MBA1691 Should You Set Goals for 2021?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that has your back year after year 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 100 MBA. And today's episode is the last episode of 2020. Yep, we have finally arrived to December 31st and in today's lesson you will learn. Should you set goals for 2021? Many businesses, many individuals set goals at the start of the year. Is this something you should do? Is there a point? Is there a purpose? Is there an alternative? What's the risk of not setting goals? What are the possible benefits of doing so? Well, in today's episode we break all that down as well as my advice to you. When it comes to setting goals, goals are cheap and easy to set. What we're going to do because we're serious about building a successful business, growing our business, scaling it to the next level, we're going to scratch out the word goals and replace it with strategic plan. How do you build one? Well, that's what today's lesson is all about. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. A lot of businesses, a lot of individuals at the start of a year will sit down with a paper and pen and say I want to accomplish this, that and the other thing this year. These could be revenue goals. This could be number of team members. This could be the projects they want to accomplish. But the problem with that, and this is Why I don't recommend goal setting is that by definition it starts and ends with, with you setting a goal. I want this, and that's basically where it ends. Instead, I'm a big believer in building a strategic plan. A strategic plan takes things beyond then I want this. It takes an idea, it takes a reality, which will be your overall goal, and reverse engineers it into quarterly strategic plans, milestones, if you will, markers, actual things you will do to reach that destination. So the first thing we are going to do is we want to set a vision for the year. What state do you want your business to be in by the end of 2021? And this is going to be different for every business. It could be something like, I need a little bit more breathing room. I want to be more profitable. I want to be at least 50% more profitable so I can sleep better at night. For another business, it might be, I want a bigger pie of the market share. I'm currently at 5%. I want to make sure I'm 10% by the end of the year. Now, many of us are going to be tempted to want to do many of these things during the year. What I want you to do is force yourself to focus on one theme, one reality that you want to have at the end of the year, the one that's causing you the most pain that you want to alleviate. Guess what? Next year you're going to choose something else. Let's take the example where you want to take a larger size of the market share. You want to go from 5 to 10% of the market share. That's the theme, that's the reality you want to manifest by the end of the year. How are you going to do this? What are the actions you have to take? What are the things you need to focus on in order to do that? This is when you're going to do a brain dump. You're going to just write down all the things that you can do to make that happen. It might be, I need to improve my product so that I am a competitive product, so I'm a superior product to my competition so I can start taking their customers. So I need to work on product development. I also need to do a better job promoting my product and really selling and describing the benefits on my website through my content. So you might want to double down on content marketing, double down on your website design. That will also help you gain more market share. Well, you also want to say, hey, I want to get new customers from different markets, so let me start doing some partner Webinars or doing some partnerships so that I can get in front of audiences that haven't heard about me. I might want to implement a product led growth strategy where I offer a free trial to lower the barrier of entry to get more people through the door. As you can see, I'm listing a whole bunch of things that will get me closer to that reality, to get me closer to that 10% market share. What you're going to do now is look at that list and you're going to put them in order, in the order of impact. How much impact will any of these tasks have on you reaching the goal? Some will have a bigger impact than others. So put the one that has the biggest impact as number one and then go down in descending order. So now you have your marching orders. Now you know how you're going to get to your reality at the end of 2021, your overall big goal. You know, this is what you have to do. Now when are you going to do it? It's not just enough to know what you're going to do to accomplish the goal, but you have to know when you're going to do it. You have to actually allot it, time bound it so they actually happen. This is going to allow you to have milestones and I rec to do quarterly milestones. That means every three months you have to hit a certain number of these. Some of these are going to take longer or require more effort. So you might have just one milestone, one task in one quarter, but some quarters you'll have three. So you basically farm out or you divvy out these tasks to get you to that goal into each of your quarters. So January through March is your first quarter, April through July is your second quarter. You get the point. And you can compile all this. You can write all this out in a word doc or in a Google Doc. This is very simple to do and this is important to document because you're going to refer to the strategic plan regularly throughout the year to make sure you're hitting your goals, to make sure you're hitting the milestones to hit the goal. Here's another step that a lot of people do not do. As you're