my teeth into it and I'll do it. And you procrastinate and you put it off because the motivation isn't there. Now what happens is if you flip that around and you start with action, the motivation comes afterwards. So this is the phrase that I heard and that I remember and I kind of live a lot of my work by now. Action breeds motivation rather than the other way around. Don't wait for motivation to strike you to then take action on your tasks. Think of it the other way around. I'm going to do this task for 10 minutes. I'm going to open a file, I'm going to look at some notes that I made, I'm going to do 10 minutes of research, 10 minutes of learning and then I'm going to put it away. And if the motivation hasn't hit you after that 10 minutes, then perhaps it's not a task that you need to be working on. If it's something you can delegate, whatever. What generally happens is once you have got your teeth into that project because we're all entrepreneurs, right? Entrepreneurs, you're hard working people. You, you, you want these projects for your business, you want to do these things. It's just finding the time and getting it done. You want to do those things. So once you've got those 10 minutes into the task, it's so much easier to then just continue and the motivation will come. And I find That a lot with my work, if I've got a big project sat somewhere I really don't want to get started on, I just think, right, I'm going to start it, I'm going to work on it for 10 minutes, I'm going to make some notes, and then normally I'll, I'll look at the clock and I've been working on it for two hours because I just got sucked into it. Okay, so don't rely on that fleeting feeling of motivation, but instead take an action approach first and the motivation will come afterwards. Okay.

Accountability. Going back to accountability as well. Try and find somebody that can hold you accountable. So maybe it is a family member or your spouse, you know, maybe you just have a weekly check in with them and say, hey, can you just check in with me every week to see if I've done these tasks? Because if I know that somebody's going to check on me, I'd almost feel embarrassed if I haven't done that task. And I said I was going to do it. So just ask somebody to check in on you. It could be a member of your team. Maybe you have a meeting every week and you, and you sit down and you say, right, what were the goals? How have we done on those goals? And you have that accountability meeting once a week or once a month. It could just be that you make yourself accountable by factoring in a time on your calendar to sit and reflect on your goals on a regular basis. So maybe once a month for two hours on a Friday, you sit and you go through all of your goals, what you've achieved, what progress you've made, and what you need to be doing in the next month to make sure that you are moving on to that goal. And you, you plan that time into your calendar so that even if you, if it is just yourself working, you've got that, you know, that meeting with yourself to hold yourself accountable where you check in with yourself. Okay, so just finding some way of having that accountability.

And then another one is Carol's just added, actually having an accountability partner. So, so you've got Lynn James is your accountability partner, which is great. So I assume you guys, you know, hold each other accountable for the work that you said you're going to do, which is brilliant. If you can find somebody like that, that you can, you know, hold each other accountable and support each other. That's a really, really great thing to have. So the next reason we might struggle as well is impatience. So maybe we set ourselves a goal, but our expectations on the timeline for that goal is a little bit unrealistic. Maybe we kind of assumed we would have something done within a month, but it's actually a task that might take six months. Maybe it's a task that we don't see the results until we've stuck with it for a long time. So especially for things like social media and advertising and promotion, sometimes you can put lots of things in place, but then it's. It's with time and testing and adapting that those things actually come to fruition and we get the results coming through. And sometimes after the first couple of months, we don't see massive results. So we think, oh, I'm going to give that up or I'm going to massively rehaul that and change that because it hasn't worked. And sometimes we just need to give these things the time to breathe to allow them to happen. And sometimes we just need to, you know, make sure that our expectations of timelines are realistic so that we're not quitting work prematurely before we've given it a chance to actually bring for, you know, bring results. So impatience is another thing where, you know, we think something would happen really quick. We don't get the results quick, we don't get that immediate satisfaction from that, and therefore we give up. Okay? So we want to try and combat that by having realistic expectations for timelines and making sure that we've got an understanding of how long realistically something is going to take to put into place and how long something is going to take to bring the results in as well, so that we've got a realistic expectation. Okay, Another really important thing then for making our goals is to break them down into smaller tasks so that it's more manageable and it's more approachable so we can then work on them bit by bit to achieve those goals. When the goal is something so big, like let's say the goal is you need to build a new website. There's a lot of components that go into doing that task. There's a lot of things that need to happen. So, yes, you want that website and you want it next week, but that's not realistic. You need to work backwards from that and say, well, what things do I need to put in place in order to get that website done? What things can I be doing on a weekly and a daily basis in order to make sure that those things happen? Okay, this is something that's interesting to think about. If you improved just by 1% each day, then because of compounding by the end of the year, you'd be 37 times better than where you started. So those incremental small changes that you can make to your business on a daily basis, just changing something, just improving that system there, that means that the work gets done quicker or just changing the wording on that website, which means people, you know, click on it more or whatever. Just small incremental changes throughout your business on a daily basis can have a really big compound effect by the end of the year. And something that seems so far away, you know, I need to boost my revenue by 50% by the end of the year. That seems like such a massive thing. But if you can make those incremental changes throughout the year, then you will slowly, gradually be working towards it rather than just trying to do that one big jump to get there. Okay, so kind of, you know, have that in mind that those small daily changes can be really, really powerful.

