Sara Nguyen

Helping Sassy Solopreneurs Reach more people and get more clients

How to set goals 2020 | Business Goal setting process – Plan with me

Hello and welcome, whether you’re here with me live now or if you’re watching the replay. So I released a video a couple of days ago where I talked about how do you create a content calendar and it was really a popular one. And what I thought was a great idea to share, particularly on the 1st of January today is a video all about business goal setting, but not just how do you set business goals, how do you actually set the goals and break them down so that you can stay focused and actually implement them.

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How to set goals 2020 | Business Goal setting process – Video Transcript

I find a challenge that many people have is that when it comes to goal setting, there’s a lot of advice out there. It, you know, from very theoretical things like set smart goals to, you know, visualize and there’s a whole diff– there’s so many different schools of thought, thoughts when it comes to goal setting.

But what I thought I would do is something much more practical because as you know, that’s how I roll. And what we’ll do in this video is I’ll walk you through a series of processes that would get you from setting your goals for this year and particularly this quarter.

So for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help awesome entrepreneurs like yourself, build and grow your business using social media and technology with ease.

So I thought it was perfect timing for today’s tutorial, which will be a breakdown of how to create your own, I guess goals and how do you actually implement that so that you actually see results.

So let’s get started and let’s go over and let’s see how all of the magic happens. I’m going to share my desktop with you now. Okay. So I’m going to put a link in the description.

So check out the description ”cause I’ll put all of the links to the resources including a link to this template. And this is also the same template that has the content calendar that I shared. Here we go. Yup.

The content calendar that I shared a video all about. So you can have all of that and it’s all in one place. You don’t have multiple spreadsheets, you just have one that you can use. So I’m going to walk you through the process of goal setting.

These are based off a couple of, I guess, these are based off a couple of processes that I learned from lots of different business people and this is what I find works well for me and I find works well for a lot of my clients as well.

So if you’re going to take this template, just first thing is go to file, and go make a copy. I’ve set it to be view only, so please don’t request access, just make a copy and then you can change the colours and you can edit it all on your own Google drive and your own Google sheets.

So when you’re goal setting, we’re going to break it down and get too overwhelmed by what you see here, because it’s really not that bad. I promise. I promise that this will all make sense.

By the end of this training, you will have a, you will have your own goals and a system for implementing them. So I think the first start, the first start, the first part of setting your goals, particularly as a business, this is focused on business goals.

This is not for weight loss goals. This is not for fitness goals. This is specifically for setting your business goals for 2020. I think the first thing that you need to be realistic about and be open to putting down on paper is where do you want to be this year?

So in this top section here in this magenta or hot pink, because I thought it was a great way to start as bright colours, I want you to sit down and think about and figure out where do you want to be and this is where you can be dream as big as you want to dream because these numbers are yours.

You don’t have to share them with anyone. I’m not going to share my numbers because they’re personal to me. But this is a template for you to use.

And in this top section here, I want you in this column B where there’s a dollar sign to put down what you want your figure to be this year for what you want to bring in. So for argument’s sake, let’s just say that you want to be, by the end of this year, you want to have made $100,000, okay? So let’s, let’s just say that.

So put in your number, whatever that is. You don’t have to tell me. A hundred thousand, one more zero. There you go. So 100,000 so in terms of the year, what we’ll do is we’ll break that down into four.

So for each quarter, so the quarter starting from January 1st to the end of March quarter one that’s going to be $25,000, I can’t type when people are watching me. And then the next quarter will be $25,000.

This is just for you to plan and see what it looks like. If your numbers are different, that’s okay. This is just a guide for you to get started with. So let’s just say that’s your figure. You want to reach $100,000, put it down.

As I, as I’ve mentioned in the previous training where I talked about goals for your content calendar, there is a power in putting it down and making it visual so you can see what you actually want to achieve.

So in the first section, ask yourself, where do you want to be this year in terms of the money that you want to bring in? People feel quite uncomfortable with this. And I get it because sales, money, you know, it can feel really icky, but be genuine in terms of, okay, instead of perhaps thinking about how much money, so that I can be greedy.