writing down the tasks you have to do each quarter, under each task, ask yourself the question, what's going to stop me from achieving this task from completing this task? What are the blockers? What are the things that are going to hinder me from completing them? For example, I might want to introduce a new free trial. That's one of my Tasks for the quarter. What are some of the things that might block me from doing this? Well, you might need to hire a developer. You might now have a full scope of how long it's going to take in terms of development hours. Write down what worries you so that you can come up with solutions to them before you get started. So, you know, hey, I need to hire a developer before the second week of January or by the end of January so they have enough time to develop what they need to develop so I can release the free trial, announce it, market it by the end of the quarter. As you can see, as we mapped out our strategic plan, this is something completely different from goal setting. Goal setting is just something that you'd like to have. This is a plan of action. This is stepping stones and milestones to get there. This is going to increase your likelihood, it's going to increase your confidence, and it makes failure not an option because you're actually just doing the work to get there. So why do people not do this, create a strategic plan? Why do they do goal setting instead? Well, honestly, it's more work, it's going to take more time, it's going to challenge you more, it's going to ask you hard questions, it's going to require you to commit and everybody who's involved. And this is what creates this resistance. But I have to tell you, I've been doing this for a couple of years now, and this is a whole lot better than goal setting. This allows you to have a game plan. You know exactly what you have to do, and now it's just implement. You even know what challenges are ahead so you can preempt those challenges. And it's such a satisfying feeling at the end of each quarter where you cross off the things that you accomplished and you see yourself getting closer and closer to the goal, to what you want at the end of the year. And often a lot of the people that use strategic plans will hit the goal, like the 10% market share, even before the end of the year. So I highly encourage you to create a strategic plan instead of goals for 2021 to wrap up today's lesson and to wrap up our last episode of 2020. Your business means the world to you. You have sacrificed. You have put so much time and effort, thought you dreamed of your success. Your identity is wrapped up into deserves more than a wish list. It deserves more than some hopes and dreams on a piece of paper that you call goals. It deserves strategic planning. It deserves time, thought. And in my opinion, this is a five to six hour event. Okay. This is a long time to put this together, this document. You might have to break this up into a couple sessions, maybe a couple days, but it's well worth it because then this document serves you and your business for the rest of the year. You have a clear, clear plan to how you're going to spend your resources, spend your time, your energy for the rest of the year. There's no if, ands, or buts about it. This actually relieves a lot of stress throughout the year because you don't have to revisit things over and over, discuss. Hey, what do we want to do now? No, you've already planned out the year. It's already there. You know exactly what you have to do, when you have to do it, in what order. And what are some of the challenges that will come about thy ticket lady, Jennifer of Coolidge.

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You. I'm so proud of all of us for making it to the end of the year. Sane, healthy, hopefully. I wish you guys all the best in 2021. And I want to let you know that me and the whole team are all here for you. We're here. We have your back. We're going to be supporting you throughout the year with new lessons, with new episodes, with new, with new ways to improve your business, to grow to scale and feel proud of what you built. That's it for me today, guys. But one last thing I want to leave you with before I wrap up the episode. Without a doubt, wherever you are in the world, 2020 was a challenging year. As they say what doesn't kill you makes you grow stronger. It's been really challenging for all of us, whether it's in business, whether it's been personally difficult, you know, juggling family life, being at home, Covid affecting our social life, affecting our families, you know, on a personal level. My uncle Mahmoud passed away from COVID earlier this year. And it was a very, very challenging time for me and my family coming to grips with the reality of how serious, you know, how serious this situation was. But situations like that, whether it's in business or in life, will always give you perspective, will always give you a chance for you to have a little bit more gratitude, to value your health, to value your family, to value your life. It's a blessing, really, to have the opportunity to have a chance to do something, whether it's to build a business, to grow an audience, to earn an income and support your family. It can hurt in the moment, but it will make you stronger. So even though we're wrapping up a challenging year, there will be more challenges ahead. Know that for a fact. Life is always going to give you challenges. But don't try to avoid them or avoid the feelings that come with them. Embrace them. Understand that at the end of the day, we can learn, we can grow, we can build from these challenges. Thanks so much for being amazing listeners in 2020. I will see you tomorrow. We don't skip a beat in 2021. Have a good one. I'll see you then. Take care.

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