So setting really clear goals is so important. As we mentioned earlier, that lack of clarity can be a real drawback, a real, a real challenge for us. So before, maybe what we said is I want to grow my business, you know, or maybe, maybe even I want to grow my business by 30%. We can get so much more specific with our goals. And I'm going to show you a process that we can go through, but we want to take that goal. I want to grow my business so that it looks a little bit more something like this. I want to increase revenue by 30% in 12 months by expanding my digital marketing strategy. And I'm onboarding 10 new clients. So I now have a metric. I want to increase revenue by 30%. That's something for me to track, to work towards a timeline. 12 months. I want to have this done within 12 months. I've got some level of action of how I'm going to achieve that by expanding my digital marketing strategy. And I also have another metric here as well. I want to onboard 10 new clients and that's going to help me get to that higher revenue point. So that is a much clearer goal that we can actively work towards and track and monitor to, to make sure that we are working towards that goal. So for anybody that put in the comments earlier a goal that they were working on, maybe try implementing this to make it a more, you know, clear goal. What we're going to do is, you may have already heard of this process before, but we're going to create smart goals. So this is S M a R T smart goals. We want to be really specific with the goals that we're setting. It needs to be clear and detailed. Like we just showed in that example, we're going from I want to grow my business to I. I want to grow revenue. I want to improve revenue by 30% in 12 months by onboarding 10 new clients. And be really specific with the goal that you're setting. You also want it to be measurable. So you want to make sure that there are metrics within that goal that you can realistically track and. And that are good indicators of the progress that you're making. So in that previous example, we want to go from growing my business to I want to increase my revenue by 30%. So that is something that we can now track. We can track our revenue, our monthly recurring revenue, or the profit at the end. You know, whatever it is that you. You want to track. There may be several figures that you can track, but you want to make sure that you've got an idea of what metrics you are tracking and.

How they need to improve. So if you want to get 12 clients in a year, then you need to get one client every month. That's the metric that you should be striving for. Okay, so what do we need to do? Break it down throughout the year. If I want 12 clients, I need one a month. So every month you check in, did we get a new client that month? Did we go under? Did we go over? What are we doing that's working? You can refer back to that metric to see what your progress is.