It’s more about how many people do I wanna help so I can make an impact and the revenue that you generate from that. So whatever that figure is to you, it may be 100,000, it may be 50,000 it may be 500,000 it may be a million, a million, a million, whatever it is.

Write it down and then break it up by quarters. Why did I divide it by four equally? I just did. It’s just a point of reference for you to work towards. And then the other columns I filled in, you can make these whatever you want, but this is you asking yourself, ‘okay, if I am successful at the end of the year, what does that look like in terms of the money that I have?

How many clients or customers do I have?’ or if you sell, if you want to sell courses, how many enrollments do I have? In terms of your email list, what size is your email is going to be by the end of this year? If you’re looking to do influencer marketing, how many business deals have you generated by the end of this year?

If you want to grow your YouTube channel, how many YouTube subscribers do you have? How many Instagram followers do you have that you want to grow? How many Facebook followers?

You don’t have to do all of these things that I’ve listed here, it’s just a couple of ideas to get you started. Delete them, change them, add them, do what’s appropriate for you, for what you want your successful year to look like.

So sit down and figure out what you want your year to be in terms of the numbers, the numbers in revenue and the numbers in customers and other measurables in your business. And as I said, this can be a massive dream.

You may go, ‘you know what? We’re going for a million’. Good for you. Whatever it is. Don’t let anyone tell you that your dream is too big or too small. So work with what you want to work with.

So that would be the first step that I would do in starting to set up or starting to set up your goals for 2020 in your business. Now, after you’ve done this and you filled in all of the numbers, you then have a picture of what your year wants to be like.

The next step I think is about working through if I was already, so let’s just say your goal is 100,000 if I was already making $100,000 a year as a business. These are a couple of questions that I want you to work through and if you’re rolling your eyes at me because you’re like goal setting questions, this makes sense in the next part.

So don’t miss. Don’t skip this part. And this part is actually I find really handy because it helps you, it helps you to really see what’s going on in terms of your business and what you can achieve.

So if I was already making $100,000 a year argument’s sake, who would I be? Ask yourself that question. Whatever your number is, you need to ask yourself, who would, who would I be if I was already making this amount of money?

So I may have lost you already. This is something that I learned from listening to Jim Fortin, the transformational coach on his podcast. And his whole thing is that if you want to see success, you need to work from the space as if you’ve already achieved it.

And that’s how you’d get there. And when I heard him, he talks about this a lot in his podcasts and in all of the trainings and interviews that I’ve heard him on, and it really is working from the space of ‘I am already successful. What does a successful person do?’ so think of it as if I already had 100,000, if I already had $1 million business, if I was Beyonce, how would I channel? What things would I do in order to be this successful business?

And the first question is, who would I be? What behaviours will I have? Now, the behaviours that I would have as Beyonce and a multimillion-dollar business from my view is I will be consistent.

Do you think that Beyonce wakes up and goes, ‘Hmm, what am I going to do today? Don’t know. Maybe I’ll sing, maybe I’ll go to a concert’. No, she doesn’t do that.

She has it all planned out because she has so much going on between all of her businesses, between her performance schedule, she’s consistent because she has a plan and you know she is committed. Do you think that Beyonce goes, ‘you know what, I think I might release an album in about five years and then maybe in the next one in seven years.

Ah, I’ll see how I do. I’ll see how I feel’. No, she does not. Beyonce releases stuff all the time. She is constantly creating, ’cause she’s like– and this is one of the things that keeps her relevant because she is always doing what she needs to be doing as a successful person.

So the behaviour is she’s consistent or you’re consistent, you’re committed. And for me personally, if I was a multimillion-dollar business owner, I would be the type of business that brands will want to work with because I have high-quality content because I have high, ’cause I present myself as a high-quality business.

So sit down and fill out this section of who do I need to be? What behaviours do I need to have? And be really honest with yourself. And this starts to open up that I guess, opportunity for you to implement the things that you come up within this section.

So after you’ve done the, ‘who would I be?’ deep dive. The next section is, all right. So if I am this million dollar a year business, what would I actually do?

