Ep 29 - Effective Goal Setting for CEOs: How to Follow Through and Achieve

Do you find yourself setting ambitious goals at the beginning of the year, only to lose sight of them as time goes on? If so, I want you to know you're not alone. And on this episode, I'm about to unlock the secrets of effective goal setting for CEO. Diving deep into the art of goal setting and, more importantly, how to follow through and achieve those milestones. It all comes down to strategy. Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, get ready to revolutionize your approach to goal setting. It's time to turn your aspirations into tangible achievements.

Are you that driven entrepreneur tirelessly working 24/7, believing that working harder holds the key to your dreams? Are you drowning in the day to day tasks, wishing you had more time to strategize and cast the vision for your business growth. Hi, and welcome to the CEO Amplify podcast.

I'm Donna Dube, your guide on this entrepreneurial journey. As a fellow entrepreneur, I've walked in your worn out shoes, burning the midnight oil, convinced that sheer hard work was a secret to success. Just 1 more email, 1 more task, 1 more push until I found myself on a one way track to burnout. But here's the twist in the tale. I discovered that success isn't just about working harder. It's about working smarter. The elusive key lies in being intentional and purposeful with your time. It's about steering our ship with focus because no team, no system, and no automation can outperform a lack of direction.

In this podcast, I'm sharing with you all the strategies for business growth that it took me years to learn so that you don't have to. If you're ready to step out of the daily overwhelm so you can amplify your profits, then I'm ready to teach you. I believe that the only limit to your business growth is the one you set for yourself. So if you're ready, go grab a notebook, warm up that cup of tea, and let's do this.

My series on how to plan a successful year as a CEO - this is episode 4 in the series, and if you haven't reviewed the 3 previous episodes, I highly encourage you to go back and do that. That really sets the groundwork for this episode and how we're gonna move forward. Alright, so as we kick off the new year, I know many of us are reflecting on the goals we set in the previous year and gearing up to establish new goals for for 2024.

It's a familiar ritual all entrepreneurs go through, but here's the thing. It's often easy to set goals. The real challenge lies in following through and achieving them. Agree? I have to admit in my earlier years of entrepreneurship, I too was guilty of this, where I found it easy to set a revenue goal. You know, I just pick a number over the sky or pick a number that was a little bit higher than what I did last year, but I didn't really dive any deeper to explore how I would reach those goals. And I certainly didn't map out a strategy and a plan for how to reach those and so was I able to follow through and achieve? Not very well. And so today I wanna share with you a little bit about my on how I plan out and follow through to be able to achieve the goals I set for myself at the beginning of the year. Before we dive into the how to's though, I want to address the big elephant in the room.

Why is following through on goals so, so difficult? Well, for starters, for some of you, it could be a love/hate relationship. Setting goals itself could be a love/hate relationship. Possibly you've set goals in the past and haven't been able follow through and haven't been able to achieve them, so you're of the mindset that setting goals is actually a waste of time. You set ambitious goals, but as the year progresses, these goals may end up buried in some Google document in your drive somewhere in a digital graveyard, untouched and basically forgotten. Some of you might be in that boat, but it goes a lot deeper than this because as entrepreneurs, we're often inundated with the day to day demands of our business. From putting out fires to managing a laundry list of tasks, it's really easy for those well intentioned goals to slip through the cracks. In this online world, we have the ever evolving landscape of entrepreneurship.

Markets shift, our customer needs change, new challenges arise, and sometimes it makes it hard to stick to the original plan that we had. Without the right training, strategies, and adaptability, our goals can become obsolete before we even get a chance to pursue them. So the real reasons behind us being able to set goals, but not being able to follow through stem from a lack of support, accountability, and proper training. I mean, consider a small business owner. You excel possibly in marketing, but you struggle to find the time to implement the strategies needed to achieve your goals. You lack a dedicated support system and accountability that can actually make those goals that you set seem like distant dreams. And today, I want to dive into a new way of setting goals. It involves systems, it involves strategies, and it involves support to help you achieve your goals.

So first thing we're going to do is do a little brainstorm, or a brain dump as I like to call it, I want you to take a piece of paper, a Google Day, whatever is convenient for you, and and I want you to brainstorm all the potential goals that you have for this upcoming year. Now there's no limits here. I just want you to write. No editing, no erasing, no thinking twice. If something comes to mind, put it down on paper. And I want you to consider all the different areas of your business as you're doing this. Meaning, I want you to consider your marketing, I want you to consider your sales, I want you to consider your delivery, and I want you to consider your operations. Those are the 4 systems or categories, if you want to call it that we need to have running in our business to be able to have an effective and growing business.

