MBA1161 How to Deal With Not Reaching Your Goals

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to The Hunter, the $100 MBA show business strategies you can actually use every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to deal with not reaching your goals. It's the end of the year, we're winding down 2018 and and for many of us we're looking back at the year. We're looking back at the goals we set at the start of the year. And for some of us we're gonna notice that hey, we didn't reach all our goals. This is particularly painful when you're growing a new business because you're working your butt off and it can be somewhat disappointing and even depressing if you realize, hey, I didn't hit the mark, I didn't hit the goals that I set out for myself at the start of the year and you can easily start to really get into a funk, a state you just don't want to be in where you lose enthusiasm for your business and your entrepreneurial journey. So in today's episode we're going to focus on how to deal with the fact that you didn't reach your goals, this is bound to happen. And that's because it's quite common for us to set ambitious goals and not reach them. There's nothing wrong with setting ambitious goals. You should stretch yourself. But how do you evaluate that failure? How do you learn from it? How do you actually get something positive out of this situation so you can improve upon yourself, your business, and take on the next year with a little bit more wisdom, a little bit more insight, and a little bit more clarity on what works and what doesn't for you and your business? If you're listening to this and this resonates with you, hey, you got a bunch of goals that you know you didn't hit. Whether they are sales targets, leads, the number of customers you have, the traffic you're getting to your website, whatever it is. Today, you're gonna learn how you can take this negative and turn it into a positive. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. At the start of the year, we often set goals. We set goals for our business, for ourselves, and we set out throughout the year to try to achieve these goals. For today's lesson, we're going to focus on business goals, not personal ones. Now, I highly recommend that if you are going to set some goals that you don't set too many, you want to be able to focus on one, two, max, three goals throughout the year. And these goals could be specific, like add a certain functionality to your product or a customer service rating that you want your team to get from your customers or straight up sales. How much money do you want to make by the end of the year? Having a few but simple goals allow you to focus. Now, not reaching these goals are not necessarily a bad thing. You need to really look beyond the surface. Say, for example, you set the goal of saying, I want to make $100,000 in sales by the end of the year, and you're wrapping up the year and you're around $75,000, you didn't hit your goal. Now we're going to look at why you didn't reach that goal. But we also have to just take a moment and pause and realize, hey, where did we start out? If we started out at 20,000 and we reached 75,000, that's pretty good progress. We made progress. It's not like you didn't make any progress on that goal. There's a reason to celebrate. There's a reason to recognize that, hey, you worked hard and you got a result you may have not gotten the perfect result, you're looking for the a hundred grand, but you got close or you are working towards that. The second thing is, when you set that goal, did you feel like it was a bit of a stretch? Was it a bit ambitious? If so, that's a good thing. Like they say, if you shoot for the moon, worst case scenario, or land amongst the stars. So it's okay that you came up a little bit short, you still made progress, you're still winning. But we have to take a look at why we didn't reach the goal. What were the circumstances or what happened that didn't allow us to hit that target. And in my experience, it really boils down to two things. Either time or attention. You didn't have enough time or. Or you didn't dedicate enough attention to this goal. Notice I didn't say money. For the most part, people don't reach their goals. Not because lack of funds, because most of the things that you can do to grow your business just require time and attention. Yes, you need money to run a business, that's a given. But to grow your business, to make the right hiring decisions to have better customer satisfaction, these things take time and attention. Did you allow enough time for you to hit that goal? Did you dedicate enough time? Did you give yourself enough attention? If you're working a full time job and you're, you know, maybe spending 10 to 15 hours a week on this side hustle, and you're looking to make 100 grand at the end of the year, and you're spending 10 to 15 hours a week on the side hustle, and you're looking to make 100 grand a year off of it. That's very ambitious. And you may have not just had enough time to fulfill that goal. Now, the reason why we're analyzing this is so that when we set our new goals, we can be a little bit more precise so we can know what it takes to reach the goals. So it's not enough just to say, hey, these are my goals. You gotta ask yourself, how am I gonna get there? What's the game plan? What's the action plan for me to actually get to that goal to reach those goals? Let me give you a real example. Our company, Webinar Ninja, our software company, we had the goal to reach 95% customer satisfaction, overall customer satisfaction. That means every time we close a customer service ticket, our customers would get an email to rate their experience. And the way our system rates it is with emojis. Awesome is like A smiley face with star eyes. Great is a smiley face. Satisfactory is like a face with just a straight mouth. Right. Just a serious face. Not good is a frowny and really bad is an angry face. Right. So when they reply to that email and just click one of those choices. So for us happy customers is a smiley face or a starry eyed smiley face. So our goal is to have 95% of all the ratings to be either of those two. They're super happy with their service and we dedicated a lot of time and money to get there. We knew that this is a big goal. We knew that we had to take it in stages and we knew we were, you know, a bit far off that. But we knew it would really help our company if we hit this target. So we thought, hey, how do we hit this target? What do we need to do? Well, first of all, he's like, we need fast response, we need good response. Right? We need people responding properly and like a human and friendly and really helpful to our customers. So that required us to hire new customer service agents to spend a lot of time to train them to make a really good hire when it comes to our customer service manager who's going to help manage the team. But it also means improving the product itself because customer service only could do so much. If they're not happy with the product, they're going to give a bad rating. So we wanted to make sure that we clean up any issues, we improve the product and add features that our customers are looking for. We work with the support team and the development team to make sure that, you know, bugs are fixed quickly, as well as the fact that customer services recommendations for improvement are implemented on a regular basis. So all these things, you know, take our time and attention. We really need to focus on this. Hey, I really need to focus on making these great hires this month. I need to focus on training. I need to focus on you know, getting these, you know, bugs or issues that we had that customers are complaining with to get fixed as fast as possible and that will result in hitting that target. Luckily, we did hit that target this month just in the nick of time. But it was a steady growth and it was pretty predictable. We knew that we were going to able to hit it because we know we went from, you know, 89 to 90 to 91, back to 90, then 92, then 93. You get the point? And we would see the effects of the efforts and the time and attention that we're putting into it. So when you look at the goals that you haven't hit analyze. Why? What was your game plan? So next time around, when you set your goals, you have a game plan and you are dedicating the time and attention you need to hit those goals. Now, the next thing I want to mention is critical. It's super important when you're analyzing why you didn't hit your goals. It's very important for you to do this when you're not in a stressful state, when you're not tired. You need to come at this with a positive attitude, with an optimistic attitude. You got to think to yourself, hey, how can I learn from this? How can I take this as a learning opportunity and a challenge to get better? Easy for you to get down on yourself and feel really horrible about your business if you don't hit your goals. Even if you come close to hitting them, you only really fail if you don't learn anything. You need to make sure that you learn from the experience and you don't repeat it. Part two is very important. Don't repeat it. Remind yourself what it takes to achieve those goals.