So you also want to set goals that are achievable. Now, we don't want to be boring. We don't want to be mediocre. We do want to set challenges for ourselves. We want to push ourselves and drive to meet these goals. You know, we want these goals to be a good challenge for us, but we also don't want to set goals that are too unrealistic and too high, because that's gonna really demotivate you, and you're just gonna feel unsatisfied and disappointed when you really obviously don't reach them. If you had a goal where you said, I'm gonna 10x my profit by the end of this year, that's crazy. That's really unrealistic, and it's not achievable. And then when you do double your profits by. By that year, you look at the goal that you set, and you said, well, I wanted to 10x them. So I'm not really satisfied with the fact that I want that. I've doubled them, but you've just doubled your profits, which is a crazy amazing thing to do. Okay, so obviously that's an exaggerated example. But when you set your goals too high, it makes it really disappointing for you and unsatisfactory when you don't meet them. So you want to be kind of finding that sweet spot of challenging yourself but not being too unrealistic that it's not something that you can feasibly achieve within the time frame that you set. Okay, so you want those goals to be achievable. And you know, I've used the example there of, of metrics, of, of money if I want, I want to 10x my profit. But also if something's not achievable because maybe it doesn't align with your business, you know, that's not going to be achievable because we don't have the, the facilities for that. You know, you want to grow and franchise your business and you want to set up an offices somewhere or whatever and well, that's not feasible because we're an online business. You know, make sure it's achievable, also make sure it's relevant. So you want to have a good idea, we're talking today really about setting your goals for the next year. But you also really want to have a really clear idea of what your longer term strategy and goals are for your business as well. What's your 10 year plan when you want to be in 10 years and what kind of things do you need to do to make sure that you will reach that point within 10 years? And are the goals that you're setting now for this year, are they going to help you get to that point in 10 years? Okay, so Mark in the academy tomorrow, anybody who's here from the academy is teaching his vision to plan process where he goes through this in a lot of detail. Where he, which is the process that he uses in the business and in his life. He looks at where he wants to be in 10 years time in business, in life and then works backwards from that. Okay, if I want to be here in 10 years time, what do I need to be? What does my life need to look like in five years time, in three years time? And therefore what do I need to be working on this year in order to get myself to that stage? So make sure that your goals that you set for this year are relevant for the bigger picture and that are and that align with the objectives of your business. Okay, make sure it's relevant and you also want to make sure that they are time bound as well. So this is SM s M A R T T is for time bound. We want them to have deadlines and time scales that we can work towards and hold ourselves accountable to as well. If you set yourself a deadline where I need to do this thing within the first quarter of the year, then you can check in with yourself on each month and say, well, what progress are we making? Are we going to make that target and adjust your strategy if things aren't going the way that you expect them to go? Okay, so with that in mind, this smart goal, I'm going to jump over to ChatGPT and I'm going to show you a prompt that you can use to help make your kind of that base.

Goal that was just, I want to boost my, my revenue. How can we turn something like that into a smart goal using ChatGPT? So let me bring this up. So here's the prompts that I'm using. I'm going to kind of go over it briefly, but then we'll look at the results of it as well. So I've given it a Persona. First of all, you are a goal setting strategist specializing in helping users turn their goals into into actionable plans. Your task is to take the input based on the SMART framework and produce a clear goal explanation, a task checklist, and a timeline with an agenda. So with this example and this prompt, I'm actually going to get it to make a smart goal and then also create a breakdown of the work that's needed to meet that goal and then produce a table with timelines and deadlines to make that goal. So I'm doing it all in one prompt. So just to reiterate your task, your task is to generate a clear written explanation of the smart goal based on the provided variables. So we're going to give it the variables, we're going to give it the smart goal, we're going to give it the, the S, the M, the A, R, T, and it's then going to generate me a SMART goal using that information. It's then going to create a breakdown of the work needed to achieve the goal in a checklist format. So it's going to do its own thinking. It's going to brainstorm. Okay. If you want to. I mean, I think the, the first example I'm going to use here is increase monthly website traffic by 20%. If you want to do that. What kind of things are you going to need to implement to get to that point? ChatGPT is going to do that brainstorm for you and put it into a checklist. For you. So you've got a good idea, at least a good starting point. We then want to produce a table with tasks, timeline and a brief agenda for executing these goals. So the next section of the prompt is the variable section. So here it says specific, which is the S of smart. What is the specific goal? And I will input here onto my prompt whatever my goal is with as much specificity as I I can. You know, you don't have to be super specific here because the point of this prompt is to bring that specificity out, but start with it as specific as you can for this variable. So I put we want to increase our monthly website traffic by 20%.

Then we've got measurable what metrics will define your success. Now for this one, I've just put here that I'm going to track that traffic through Google Analytics. Maybe you put the exact metrics that you are going to track. So if I want to increase my web website traffic, I'm maybe going to track the amount of people that land on the page, how long they spend on the page, maybe the bounce rate.

How many people click on a certain social media post to get to that website. Whatever it is, there may be different metrics that I want to look into and, and measure to, to give me a sense of how well that's working.

Make sure your goal is achievable. So why is this goal realistic and what resources are you going to use as well? How, how are you going to get to that point? What's your general idea of how you're going to make that happen? So we're going to implement SEO strategies, we're going to post weekly blog posts and we're going to promote on social media. That's how I'm gonna boost my website traffic.