When we have strategy set up for each of these 4 areas, that feeds into helping us reach our revenue role. Because the truth of the matter is, we can all say "I want my revenue goal to be $100,000, I want my revenue goal to be $500,000, I want my revenue goal to be $1,000,000 this year." But if we don't have strategies and a plan in place, we're driving without a GPS. We've got a number out there in the sky, but we have no way of how we're gonna get there. And so by going through and writing down all of the goals that you can think of, of all the potential goals you can think of, keeping in mind these 4 systems in your business, sales, marketing, delivery, and operations, making sure that you have goals that fit each of those areas. Alright.

So take a pause the audio, go and write down and have a brainstorm of all your ideas. If you think that this is going to take longer, set a timer. Set a timer for 10 minutes and just write. Okay, welcome back. I hope you've got a list now of all potential goals. Now we're gonna pinpoint each of those 4 systems in our business, and make sure that we have a goal and a system in place that can be rinse and repeat. That means that you know what you're doing each and every week. Your team knows what they have to do each and every week, and is running like like a well oiled machine in the background.

So let's start with marketing because that's a big area for all of us, no matter what our business is, marketing is part of the game. And so I like to break marketing down into 3 categories, captivate, connect, and cultivate. Now most of us probably think of cultivate when we think of marketing, that nurture strategy that building the know, like, and trust. But the other 2, captivate and connect, are just as important. So let's start at the top. Captivate is how we're going to attract new people into our world. So there's different ways that new people can find us. They they can find us in a Google search using SEO, they can find us through word-of-mouth, they can find us when we're in front of other people's audiences, they can find us from referrals, they can find us from ads.

And so when you look at all of those, I want you to pick out a goal that you have for yourself and your business on how you are going to captivate, how you are going to attract new people into your world. So you're going to pick 1 strategy, and you're going to achieve 1 goal in that area. And I want that goal to be SMART. I think we've all heard this according before, that it needs to be measurable, there needs to be a timeline on it, so that as time progresses throughout the here, we can measure where we're at in reaching that goal. This goal needs to stay front and center. We need to have a process and a system set up for how we're going to achieve this goal. I'm gonna go through some examples to show you what I mean by this, but first, I just wanna get through the three pieces of the marketing system, and then we'll dive deeper into actual examples. So the 2nd piece is connect.

How do we engage with those new people after they've come into our world? So for many of us in the online world, that could be an exchange of contact information. Right? They might join our email list in return for getting some value from us. They may request a consult or request a proposal for something, whatever that looks like for you and your business. But how are you going to engage with that audience now that they've heard about you. So we wanna make sure that we have a system set up behind the scenes that will run effectively week after week after week so we can reach our goal in this area. And then the 3rd piece of marketing is cultivate. This is our nurture strategy. So once people have exchanged their information, they've come into our world, how now are we going to build the know, like, and trust with them? How are we going to bring them value each and every week on a consistent basis so that they get to know us? And so when it's time to then sell to them, to invite them to work with us, that relationship has already been built.

Alright. So 3 pieces of our marketing system, captivate, connect, and cultivate. Our next system is our scale system, and this is what I like to call convert. So this is where we're inviting people and actually making the sale. We have to have a plan in place for what we're going to be selling and when in in our business, and if you roll back to a previous episode in this series, I went through a 12 month plan then for profit. How do you set yourself up to sell and market your different programs, offers, and services over the next 12 months? So this is gonna be really important as we look at what our convert strategy is. And then the the 3rd system that we need to look at is delivery. And this is what I like to call celebrate.

So how do we delight? How do we deliver the profit, program, or service that we promised when people purchase from us, and how do we guarantee and make sure they get the transformation and the results that we said they would get? And so we wanna make sure we have a system in there for onboarding them, for working through them, for reaching milestones with them. And then when the service or program or offer is finished, how we then off board them, receive a testimonial, all that good stuff. So we wanna make sure we have that place for each one of our offers that we have in our business. Alright. So let's dive a little deeper now into the plan any aspect of this. So when we have our list of our goals, we wanna be able to pick 5 top goals for the no more than 5. And for some of you, that might feel very limiting, and I'm sorry if it does, but I want to be able to choose life goals and effectively complete them. If we happen to complete those goals before the year is done, great.