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Remember, goals are what you set. You control the boundaries, you control. You know the rules of the game. So my advice is when you make annual goals, don't just make an annual goal. Make micro goals. Break down that goal into a monthly goal. So if you're looking to make 100k in sales, how much money do you need to make every single month to hit that? What kind of growth we're looking at? Set some milestones for yourself. Without a game plan, without an action plan, without some practical steps, it's really just a wish, a whim. And as an entrepreneur, we don't do that. We don't play that game. We play the game of results, right? We play the game of I do this. I get that. So if you haven't hit your goals this year, not all is lost. Learn from why you didn't hit those goals. Take a look. Take an honest look with yourself. You don't have to share this with the world. You could just have a conversation with yourself and take those learnings and apply them to your new goals. And don't forget to evaluate how much progress you've made. If you made zero progress, then really you need to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what are you doing? Do you really want to do this? But if you made some progress, you need to recognize that and that recognition can motivate you to achieve bigger goals in the future. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. I hope this helped. If you love what you hear, leave us an iTunes rating and review. I'd love to hear from you. Everybody who leaves us a review enters our weekly random draw to win a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, my $500 course on how to build your own online course every Friday. So if you want to win it, just leave us a review and we do a weekly random draw on Friday. We call it free Ride Friday. You might hear your name and you win it absolutely free. If you don't win this week, no problem. You enter the draw automatically for every week until you win. All you got to do is leave us a review on itunes to be a part of it. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I'm very goal oriented and if I'm going to be quite honest, I see a lot of my self worth embedded into how much I've achieved. What kind of significant things have I done this past year or this past decade? So it's very easy to be hard on yourself, but know yourself. Know your limits. It's okay to be hard on yourself, but understand there's only so much, you know, tough love you can give yourself. You got to balance that with encouragement. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode for Yard Friday. I'll see you then. Take.

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