Guided Goals & Planning – 01 – The Completed Goal Review

IF YOU NEED THE BLANK ASSESSMENT, CLICK HERE.

 

You can see that I feel good about where things are with two of my goals: Overall Business Growth and Retention.

You can also see I don't feel good about where things are with Product Launches, Promotions, and Innovation.

Then, you'll note that I feel neutral about both my List Growth and my Upkeep.

In the Notes section, I jotted down a few details about the three areas I'm not happy with, and as you can see, they all relate to the INTERNET.

 

 

When YOU assess things for yourself, if you know there was something out of your control that impacted things, then write it down. Just be honest. There's no reason to make up something to offset things because the whole point of this assessment is to make the adjustments necessary to do better next year.

In my case, the Internet has been a growing challenge for the past few years, and I've made adjustments to work around it.

This year, I haven't been able to do that because my particular adjustments had to do with traveling to locations where I could use a better internet connection and working during non-peak hours.

The pandemic along with our increased power outages in California changed all of that, which means I have to focus on different ways to ensure that going forward those issues have less of an impact on my work.

What's important about recognizing those things is that I know my PLANS weren't bad, but my execution of those plans wasn't adequate, so instead of reinventing my plans – plans that have worked for years – I simply need to shift the execution.

Be on the lookout for similar issues in YOUR assessment!

Finally, a brief explanation of the neutral feeling I have about both my List Growth and my Upkeep…

Thus far, I've grown my business by the 10% I set out to, and while my list growth is only at 35% versus the 50% I'd wanted, my retention (of customers) is at 70%.

The math on that works out well: If 30% of my customers leave, but I grow my customer base by 35%, and I have a 10% business growth, things are solid.

The upkeep refers to my website maintenance, and this year I'd set a pretty big goal of moving a bunch of sites to more central locations. This was both to cut down on the time I spent backing up and updating so many sites, and to offer customers an easier and more localized way to access their purchases.

I had about 40 sites I needed to move, and under normal circumstances, that would have been taken care of by midyear; however, that particular process requires a fast, reliable internet connection, so by the end of April, I'd abandoned that project altogether.

Thankfully, I'd prioritized sites, and the 40% I was able to get done included almost all of my most critical work.

Once again, the plan wasn't the issue, the execution was, so I know as soon as things with the internet resolve, I'll be able to finish that goal.

Next time, I'll share the next step in the process: Setting New Goals for 2021.