Now we can go go and pick some other goals to do for the rest of the year, but I find 5 goals as effective to start with and to keep us moving. And so if you think about the 5 stages that I just talked about, we wanna make sure that we have a system and a goal in place for each of those captivate, connect, cultivate, convert, and celebrate. If any of those areas doesn't currently have a rinse and repeat system in in your business, then that's where you wanna start when you're setting up your 5 goals. So if I don't have a system in place for attracting new people into my audience, then that's gonna be one of my goals. Setting up a system, having it measurable, and be able to track how how I'm bringing in new people into my audience. Okay. If I don't have a system in place already for connecting, for engaging, and exchanging that contact information, then that's gonna be one of my goals. If I don't have a system in place for celebrating and delighting and delivering my product, onboarding and offboarding in testimonies, then that's going to be one of my goals for this year. So the foundation is to set up a rinse and repeat system for each of these 5 areas in our business.

Once we have that in plan, and it's working, and we can measure it, then we can go on and explore other goals that we might have. Right? I'm sure you have other goals, writing a book, starting a charity, making a new offer, whatever the other goals are, we wanna make sure that the foundation is there first. I'll give you example of this. I started a podcast back in August of 2023, before I started the podcast, I had to do some real thinking and set up a system and a process in place so that I could be successful at doing this podcast. We know there are tons of millions of podcasts in the world, but when you actually look at the statistics, many of them don't get very many episodes out, and many of them stop. And the reason being is they didn't take the time to set up a rinse and repeat system. They didn't take the time to set up a process so that this could be done effectively week after week in their business. Right? So I have a system in place.

Obviously, I record the episodes. I have a small team who will help me then edit the audio, prepare it for the, podcast stations, set up some social we oppose, set up an email, all that behind the scenes. That happens each and every week. But I needed to do some back work first to be able to set that up. If I just dove in and said, yeah. I'm gonna do a podcast, not knowing how many times I'm going to record, how that's going to look, how it's gonna be edited, when it's gonna be released, all those things, then I'm setting myself up for failure. And so it's really really important that we have the foundations in place first, and then we can layer on another strategy. So let's look at this in more detail.

If we're going to be looking at captivating, so attracting a new audience again, there's different ways we can do this. We can use SEO. We can use other people's audiences. We can use referrals, ads, etc. I'm gonna give an example of using other people's audiences. And for this example, I'm going to say that I want to do podcast guest interviews. So it's not enough to say I want to get on podcasts as guests. I want you to dive deeper than that.

What type of podcast? Who is your target audience? What kind of podcast are you going to pitch to? How are you going to pitch? How many are you going to pitch? What's the goal of how many you wanna get on per year, etc. Yes. We have to dive into these details, friends, because the truth is when we lay out these details, now it becomes easy. It becomes rinse and repeat because we know what we're doing, we know where we're edit. So for me, let's say I wanna get on 26 podcasts a year. So I wanna be on other people's podcasts, and I want 26 in the year. Now I can do simple math and figure out how many I need to do each quarter and how many I need to do each month. And from there, I can figure out how many do I actually need to pitch to, because obviously not all the ones that I pitch to I'm going to get accepted on.

And then what's that process for pitching? Am I doing that? Do I have a team member to help me? Am I going to pay an outside, company to help me pitch these podcasts, what's that gonna look like? Do I have a templated pitch? What is my pitch going to look like? If I need to do some research, do I have time set aside in my week to research certain podcasts and be able to pitch them? Right? So at the end of the day, you want a goal that's clear and measurable. So I wanna get on 26 podcasts next year. I'm going to pitch 75 of them, and every week I'm going to pitch to x number. Right? Just do simple math and break it down. Now we have a land in place that can be measurable. So at the end of the week, I can see, yes, I had time. I put time in my calendar. I pitched to this number of podcasts, I heard back from this number.

I'm getting 1 a week. Great. And then we need to decide when we're on that podcast, what's gonna be the resource? Where are we going to direct those those listeners to find us because remember, the point of this podcast interview was actually to attract new people to our audience. So we wanna make sure we don't lose those listeners along the way. Right? So we give them an opt in, we exchange some value for their email, and they get a taste of what we have to offer. Alright. Next piece. So that's an example of how we would have a goal for captivating or attracting new people.

