MBA1574 How To Make Sure Your Business Finishes 2020 Strong

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you no fluff, just the good stuff 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 over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn how to make sure your business finishes strong in 2020. I know you might be thinking, hey Omar, it's July. What are you talking about? Well, it's officially the second half of the year. It's the third quarter of 2020 and if you wait to the fourth quarter, it's far too late. You need to put a whole lot of things in play before then. Actions, planning so you can reap the benefits and succeed before the end of the year. So in today's episode, I want to show you what you can do right now to line up for a strong finish for the end of the year. 2020 has been challenging to say the least. But the best entrepreneurs that I know and have read about, they thrive when everybody gives up, when everybody kind of just calls it a year and says, you know what? 2020 is a wash. No, it's an opportunity. But you can't take advantage of that opportunity if you don't plan for it, if you don't have it front and center. And it's a priority. So we're going to make sure we hold ourselves accountable and have a plan of action to have a strong finish to the year starting right now. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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The thing about time is that it keeps on moving. And if you don't plan for it, if you don't move with it, it will leave you behind. And just like that, we're six months into the year, past six months actually going on to seven months in. We're well into the third quarter of the year and it's time to start hitting the gas. We got to make sure we finish strong. We run through the tape of the finish line of 2020, and that happens right now. This is when we pick up speed. This is when we make sure we dot those eyes and cross those T's. So how do we do it? How do we make sure that we don't get to October and November and start getting nervous that we won't hit our goals for the. Well, the first thing is, is it we have to establish what those goals are. We have to really be clear what we want to get done, what we want to accomplish in our business in the next two quarters. Right? It's really five months, five months to go. So the way I like to do it is I like to do it in quarters. So we're in the middle of quarter three. You have two months left, maybe a little bit more to wrap up this quarter. What do you want to get done in the next two months? What are your revenue goals? What, what are your business goals, your team goals? Are there products you want to launch? Is there a change you want to make in your website? Are there hires you want to make? Get crystal clear about them. I believe that when it comes to short term goals, like two months, you should be able to count Them on one hand. So three to five things you want to get done, that's a little bit of a stretch, but it's doable. Obviously it depends on the size of the goals, but it's enough for you to stay focused on them. You can actually repeat them all off memory, no problem. You're gonna do the same thing in quarter four. So you have three months there. What are the goals you wanna accomplish? Again, quarter four, it should be three to five goals that you wanna accomplish. Whether that's a revenue goal, a business goal, a product goal, whatever it is, you wanna write those down. I always kinda get really conservative in the last quarter because the last quarter's quite busy. We got holidays, things are wrapping up, people go on vacation, we're winding down things. We wanna make sure we leave enough room for us to accomplish what we set out to, to have goals for quarter three and four. Now what? That's not enough. Most people stop right there. Okay, I got my goals. I'm looking at my goals every so often and hopefully I'm gonna hit them, right? No, what you need to do is you need to get people involved in those goals. So who is involved in those goals? Who are the stakeholders? Who are the people that are gonna help you get there, who are impacted? These are most likely teammates. These could be co founders, these could be investors. They could be people in your mastermind group or your coaching group. Sit down and evaluate these goals with them, discuss them, see if we should modify them, add, remove things like that. You want to get people on board because you need the people that are involved to know what you're trying to achieve. You guys all have to be seen from the same song sheet. It can't be confusing. And this is like an announcement. This is like you're putting a stake in the ground and saying, everybody, this is what we're doing. This is what I like to accomplish. What do you guys think? Let's all agree, let's kind of come together on the same mission. Once you've done that and you've kind of finalized these goals for the next two quarters, you want to break down the goals into weeks. So let's take a look. Let's say, for example, for quarter four, and let's say you have four goals for the fourth quarter on average, you should be accomplishing one of these goals every three weeks. And you should be a third of the way of accomplishing that goal every week. So let's make it simple. Let's say one of those goals is a financial goal and you want to increase your monthly recurring revenue by $3,000, okay? That's the goal for that quarter. Okay? So if you're trying to hit that goal, and it depends on when you want to hit it, do you