That's a really loose idea of how I'm going to approach that. We also want it to be relevant. So how does this align with the broader objectives of your business? So I've put in there that this supports the company's goal of generating more leads. So maybe one of your overall metrics that you always track is how many leads you have in the business. I think that's something we, we measure leads, clients.

And a couple of other things. But it's, it's one of the key indicators of, you know, how many people are coming into your business. So yes, this aligns with that general goal. And time bound, what is the deadline for achieving this goal? I've put that I want to achieve this goal by the end of quarter two. I've then given it a structure of how I want it to provide that answer to me. I've given it some rules of, of how it needs to follow that. And then I've given it an example as well of what an example might look like. So I won't go through all that. But that's what I've included in the prompt we now have then. So it's given me the smart goal explanation. It's taken everything that I've told it and just put that into a paragraph which explains what my goal is in detail. So our goal is to increase monthly website traffic by 20%. We will measure success using Google Analytics to track traffic traffic growth. So Google Analysis has a lot of different measurements on there, so that's a good place to measure. To achieve this, we will implement SEO strategies, publish weekly blog posts and promote content on social media platforms. This goal supports the company's broader objective of generating more leads. And the target deadline is end of quarter two. So it summarized that goal all in one place, which is much better than just saying I want to boost traffic to the website. We've now got a clear, really specific goal. We also got a task checklist. So here are a couple of things that you might need to do in order to achieve that. So we've got conduct a website audit to identify SEO improvement areas. Research and document up to date SEO strategies. Optimize the existing website for targeted keywords. Develop a content calendar for the weekly blogs. Write and publish engaging blog posts weekly. Plan and execute a social media promotion strategy. Set up Google Analytics dashboard so that you can track, monitor website traffic weekly and adjust your tactics and then evaluate progress monthly and refine strategies as needed. So if this is something that you know that there are a couple of extra steps actually that we need to do in our business, then you can just add that in here. But this is a really good start for that brainstorm. And now we have a.

A table which has taken those tasks. So the first one there was conduct a website audit. So the task here is conduct website audit. It's given me a start date and an end date, which I think is actually really useful because sometimes you can be working on these.

Over time consistently. And if you just put the end deadline, you know, if I just put I need this to be done by January 15th, then maybe you don't sit and you don't work on it until January 13th or 14th. Whereas if you give yourself that time frame, you know, during this week, this two week period, this is what I'm focused on then it's, it's something that, it kind of drives you to make sure that you are working on that task in that period. It's also giving me a bit of an agenda. So it's kind of, of just expanded on that task a little bit and said if I want to conduct my website audio audit, then my agenda is I want to identify current strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in SEO. So that's something I need to be doing to make that task happen.

I want to research SEO strategies, document updated SEO methods and tools for implementation. I'm going to optimize my website so that, that might include updating metadata, keywords and internal linking for all high priority pages and so on and so forth. And it's got start and end dates for all of those to make sure that I get it done by the end of quarter two, which is end of June. So that's, you know, maybe SEO is not something that makes sense to you. So let's look at another example with pricing. So we teach, in the value pricing academy, we teach you how to price and we know that accountants and bookkeepers are chronically underpricing their services. So it's always a super important thing to be boosting your prices. Okay, so we can use this prompt to give it the, the, the general idea of what we want to do and then it's going to help us create a plan of how to, how to make that goal happen. So it's the same prompt. I'm just changing those variables this time so that I'm giving it a different goal and we can see what it comes up with for that. So what is the specific goal? I want to increase prices by 20% across the board using value pricing. So a big goal. People do it in the academy. They do it 20% across the board. It happens. It's not uncommon. Measurable metrics. So this is going to be. If we want to increase prices by 20% and maybe we want to measure what is the average price point of each client, you know, because if you're using multiple different price points, you want to take an average point for that to make sure that the prices have gone up kind of consistently across the business. You maybe want to be looking at monthly recurring revenue. You may be wanting to be looking at the profit. Okay, there might be different figures in your business that you think, yeah, I really want to make sure. I'm, I'm, I'm tracking those figures because that's going to give me that indication of what, of, of what progress I'm Making achievable. Is it achievable? So we've put, I've just put here, this is, I'm, I'm making all of these up. By the way. 20 is a necessary increase to help us preventing, prevent cutting corners on our client work. And we can use pricing software to assist us with this. So what resources are available? We're going to use pricing software. We're going to use the effective pricing software to help make those price changes. Is it relevant? Yes. This supports our company goal of boosting our profits to 100k a year. What is the timeline for this? By the end of calendar year in 2025. Okay, I've just made all of that up. It may be that you have a different point where you price people from like April to April or something. You know, just put that information in there and then again we've got the out the structure, the rules and the example of how I want it to be laid out. So what it's done is give me a summary of that goal. Our goal is to increase prices by 20% across the board using value pricing. Success will be measured by tracking the average price point of, of clients monthly recurring revenue and overall profit. This goal is achievable as a 20% increase is necessary to maintain quality work without cutting corners. And we have access to pricing software to facilitate this transition. This aligns with the company's broader objective of boosting annual profits to $100,000. The target deadline for achieving this goal is to. It is the end of the 2025 calendar year. So it's then suggested some.