So in terms of the ongoing day to day things in my business, what would I actually do? What are the tasks that a person who has already seen this success do? So see how powerful this is? So channel your inner Beyonce again.

So if I was Beyonce, the business CEO Beyonce, I would be working on high-level tasks in the business. I wouldn’t be doing lower-level things. And when I say lower-level things, what I mean by that is things that you can possibly outsource and pay someone else to do quite cheaply.

And this is things such as doing all of the graphics for your business. I understand that there are cheap tools and there are really easy to use tools like Canva and PicMonkey where you can do a lot of it, but that’s still stuff that you, that I see a lot of people spend time doing what they can outsource. So they may spend days working on all of their graphics when they can outsource that quite cheaply

these days on market places such as Upwork and fiverr.com or they work on higher-value things such as running profitable ad campaigns. A big part of growing a business is being able to get your content and get your products and services in front of people.

And one way of doing that is by running ads. So when I think about successful businesses and what a lot of them have in common, it’s about being able to scale their visibility. And get their content in front of the right people at the right time.

And one way of doing that is by Facebook ads. I talked about outsourcing, outsourcing, lower-level busy work and that allows me as a successful multimillion-dollar business owner to get more stuff done because you don’t have a successful business by doing all the busywork.

You have a successful business by doing the high-level, money-generating tasks that brings you in the revenue that gives you the freedom that you want in your business. I would also create quality content on a schedule. So we talked about the behaviours of being consistent as a business owner.

So that’s something else that I would do as a multimillion-dollar business owner. You write down what you would do as your successful person and then I would release content regularly on a schedule.

So after you’ve worked through these questions, these are just examples and I will delete these from the templates so you don’t have to be stuck with my own Beyonce goals. The thing that I want you to ask yourself next is, ‘okay, so of these things that I need to do and of, you know, who I need to be, what skills do I need to have that I’m currently missing?’ So as an example, one of the business goals that I have for myself this year is to start pitching business deals, whatever that looks like.

That’s a little bit personal right now. But for me, that’s a skill I don’t currently have. So I need to figure out what on earth that looks like. So it’s a skill I need to develop. So write that down.

Write down the skills that you need to develop in order to be the person you need to be and to achieve the goals that you need to achieve. The other thing that I feel I need to develop personally is my Facebook ad skills.

So I haven’t done them for a while. I feel really rusty. So I feel that I need to just to sharpen my skills in that area a little bit, but write down all the things that you need to develop in order to have the success and the outcomes that you want for this year.

And be really honest and you know, this is a not enough space for you. It’s a template. So you can just go and you can insert a row, a row, a roll, a row below, and then you can just create as much space as you need to fill in this area. It’s a template, it’s flexible.

That’s why I created it for you. So once we’ve worked through what you need to actually have, it’s then time to work on the next section. So based off this, I like to plan the year in terms of quarters. I wouldn’t go as far as planning out all four quarters because a lot of changes from quarter to quarter.

I think it’s enough to go high-level goals. But in terms of the projects and the outcomes that you want, it’s more realistic and it’s easier for you to achieve your goals if you’re looking at them from a three-month view as opposed to 12-months view.

This is just what I believe. This is what works for me. I find it much, I find much more success when I say, ‘okay, my goals will be set for the next quarter as opposed to the next 12 months.’ because when you look at things from the 90-day perspective as opposed to the 12-month, instead of a 12-month perspective, you get a lot more done. That’s just how it is.

So in terms of your goals, how to think about, based off what we’ve written here, what projects are essential for you to I guess, run and implement in order for you to achieve your goals?

So take the, take note of what, you know, you’ve developed in the previous sections above and now you can start setting up the project. So for me, some of these projects will be things like, okay, something I’ve prepared earlier.

Working on a weekly YouTube release schedule, that will be a goal for the quarter, releasing videos quarterly, fortnightly live streams, releasing content consistently on Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook and setting up a Facebook ad campaign and running it profitably, as well as setting up a pitch deck and pitch process.

So these are projects that I feel that I need to do in order to reach my goals of whatever my monetary goal was that we did earlier. So this, think of it as projects. Now, the next step after this is after you’ve got your projects is to then figure out from these projects, what are the essential tasks that I need to do in order to successfully implement these projects.

