Laser focus on your Goals and Objectives so you can become the Lazy Entrepreneur

In Episode 2, I walk you through the process of taking the information in the Deep Dive Analysis and how to break down these into more bite-sized Goals and Objectives.

The biggest challenge I see with Business Owners is that they turn up on Monday morning ready to do stuff, but it's not always the right stuff.

This episode takes you through a process to gain clarity around your goals and what needs to happen to deliver a result.

We get clear about the goals and objectives
We use the S.M.A.R.T. model of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

I'm adding in 2 more letters to make it  S.M.A.R.T.E.R. They are Energy to keep going, and Record/Review/Reflect

I've also suggested you find an Accountability Buddy to help you commit to the process.

next week we will be focusing on Priorities and making sure you are working on the right things at the right time.

Stephen Sandor CEO Inspiring Business
Inspiring Business website - www.inspiringbusiness.net

Book an Exploration Call here - https://inspiringbusiness.net/exploration-call-booking/

The Scale to Success System - https://inspiringbusiness.net/deep-dive-program/

Stephen Sandor LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-sandor/

Inspiring Business LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/inspiring-business

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/inspiringbusinessaustralia

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Transcript

Steve Sandor: 0:01

Welcome to the Inspiring Business Podcast where we hope to inspire you, the business owner, and provide you with the knowledge and information you need to create a business that is scalable and ultimately independent of your daily involvement. I hope the information you're about to hear helps you navigate towards your success. We are episode two in the Scale to Success Solution eight week special program. We're talking about goals and objectives in this particular episode. What I often hear business owners talk about is that they don't have time to set goals and objectives, let alone the time to manage them. And I can easily relate to that when I was in control of as a divisional manager 5 million revenue, 120 staff, six direct reports it, can be overwhelming, especially if you don't have a process in which to manage this. The Scale to Success solution is a step by step process of putting in place the systems and processes and then working with the people within your organization so that you are not overwhelmed and you've got a clear pathway to your success. We're talking about how you can become the lazy entrepreneur. And in last week's episode, we spoke about getting the foundations for your business set up. So if you've stumbled upon this particular episode, what I would suggest that you do is go back and listen to episode one of Becoming the Lazy Entrepreneur. And then come back and pick up where you left off here. So what we're going to be looking at is getting some clarity around the goals and objectives that you have uncovered, if you like, through the initial deep dive process we're going to be using. For those of you who are familiar with the smart model so that's specific, measurable. Uh, Achievable, relevant and timebound. I'm adding into additional letters e and r, which is energy and record and review. So being a little bit smarter. And then finally looking at how you can make sure that you actually achieving these goals and objectives by putting in an accountability process as well. So one of the issues that I see for business owners is not being clear of your goals and objectives. That means that you turn up in the morning on a Monday and you're not really sure of what it is that you're getting done, you get stuff done, but it may not be the right stuff. And I've made that mistake too and when I don't have a framework in place, I continue to make them and I'm not efficient and that's when I start beating myself up And being the leader of your organization, you actually need to in control, but be less controlling. And so what happens when you have the knowledge and you have the information available to you, What you can start doing is following a process. And you'll be able to get really clear on what it is that you need to achieve and your team can follow you. And it means that you turn up on a Monday and you're not spending hours working Monday morning on figuring out what you should be spending your time on. And it's all there ready for you to get started. It will also give you clarity around why you are doing the business that you are doing. So if you're a quick start and you just wanna get going, then what you can do is you can book an exploration call with me and we can look at what scaling means for you. If you think this information is valuable, then subscribe to the weekly show and you'll never miss out. So what we are doing in first part of the scale to success solution is the deep dive analysis, and what we spoke about last week was looking at your satisfaction level for each of the areas. So each of the functional areas that you have, so sales, marketing, operations, finance people specialist areas. How urgent and important they are at the moment in terms of moving the from where your what satisfaction level you currently have and moving that into where it is that you want over the next six, 12, or 18 months. And then looking also at resources, time, people, and money. Now this is very much at a overall view and what we're going to be looking at now is breaking that down into more bite size chunks. The problem we're trying to overcome is to get control of your time so you can focus on the things that need to be focused on, and that's how you become that lazy entrepreneur. So what's the difference between a goal and an objective? Let me give you a simple example. We're wanting to drive from Brisbane to sydney. That's our goal and the objectives that we have along the way are the tasks that will get us there. So we need to have some transport, we need to have some resources. Might be money, might be a number of drivers to get us there. We might be staging our our trip so that