A checklist of tasks that you might approach this task with. You know, something like that might seem like a super daunting project. It might be overwhelming. I've got to change my prices for everybody. And that means I've got to change, you know, my brochures, the sales process, my website in these updates in. You know, it may be that you just think that's such a massive task. All my previous clients know what I charge. How am I going to do that? I need to write a script, I need to write letters, emails, I need to call people. It seems like a massive, massive job. But we're going to break it down and put it into an agenda so that we've got a way of approaching it. We've got a starting point and we've got a step by step instruction. Do this next. Do this next. Okay, so the checklist it's come up with, we want to conduct a review of the current pricing and Client segmentation. So we want to make sure that we understand, you know, how, how we're pricing each client. Research value pricing principles and best practices so that you understand how to make those changes. Use pricing software to calculate new pricing structures. Communicate pricing changes to clients, clients with clear value propositions. Update marketing and sales materials to reflect the new pricing. Train staff on articulating value based pricing to clients. Implement the updated pricing structure incrementally. Monitor financial metrics like the average price, the MRR and the profit. Address client concerns and feedback during the transition and evaluate overall progress quarterly and adjust strategies as needed. So it's broken that task down for me into several different components. We then have this table again as well where it's put that into a perspective with, with timelines. So the first one of review the current pricing and segmentation. It's given me a month to do that. So it's given me From January to 31st of January bearing in mind that this is a task that I wanted to do over the course of the year year. So I've got a little bit more time to work on this. So the agenda is to analyze existing client client pricing tiers and identify any gaps or opportunities. I want to research value pricing principles. So I'm going to study value pricing models and relevant industry benchmarks, calculate new pricing structures. I'm going to use pricing software to create updated value based pricing models, train staff. I'm going to conduct training sessions to ensure staff can communicate the new pricing and so on and so forth. Okay, so that's how ChatGPT can help us to make these goals into smart goals so that we've got really clear good ideas. And then also we're going that level, that kind of next level as well, of making a bit of an agenda of how we're going to attack that, how we're going to approach that. So that kind of goes into this next idea of creating a business roadmap. So let me just bring this back up. We want a business roadmap, so we want goals, but we also want to fit those goals into our calendar year. When are we going to work on each one? How long is each one going to take? How are we going to approach that? So we want to break it down. We're going to start with the year, then we're going to look back at what is the quarterly milestone that we need to reach.

To make sure that we're on target for that goal. Or maybe you have a specific project within each quarter that you work on. What are going to be the monthly objectives in, in, in each of those quarters to make sure that you're reaching those milestones. What are going to be the weekly priorities? To keep those tasks bite sized and stay on track to reach each of the, the monthly and then the quarterly goals. So I'm going to say that you probably don't want to be looking at more than two big projects in each quarter. In, in our business, I think we do two maximum three big projects and there's six of us, I think. So we split that between all of us. But let's say your, your main goal is you want to increase revenue by 30%. You might have different quarterly goals that work together to achieve that. So we want to increase revenue. So quarter one, we're going to work on building our brand awareness to bring more people into the business. Quarter two, we're going to work on launching a new product line or, or improving the service that we have and delivering more value in that service. Quarter number three, maybe we strengthen our customer retention program. So how do we keep them in in for longer? Maybe quarter four, we scale our marketing efforts to take advantage of the holiday seasons. Okay, maybe that's some that, that's a way that we approach that. And again, I'm going to go back to ChatGPT here because we can use a good prompt to make a business roadmap for ourselves that does that and it breaks the task down. So again.