So let’s take, let’s break it down because it’s much easier for you to see. We’ve talked about Facebook ads being an area that I needed to work on personally, and it’s in my project goal for this quarter.

So in terms of the essential tasks that I need to do, learning Facebook ads is one. When I look at the other outcome goals that I have. So the YouTube videos, fortnightly live streaming and consistent social media scheduling, that’s all in line with the content calendar that I set up.

So I’m going to put a link in the description to my whole process of how I came up with or how to create a social media content calendar. But it’s essentially taking this big goal of being consistent against all the platforms and planning it out.

I’m going to show you now, so we’ve just written there the two goals. There’s one goal, and then I’ll also put the goal of the content calendar set up. We’re almost there. So it may be like, you may be like, ‘okay, but how do I actually implement this?’

and I get it. I really do get it because I think this is the part that is missing from a lot of goal setting trainings and a lot of goal setting advice that people have. They take you to this point where they’re like, ‘all right, what do you want to, how much money do you want to make?

What do you need to do to get there? What are your goals?’ but then how do you actually implement it? So let’s look at the first project, which is to set up Facebook ads campaign.

After I’ve set this goal, I need to be able to then implement it. So the way that I do that and what I would recommend that you look at doing is use a project management tool.

I always talk about Asana because it’s free and that means it’s, you know, you have no reason not to use it. It’s free and it’s very customisable and I use it for my entire team. And you can do pretty much everything that you need to do on the free plan as a small business owner.

So as you can see here, I’ve set up the columns for this project very, it’s a very basic setup. It’s to do in progress and done. So I know my project is to set up Facebook ads and so then I break it down into the tasks.

The first task will be to finish the Facebook ads training. So you for you, it may be if you wanted to do Facebook ads, it may be go and find Facebook ads training.

Whether that’s you finding free training on YouTube or you finding a paid course to do it, whatever it is, break down the tasks. The next step you, you may have is to be, to actually start creating the ads.

So create a task or create a card for each task. Do you see where it’s going here? So what you will have is, and particularly as you continue to do them, you’ll be able to have more tasks that you add because when you start, sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know.

When I started doing this Facebook ads training, that’s when I was like, ‘all right, I’m starting to understand now what I need to do and I need to create ad sets for different audiences, colder audience, warm audience and hot audience and I need to set up the campaigns’ and I’ll continue to add to this list.

Do I feel that this is as much as I can do or as much as I know? When it comes to implementation, all it is is about dragging the cards into the in-progress column as you start to do them to keep yourself accountable.

Right? And you, if you, if this board system doesn’t work for you, I love the Kanban board system because it’s visual and I’m a visual person and for me, I can see progress quite easily this way.

You can always use the list system, which I don’t love because I feel like I’m at school and this is a list of all the assignment tasks or all homework tasks that I need to do.

So I much preferred to use the Kanban board, but you use whichever system works for you. So that’s how I would do it. Take your project, break it down into task, put it into your project management system, whether it’s Asana, whether it’s Trello, whether it’s Jira, if you really are a Jira person, whatever it is, use that system and use these to track the tasks that you do.

I have my content creation, projects set up on a separate one. So this is all of the videos that I’m going to create. I’ve put dates on them and then I just move them across as I am working on them.

So today’s one goal setting, how to stay focused on your goals, it’s currently recording right at this moment. And once this is done, I’ll move it to the done column, but we’re not there now. We’re still recording so I’m going to leave that there.

So this is essentially how you move your projects or I guess this is how you move your goals into projects that you implement into tasks that you actually do. And this is how you break it up. I found this process really helpful for me and you know, this isn’t the most sophisticated layout but that, but don’t let that take away from how powerful this is.

If you implement this, what you will have is a system. So you will have your goals on paper or on a screen. You will have being honest with yourself of where am I now and what do I need to bridge that gap to be where I want to be.

These may, yours will may be completely different, you may be at a different stage of your business, you may be just starting your business and your goals may be different. They may be, I need to set up my website, I need to figure out how to do this or how to pay someone to do it for me.