want to hit it in the first few weeks or do you want to hit it by the end of the quarter? Let's say the end of the. That means every month you need to be increasing your MRR by $1,000. You have to know if you're on track or not. What gets measured gets managed. That's what Peter Drucker said, one of the fathers of marketing. Alright? So you have to make sure you're on track and you have to track yourself and hold yourself accountable and you have to hold the whole team accountable that's involved. And look at these goals every time you meet, hey guys, are we on track? Are we hitting that goal? Are we getting closer? It's week two, we've increased our MRR by 300. Okay? We're on track. This is the point. Same thing with any other goal. Whether it's a product goal, like you're trying to launch a new feature or a new product and you have your whole product spec and the whole timeline of that project. Are we a third away into that project by the end of the first month? Or at least you can break down that project into weeks. What should be done by the end of every week? So you hit that goal. You gotta get really micro here because every week we got to make sure we're on track. And if we're not, we need to make sure we get back on track and then some by the next week. We got to hold everybody accountable and make sure everybody understands these are not just goals or whims or wishes. These are actual plans. These are blueprints to getting to the achievement, to getting to where we want to. Otherwise we're going to be high and dry at the end of the year. We're going to be disappointed. We're not going to hit our goal. We want to finish strong. And that means analyzing and holding everybody on the team that's involved accountable and keeping it front and center every single week. So break down your goals by the weeks left in the quarter. So when you meet with your team, you could say, hey, this is where we're at. We're on track. We're a little behind, we're a little ahead. Great, let's keep moving. Let's see if we can blast through this goal. Now you might be saying, hey, Omar, you know, economy's Tough these days. We got Covid. We got a lot of things going on socially and politically in the world. What do we do? Well, I want to kind of remind everybody, including myself, of something. Something's always happening somewhere. Okay, it's just happening to you now. Okay. Everybody deals with something at some point in their life, in their country, in their region. But the best entrepreneurs I know, they hold themselves accountable to these goals. They don't look outside and say, oh, I'm not going to hit these goals because of these exterior reasons. We say we're going to hit these goals despite of these reasons. If you're not making enough revenue or you're not making enough progress with your goals, you've got to think of other creative ways to get there. That's the reason why we remind ourselves every single week to see if we're on track. If we're not on track, we got to get creative. How can we get on track? How can we get more traffic? How can we earn more money? Is there another product we can launch? Can I do something on the side to help out? Can I do some sort of partnership or affiliate kind of situation where I can earn a little bit more revenue? To hit our goals? This is how we get laser focused and make sure we keep everybody accountable on a team so that when we finish the year, that we're proud, that despite what happened around us, we managed to achieve our goals and we finished strong. But the worst thing you could do is to make these goals, write them down on a document somewhere and don't look at them until the end of the quarter or at worst, at the end of the year. That's not what it's there for. It's there for you to kind of look at on a daily basis and a weekly basis at the very least, so you can make sure you are on track. And if not, you can course correct. You can oversteer, understeer, make sure you're doing the right things to hit each micro goal, to hit the macro goal.

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To wrap up today's lesson, you, the leader of the company, needs to take control of finishing strong in 2020. And it starts right now. Plan out your quarterly goals, map out what they look like on a weekly basis. Share with the team, collaborate, get them involved and hold everybody accountable. Bring it up. Make sure it's front and center. And if we don't hit that weekly goal, we course correct. We do something to make sure that we make it next week. We don't give up or just chalk it up for a loss. We keep moving stronger. We figure out other ways to make it happen. Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the show. If you haven't hit subscribe, subscribe right now. Do it right now on whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Whether it's Stitcher Radio or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, we're on them all. By hitting subscribe, you become a big fan of the show. You get our next episode automatically. You also get access to over 1500 business lessons in our archives. Make sure you hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Most of business is about planning and holding people accountable to that plan to implement, to make sure that it goes through one without the other just does not work. You can implement, but if you don't plan, you implement the wrong thing. So make sure you do both. Thanks so much and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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