Number 2, connecting, so engaging. Well, I just went through that a little bit. Day you have a lead magnet? Do you have a lead magnet that is targeted for your audience? Does it give them a quick win? Do you have a simple link that you can if when you're life on a podcast to be able to say head on over to right? So you wanna have those things in plan. And then once the person gets your lead magnet, do you have a welcome or nurture sequence that they get after that? Again, if you already have this in your business, growth, this doesn't need to be a goal. If you don't have it in your business, that needs to be one of your goals for 2024. Or if you want to tweak or adjust it. That can be one of your goals for 2024. Alright.

The 3rd step is cultivate. So how are we going to nurture? What's going to be your strategy for nurturing these new people that got into your audience. For some, it might be a weekly newsletter or a weekly blog. For some, it might be a podcast, for some, it might be going live in a certain group, whatever that looks like for you. As an example for me, I'm using my podcast as a way to nurture the people in my audience. So I have chosen for the year, I would like to have 52 episodes per year, so I need to ensure that I have 1 episode recorded every week. And then I need to spend a little bit of time looking at how am I going to do that. Am I gonna set an hour aside every week to record that podcast, am I going to batch them and record every 3 weeks or once a month? I'm going to record for 4 episodes, what's that going to look like? Is it going to be all solo episodes, or am I gonna have guests? If I'm going to have guests, what's that process of inviting the guest, getting sure they're making sure they're on, and then figuring out their release date.

So ensuring that we have a strategy and that that goal can be measured. So by saying, I wanna do 52 podcasts a year, I have to take into account when I might when I have a break or a holiday. Right? For example, we just had December, so I batch recorded several episodes it's ahead of time so that over Christmas and New Year's, I could take a break, and I didn't need to be doing recording of podcast episodes. I I hope you're getting where I'm going with this. Alright. Next step is our sales system, our invite system. We want to be regularly inviting people to take the next step and to work with us. So whether that's filling out an application, whether that's having a conversation, whatever that looks like for your business, you wanna make sure that you're doing that regularly.

And so I've gone through this a couple of times in some other episodes, but, really, this is pointing back to our 12 month profit plan. How are we going to market and sell different offers within our business throughout the year? And then the last section here is looking at delight. Setting up a clear process in place so that we can support and guide the people who have reached into their pocket and spent money with us. We wanna have a clear goal of how they're going to get the results that we profit them. We wanna have core systems in place so that their introduction to us and to working with us is smooth. Right? So think about your onboarding, think about when you're working with them, certain milestones, think about offboarding when you finish with them, getting those testimonials, etcetera. Alright. So we've done our brainstorm, we've looked at our 5 the systems that we need to have in place, and making sure that we have a goal attached to each of those systems life we don't already have something that's running rinse and repeat.

Narrowing down the focus to these 5 areas really helps us to get real momentum. It really helps us see what is going to take to make it happen within our business, the systems, the habits, the tools, the processes, the training or support life needed for our team or for us. And so as you're thinking about each of these goals, I want you to think through key milestones or action steps that you need to take to reach each of these goals, and you can jot some notes down beside the goal. This is how we're going to set ourselves up for success. We have goals that are based on having a strong foundation in our business. The goals are smart and measurable. We know exactly how many times we need to do it, how many ways we need to do it. We know what the clear strategy is.

And just a few reminders I want to point out as we finish up this episode: Role setting is not an all or nothing. You set goals at the beginning of the year. I want you to pace yourself. I want you to realize that some goals are going to be easier to achieve than others. Some goals are gonna be easier to follow through on than others. And it's okay if we get to the end of the year and we didn't reach one of our goals. If we're still working on reaching that goal, that's okay. Pace yourself and give yourself structure.

By setting up these foundations and working through what action steps need to happen to make this goal achievable, you're giving yourself structure to follow. Right, again, back to I wanna have 52 podcast episodes a year. If I just say I wanna have 52 podcast episodes a year, and then I turn around and I record 8 of them all at once, and then I'm exhausted, and then burnt out, and I don't know what I'm gonna do next, and then I leave it for a week, another week, another week, a month, a couple of months. I'm now falling off the wagon of being consistent to be able to reach my goal. But if I say I want 52 episodes a year, that means I need x number of episodes per quarter, that means I need x number per month. How am I gonna get those done? And I set up a plan. I'm can now be much much much more successful. Think of it if you've ever tried to, you know, run a marathon, or do a long run, or do something physical that you're not used to.