we are doing it in two hops or we might be doing it in one long drive. They're all the specific objectives if you like to achieve that goal. So we are going to be using the smart model. Now, you may have heard of the Smart Model. It was developed by George Doran, Arthur Miller and James Cunningham in 1981 in an article. There's a smart way to write management goals and objectives, and basically what we are looking at is using specific measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound objectives. I'm adding in two more letters to the acronym, and that is e and r, and they represent energy record and review. So the energy that needs to be able to move the project task objective forward and looking at reviewing and recording the information of those tasks. And I'll spend a little bit of time speaking of that a little bit later. Where do goals and objectives fit into the overall strategy of your business? So let me give you an example of inspiring business. Hopefully this will give some context for you and you can start thinking about your specific goals by using this example. So one of the goals that I have for this business is that by 2023, that is in December, 2023, we have all of the systems and processes and people in place to be able to manage up to 10 australian based full service clients and serving 200 online mastermind clients worldwide. So that's 10 Australian based full service clients and 200 online mastermind clients and those mastermind clients are of a worldwide market. And at the moment, we're capable of managing up to four clients. So we have a capacity issue there because I spend with my clients initially a minimum of one day a week working with them in their business, developing the scale to success solution for them, and mapping out the strategies and the implementation plans and, looking at all of the fundamentals that need to be in place. So if I was to rate inspiring business in terms of our marketing, where we are now and where I would like to be at the end of 2023, I would say we're a five or a six relative to that, and I'd like it to be an eight. And in terms of our capacity to be able to deal type of business. We are a four and I need it to be a seven by the, by 2023. So to achieve that goal, there are a number of objectives that I need to hit or we need to hit. So by Q4 2022, I need to finalize the 2023 marketing strategy by Q1 of 2023, need to have the new employee training program or onboarding program in place so when we bring new employees on, they're hitting the ground running pretty much straight away. At the same time, Q 1, 20 23. We need to be looking at our finances. End of q2 looking at hiring two additional part-time staff, and then also by Q2 2023 start to form alliances so that we can build our capacity cuz I can't do this all on my own. And so I'm looking for advisors who can join me, if you like, with their expertise in servicing our client base. So let's drill down to one of those specific areas. So Q4 2022, finalizing the marketing strategy. What do we need to do to be able to do that? So I specific the S of SMART is I put a date so I'm very, specific. Finalizing the marketing strategy by December nine. Really simple. Just be as specific and as clear as you can in that one particular aspect of that objective. It needs to be measurable. How do we know whether we are succeeding with our objective? In this particular case, we need to make sure that our message is clearly articulated and we will need to get some feedback from the market to make sure that we're hitting the market here. Our market needs to be quantified, so our market, our sweet spot is businesses that attend to 50 employees strong. They're doing about a million. Per 10 employee in turnover, they're around 10 to 15 years in operation. And the business owner has got to the point where they understand that they've got a job in a business, not an enterprise, and they're ready to move forward. So that's our specific market. So we've identified it, we now need to quantify that so that we can actually have a look and feed that information into our financial models. The media we are using will have to be agreed to, and there'll need to be a cost a cost of return on investment of that media investment. Obviously the, this podcast is one of those, but we have a number of strategies that we're dealing with, so that's the measurability of that one particular objective. The next Is it achievable? This one particular area of the objective in terms of getting the marketing strategy ready by the end of 2022, I've estimated that it's gonna take about 10 hours of my time to finalize that. This podcast was recorded at the beginning of October so that means I've got about 10 weeks to achieve that particular aspect of the objective. And so that's about one hour per week dedicated to this one particular goal. Is that achievable? My estimation It is. This particular strategy has been in place since I started the business, and so we've been always working our way towards this. So it fits into the overall strategy and it also fits into our style of experimenting with different ways of doing business. Looking at how we can go about attracting the right type of client and providing the right type of solution for them. And so that's been an experimentation. We haven't always got it right.. But we are moving in the right direction. So this is a particularly relevant to our overall goals and and strategy that we have in place. And is it timebound? Yes. In this particular objective, I've set the December nine as being the milestone in, along the way. These are the smarter, so energy is the e in smarter in this case? For me it's obvious. It's a passion of mine, so I'm obviously going to bring some energy to achieving the subjective, but if you've got employees, and we will be bringing the employees into the equation further on in weeks five and six. But for now we're looking at your energy to get things done, but when you do bring in your employees, not every one of your employees is actually going to be wanting to be involved in this. You need to create an environment where the employees actually understand the direction that you're going and make a