I'm not going to go massively into the prompt, but the task is to develop a comprehensive business roadmap based on the users provided top level goal and quarterly objectives. So it's going to break that goal down into quarterly milestones, monthly objectives and weekly priorities. And it's going to follow certain steps, certain actions and so on and so forth. What it does is there's a variable here at the bottom where I put what my goal is, my general goal. So increase revenue by 30% if you have your smart goal. If you've done that other step first put your smart goal in there where you've got that really clear project, a clear outline and pathway of how you're going to get to that goal. And then the quarterly milestones as well. I'm also putting those in here to kind of direct it on what things we think we need to work on in order to achieve that. So the quarterly milestones I've got here as an example, if I want to increase revenue by 30% in quarter one, I want to reprice my existing clients using value pricing. In quarter two, I want to increase brand awareness and social media. In quarter three, I want to create a lead magnet to bring more people in. And in quarter four, I want to make a move completely to value pricing. Okay. Those are my goals for the year. That's and that's what I'm going to be working on in each quarter. I'm not going to start doing my brand awareness stuff in quarter one. You know, I'm going to try and keep my focus on that one project so that I'm not dividing my attention. And, and you made to change the priority of that based on what's most important in your business and move those quarters the other way around. What is most important in your business and how are you going to attack that and have one project for each quarter? So it's then put this into just it, it's broken it down for me. So here are my quarterly milestones that we've just gone through. We're then going to have the monthly objectives for each of that. So it's, it's saying, you know, it's obviously saying four weeks in a month.

But you know, that might just want slight adjusting for those odd months that have a little bit more or less.

Month number one, we're going to reap. In quarter number one, we're repricing our existing clients. So in month number one we're going to focus on analyzing current client pricing structure. What are we currently pricing? In month number two, we're going to develop communication plan for our clients. We're going to work out how we can communicate this pricing change. And in month number three, we're going to implement it. Okay. And then we've also got a breakdown even further than that. So in month one we're analyzing our current client pricing structure. So what are we doing? We're collecting data on current clients with benchmarking against industry results. You might not want to do that if you value pricing you segmenting clients based on profitability and service complexity. And we are week four, drafting a value pricing framework that is tailored to your services. Okay.

Month number two, we're going to develop that communication plan for clients. So week number one, we're going to create a clear value narrative explaining the pricing changes. So that might be a letter, it might be a meeting that you have. You're going to create the scripts for that. Week two, develop client specific communication templates that, that's the script and stuff. Week number three, plan and schedule those one on one meetings if you can. Week number four, review feedback and refine the approach. Okay. So Maybe this is the period where you're doing a couple of test reprices with some clients. Month number three, we're going to implement that strategy full time. You know, roll it all out. Week number one, we're going to roll out the value pricing model to a test group of clients. Week number two, we're going to monitor client retentions and make real time adjustments. Week number three, expand the rollout to additional clients. Week number four, conduct a review to assess the impact and document lessons learned. Okay. Quarter number number two, increase brand awareness. So month number four of the year, this is what we're going to be working on in each week. In week number one of April, audit your current brand presence, identify gap. So that's, that's the project that you're going to be working on, on that week. Okay. Okay. And you see how this, this all lines out for the entire year. So we've got month four, month five, month six, what are you going to be working on? Month seven is creating the lead magnet. So we're going to move on to doing that in that, in that period. Court number four, we're going to move on to value pricing. We're going to look at different goals in that period. So it's breaking that down and putting it into the weekly tasks. You can then, you know, you can then put that into the, the table that we kind of saw earlier where you take these weekly tasks that you're going to work on and put them into a time frame so that you always have, you know, this is what I'm working on this week. I need to have this done by this time period and slot all of that in there. It may be that you then dedicate a certain amount of time per week to work on those goals. Like on top of, or instead of, you know, client work and stuff, you dedicate a certain amount of time to be working on those things. So just got a couple of good strategies for staying on track is time blocking. So putting that time in and prioritizing that time for you and your business. But, you know, whether it's an hour on a Friday afternoon that you work on that thing or, or two hours once a month, month that you work on that project, however long it's going to take, you factor that time in, have a weekly review or a monthly review where you schedule time to just reflect on the progress that you're making on those goals and adjust any strategy as needed. Because we've not made that goal. So we need to change what we're doing. We need to adjust what has been the challenge, what has stopped us from reaching that goal and how can we.