I've never run a marathon, but I have done the Couch to 5K program. Now if I had just decided, I'm gonna start jogging, and just went out there and jogged, I would not be very successful. I might if made it for a while the 1st couple of days, but then my body would have start to ache and pain, and I would have said, oh, I need a break, and I might not have ever gone back to it. But when I set up a plan and a habit, I bought new shoes. I had a set time of the day when I was going to do this exercise. I knew where my track was where I was going, where I was gonna do this jogging, and I had a system, couch to 5k, to progress me each each day. Today, you do this. Tomorrow, you do that.

Then you have a rest. Then you do this. Then you do that. So it was small small goals that I achieved each day, yeah, sometimes I didn't achieve the goal. I had to walk longer than I wanted to. But each day, I worked at it until it became a habit, until it was part of my routine, until I I made that 5 kilometers, and then I could go out and run 5k freely as I wanted to. It was about incrementally building and building and building and getting momentum. But without those systems or support structure in place, I certainly would have fell defeated right out of the gate, and I don't want that to happen to you with the goals that you set for 2024.

Remember that we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, while we underestimate what we can accomplish in 5 years. So take that big audacious goal, break it down, set it down into measurable scale bite sized pieces, and start chipping away at it. A big big big thing that comes into play for us as entrepreneurs is this shiny object object syndrome. So we've set our 5 goals. We know what they are. They're measurable. We've got little pieces to work on, but then, oh, a squirrel. Oh, a shiny object, and we wanna jump and go do that new thing.

And so what I like to do for this and what I encourage my clients to do for this is to set up what I like to call an idea parking lot. So this can be in your project management tool, this can be in Google Drive. It can be anywhere, really. It doesn't matter. But a set place where you put those ideas when they come across. So when the squirrel runs by, and you're, like, oh, I'd like to try that. If it's not part of what you set for your 5 goals already for this year, put it in the idea parking lot. Oh, there's a shiny object.

Oh, that looks interesting. Put it in the idea parking lot, and then every quarter, we're taking time to pivot and progress. So we're reviewing, where are we? What's in our idea parking lot? What's still left of our goals? And that's when we can adjust. Because it's possible at the end of the quarter that one of those ideas yes, and your idea parking lot fits and isn't aligned for where you want to go, growth, bring it out of the idea parking lot, and let's do it. But in the meantime, we gotta put those blinders on and stick to the 5 goals that we set, because if we set 5 goals in January, and by March, we've lost them and we're off doing other things, it's really really really difficult, for us to be able to get that momentum and see that progress in our business. And the last piece of here is I want you to think about what's going to be a push goal for you. What's gonna be the domino that's gonna set everything else in motion? So if you look at those 5 goals you set out for yourself. Those day, captivate, connect, convert, celebrate.

What one of those would be a push goal? It would start the whole domino train rolling. So as an example, when I was working with a client, she was a solopreneur at the time, and wanted to think about hiring an assistant. She was hesitant, she was concerned about the income and the budget and all that types of thing. So we narrowed it down that we could hire an assistant for 5 hours a week. She had the budget to do that, so let's say $1,000 a month she was going to pay this virtual assistant. $8,000 in revenue was her push goal. That was enough to be able to cover the virtual assistant. So that was the domino that got things going.

Yeah, she was confident she could make $8,000 revenue, therefore, she could bring on her assistant, pay her the $1,000 a month, and gain back time so that she could then focus on her higher CEO level tasks. Just a simple example, but it helps you to see what's that push goal? What's that domino that's gonna start the whole train in motion? Alrighty. This has been a little bit of a longer episode. I hope you stuck with me to the end, and you can now see how you can set effective goals and more importantly, follow through and achieve them. I'd love love love to know what your goals that you've set for your upcoming year are. If you're happy to share, you can share them in email or head on over to the Facebook group, CEO Amplify, and share in there 1 or 2 of your goals for 2024. Alright, I hope you have a great week, and see you next week. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoy today's episode, I kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review. It would mean the world to me.

Your feedback helps me reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining, and we'll catch you on the next episode.