I need to get consistent and I need to figure out how to create content or pay someone to do it. So your goals may be completely different and that’s okay.

But work through this system where you set, you set numbers, you set what you want to achieve, you figure out what person do you need to be and what do you need to do in order to achieve these goals.

Break them down into projects and then break them down into task and then move them to a project management system so that you can actually implement it. And I find this system really useful.

I found this system really useful for myself, and it’s a combination of things that I’ve learned from lots of different mentors and business people over the time. And as I said, this doesn’t have to be this big business plan with a SWOT analysis with all these bells and whistles.

This is for you. This is a personal check-in that allows you to go, ‘what I want to do and how am I going to get there?’ so this is just a couple of processes to help you get that task done. The other thing that I’ve added in this template is a habit tracker.

And once again, it’s a, I wouldn’t say the most sophisticated system, but one of the things that I’ve definitely learned over the last year is that success comes from habits, habits that you put in place. So whether that your goal is to lose weight, success in losing weight comes from eating well and it comes from exercise and doing that consistently and tracking your progress.

And if you go off, you know, if you go off that far, seeing that and being able to correct it. The same is for business. It’s about tracking your habits.

So if you really want to have a million dollar a year business, you need to put in the work in order to get there. And you may be saying, ‘but Sara, why are you saying that I have to work every single day? Like don’t I get a break?’ of course you get a break, but track your progress.

If you want to commit to say growing $100,000 a year business, $1 million a year business, what type of person would you need to be? I think you would need to be a person who has a lot of structure and who at least dedicates time every day to working on their business.

Even if it isn’t all day. Even if on the days you have off you and you look at the business-related things for half an hour, it’s still a daily thing. But that’s my view.

I would use a tracker and the point of the tracker, and I’ve broken it up into a couple of months and then you can create your own ones from there is that you can just see at the end of each week and at the end of the month, how did I go with doing the things that I said I would do regularly.

So if that’s business work, if that’s meditation, if that’s fitness, if that’s checking in on your goals. And this just helps generate some data so that you can reflect at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter on how you went and what you can do better or what you can improve on.

Or you know, if you did really well, you can pat yourself on the back as well. So this is another thing that I’ve added to the templates. So you’ve got a part of quite a few really good tools that I’ve generated.

So I hope that you find them useful and I hope that you use them because I created it for you. So you’ve got the goals template and I will clear all of these statuses so it’s clean for you, that you can work through.

You’ve got the habit tracker so that you can track all of the things that you need to do in order to be successful because success comes from habits. And then you’ve also got my Social Media Content Calendar as well.

So you’ve got all sorts of tools. There’s no excuse anymore for being unorganised and for not being planned. And I also talked about Asana, which is a free project management tool so that you can then implement all of these goals that you have set for yourself.

So that essentially wraps up today’s live stream. I hope that you found it really, really useful and I was really excited to bring this training to you because I think it’s really timely whenever you are watching this, whether you’re watching it in January or you’re watching it later, I particularly remember seeing a lot of people towards the end of last year go, ‘Oh, I’ve already created my content calendar.

I’ve already created my plan’. That’s great. For me at the end of last year, it was really about, ‘you know what, I just need to make it to the end of the year. I can’t even focus on next year yet’, but if that was you as well then just know that it’s okay that you haven’t done it, you know, in advance, but as long as you do it as long as you do it at some point so that you can have something to work towards.

So with that said, I’ll put a link in the description to the template so that you can have it. You don’t need to sign in, just make sure you make a copy. Don’t send me requests to, you know, edit the document, I’m not going to do that and make a copy of the sheet.

It’s free. And hopefully that really, really helps you. I’m also going to drop a link in the description to my Social Media Cheat Sheet and my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets as well. So if you’re really looking to grow your business in 2020 with social media or to start live streaming on Facebook, I’ve got free resources once again for you to sign up and download and then use them to, I guess, achieve your business goals.

So I hope that you found this training useful. I’m really excited for this year. There’s just some really nice vibes happening and there’s a really nice energy about 2020 personally for me and I hope for you as well. So with that said, thank you for being here and I will see you on the next training. Bye for now.

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