space available for them, someone within your team to be the champion of the objective or the goal, because you can't be the energy behind everything. You need to be able to delegate some of this to people who are passionate about whatever it is that they're passionate about and fitting in the objective or the tasks that need to be done with their particular skill set. So that gives the momentum in which the project can be pushed along. The other thing that I see often, Missed by people who are running this type of really simple goals and objectives is that they, forget to do, recording information so that they can review and reflect on it. For those people who are in that sort of project management mindset or have got a background in PO project management, this is a, this is natural for them. But people who are typically running a a small business and they're trying to get things done that don't tend to take the time to record the steps along the way. And what you are missing then is the ability to go back and look at where you may have mistepped or made a gone down a particular pathway that you didn't have planned and you went down as an experiment, didn't work and you need to be able to come back from that. So being able. Record that information. It doesn't have to be copious amounts of notes. You can have somewhere where you put notes relating to this particular area. And they, just we did this on this particular day that work that didn't work, Give it a rating. One, one outta 10 it, failed. It was a three. No, it was brilliant. It was a nine. And then that way what you can do is when you get to the. If you've succeeded, you don't you go back and have a look at what made it success, but it's more reflective of if it didn't work, you wanna be able to know what didn't work. My favorite saying is, mistakes are only decisions that were made with not unfor information. If you had more information, you'd make a different decision. Not always better, but different. And so without the information to be able to make a different decision makes it really, difficult. The final one, I think that I see specifically with business owners who run a smaller type of business, that it is particularly lonely at the top in this world. There's not many people who you can rely on. You don't have, tend not to have a board of advice. You tend not to have lots of people around you. In management. You might have supervisors, but they just don't have the experience to be able to help you. You've got maybe advisors out there, maybe talking to your accountant maybe you have a, consultant or a coach who's helping you they have product, they have a product to sell, and they're charging you for that. I find that in these situations, you're better off having somebody has no ax to grind to keep you accountable. And that's an accountability buddy. Now I am very fortunate for those of you who have listened to a previous podcast with Karen Lindsay from ages Businesses Services. Karen and I have known each other for about two years now, and we have, I think we may have missed four times out of the two years that we've known each other, that we speak on a weekly basis for somewhere between half an hour and an hour. And the purpose of that conversation is to support each other. What can we do to help each other as, human beings? So how can we emotionally support each other? How can we help each other in our businesses? Sometimes it's business related, other times it's just we venting our spleen and we, need somebody who is impartial. We don't wanna be speaking to our partners. We don't want to be speaking to our businesses, colleagues and associates about these types of things. And we also are happy for that person to keep us accountable in our actions and give them permission to do that. And so I would suggest that if you haven't got an accountability buddy in this area, that you take the time to think about who it is that you could invite into that. So I would encourage you to find somebody as an accountability buddy to help you achieve your objective so you can help them achieve theirs. So for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you'll. Two images, one with a man frantically trying to keep a, number of plates from crashing and then another with plates under control. Happily smiling. And our objective with the scale to success solution is to take away the frustrations that I hear from my clients and people who I talk to in business where they don't have enough time. And so what we're trying to do through this process is to give you a mechanism in which you can start to look at how you can build a buffer of time so that you can do the things that you love to do and how you can help your staff to become better at what they're meant to be doing. And so you can delegate that with confidence to them. So using the Smarter goal framework is one way of identifying what those tasks are and being able to put in place a framework where you can track them. Now, what we're going to be doing next week is we are going to be working on the priorities and decision making that you need to layer over the top of the week one and week two. So week one was the foundation week, Find your starting point. Weeks two and three, we're looking at goals, objectives, and then stress testing your priorities. We'll be doing that next week, weeks four and five. We're talking about people capacity and capability. And then week six we look at the financial management and then, Week seven and eight, we're looking at how do we implement these and allocate resources. So the Scale Success Solution is a simple application of systems and processes to improve your efficiency and effectiveness. It delivers a program of people development and leadership training, so they have the skills and knowledge to do the things that they were employed to do. And my goal is for you to become the lazy entrepreneur so you can continue to do the things that you love and be with the ones who you love. As always, I appreciate you for listening and I hope the information I shared with you today is useful and adds value to your business and that you are inspired and energized to make a difference in your and others lives'.