Get rid of that challenge or overcome that obstacle? Okay, have a review, reflect and adapt your strategy. Also, there's this really useful table which is called the Eisenhower Matrix, which you've probably seen, which is helping you to prioritize your tasks based on urgency and importance. So if something is super urgent and important, then you do that task. If it's not urgent, but it is important, then you schedule that task for the future and make sure that you work on that at another time. If it's urgent but it's not necessarily that important, then can you delegate that work? That work it needs to get done, but maybe it doesn't require your specific skill set. Can you delegate that to somebody else or delegate it to automation? You know, get ChatGPT to write you a bunch of blogs or get ChatGPT to write the website Word, whatever it is. If it's urgent but it's not important, maybe you can bring automation into it or a different team member. If it's not urgent and it's not important, why are you working on it? Delete that. It's a distraction, it's unnecessary. If it's not important to your business, it's not going to have an impact and it's not something that urgently needs doing. Delete it. You don't need to be working on that. Don't waste your time on it. Okay, couple of tools for staying on track. This is just kind of a broad overview automation tools as we seen Chat GPT, there's Zapier which helps your tools talk to each other. Because if you can be automating tasks and improving your workflow, you can get more done in less time. So that really helps with your productivity. You might want a tool like a social media scheduler or an email delivering tool that these kind of automated tools that just help you reach those goals. If those are the goals you're working on. You want something that helps you with organization. So we use Trello, but I know some people like Asana or Notion or something like that which just helps you brainstorm things. It can help you put your planner in in order. We have our weekly planners on Trello. You can also communicate with your team and stuff on Trello and things like that as well. But it helps to organize, put things in order so that you can consistently see what you're working on. We have our big strategic planning we have as a board on Trello so that we can see what our goals Are and we can add metrics and stuff to it and see, you know, check back in and say, what goals are we working on? What progress have we made on those goals? We can check back in on those. Maybe a time blocking tool. This could literally just be your Calendar app. So your Calendar app on your phone or like Google Calendar or something. But you can also get specific apps that will give you reminders or push notifications just to say, have you worked on this thing.

Tracking? So you might just go with a good old Excel spreadsheet or you might look at something a little bit more advanced, get an app that is specific for what you're working on. So if you're, if you're doing website traffic, look at Google Analytics. Okay, Something like that. You want an accountability tool. Then there's one called Focus Mate, which I've never used, but this is what, what came up in the research. Tools that will either connect you with somebody, you know, maybe, maybe you find a tool that will connect you with somebody, that you can find an accountability partner like, like Carol has with Lynn, or you use an app like this, that, that checks in with you. Okay, Collaboration as well. You want to work with your team. So you've got tools like Slack Teams, you know, your email, whatever that might be. Tools that help you track in other areas, financial, budget wise. Okay, Fathom Zero, QuickBooks, that sort of thing. So, okay, we're on the hour, so that's all the content I've got for you. I hope that that has been a good insight. Hopefully, at least. Hopefully. I reckon it's not been anything really new because you, you know how to do these things. You know that, that this is how you need to boost your productivity. But it's really useful sometimes to just have that refresher and to just say, am I doing that? Am I being productive? Productive in that way. Or maybe a strategy that I said, hopefully some sort of strategy that I've said at some point clicked with you and you think, oh, that's a good mindset thing to have. Like, I really love that. Mindset of action breeds motivation. I, I say that to myself almost on a daily basis. If I don't want to do something, I don't want to wash the pots or I don't want to walk the dog or whatever. I just say, no, look, we're just going to do it. We're not even going to question it, we're just going to do it. We're going to start and we're going to go. And then the motivation comes later for me normally. So hopefully something has clicked and and it hopefully helps you plan your goals for 2025. Thanks everybody for being here and I going to play some music to see you out and I'll hopefully see you on another session in the Academy soon or in a live stream next year in2025. So if that is you then Merry Christmas everybody and Happy New Year and I'll see you all in the next year. Thanks guys. Bye.