If you’re serious about making 100k, one of the most important things you can learn is how to set yourself proper goals, and then once you’ve done that – actually achieve them!
It’s no good just having a vague idea that you ‘want to be rich’. There are a million and one different definitions of ‘rich’ depending on who you ask. You need to be clear on exactly what you want to achieve before you have any chance of figuring out how to get there.
I’m going to tell you what I know about setting goals. Every success I’ve had in my life has started by clearly seeing where I needed to get to, and then reverse engineering, working backwards to figure out how to do it. (And I’ve still had plenty of failures too! But without clear goals and a plan you are just playing the lottery.) Here are my five steps…
Want an Aston Martin? Work out what you need to do to get one. Set a goal.
5 steps to 100k
Step 1 – Be specific
The first rule of goal-setting is: Be specific. Really, really specific.
So what you don’t say is ‘I want to be rich’. You say, ‘I want to make £100k’. Now you’ve got a real, concrete goal to be aiming for. You’ll know when you actually get there. There’s an endpoint.
But that’s still not good enough.
Step 2 – set a timeframe
Did you want to make £100k…over your entire lifetime? This year? This month? This week? When you’re setting goals, you have to also give yourself a time frame.
This is so important because the next step of building your goal depends on how long you have to achieve it. It will also help you to benchmark how high you are aiming. £100k in a year – easy! £100k in a day? Well, that might take a bit more work!
Step 3 – Break it down
Let’s say your goal is to make £100k in a year. What does that mean you will have to make per month to get there? It’s just over £8k per month.
Break it down more – how many days are you working each month? At 20 working days in a month, that means you’ll need to average income of around £400 per day. Now we’re starting to get a clearer picture of what it’s going to take to have you hitting your target.
Step 4 – Evaluate
Now that you’ve broken your goal down into more manageable chunks, ask yourself if it’s realistic. Can you make enough sales at the required margin under your current setup to make the £400 profit per day you’ll need? If not, why not?
Perhaps your margins will need to be higher, or maybe you need to increase the number of days you sell/work per month, so you can still be on track with lower average sales per day. Do you need to find another revenue stream, to make up the shortfall? Increase your product range. Cut your costs?
There’s no one answer, as everyone’s goals are going to be different, but the process still applies. This is the part where you start to drill right down to actionable steps you can take to make things CHANGE so it works. Make yourself an action plan, so you can see exactly what you need to do to hit your goal.
Step 5 – Make the changes
It’s no good doing all this goal-setting work and then spending 6 months just thinking about it. You actually have to make the changes you need to get things started. Take action!
So if that looks like taking on more staff to enable you to process more transactions, investing in new equipment to double your outputs, or finding a new market to sell to – that’s what you’ve got to do!
The only reason you are going to fail
I see a lot of people failing to achieve their full potential, and it’s so easy to spot why. Everyone who fails to achieve a goal has something in common. Either they didn’t take the right steps to make it happen, or they COULDN’T take the right steps to make it happen. Maybe they didn’t have the right skills or didn’t put in the effort required.
Don’t be one of these people.
What you have right now is the direct result of the amount of work you’re putting in. If there’s a gap between where you are, and where you want to be – it’s on YOU to change it, and you need to change your mindset!
If you set your goals properly, you will end up with a clear vision of what you want to achieve, a view of what practical steps you are going to need to take to get there, and an action plan of all the steps you need to take.
If once you’ve done this, you recognise that you need funding to make any of the steps happen, then I can help.
I’ve funded deals for businesses in so many sectors, from startups to established businesses that are expanding or moving into new markets, and there’s not a problem in business I haven’t dealt with first-hand.
So if you’ve got ambitious goals, and need funding to make them a reality, let’s talk!
