Web Design Business with Josh Hall

359 - My 5 Step Annual Goal Setting Framework

• Josh Hall

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For the last episode of the year, I think it’s only fitting to look ahead and share some goal setting tips for 2025!

In this episode, I’m sharing a lesson from my Web Design Business Course on my 5 step, annual goal setting framework.

We’ll dive into:

  • Setting an achievable revenue goal
  •  Separating Net vs Gross
  •  Rocks, Stones & Boulders goals
  • Pricing that aligns with goals
  •  How and when to measure

Again, this is just one lesson inside my signature Web Design Business Course available now (along with my entire suite of courses) inside of Web Designer Pro when you’re ready to dive in!

Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/359

Big thanks to the sponsors for our upcoming Web Designer Pro CON 2025 event! We couldn't make such a top-notch event for my community without their support 🙏

17hats (for proposals, invoicing, contracts and automation)

SiteGround (for website hosting)

Termageddon (for auto-updating privacy po

Josh Hall:

Hey friends, welcome in to the final episode of the Web Design Business Podcast of 2024. Yes, don't worry, plenty more ahead. In fact, we've got some doozies lined up for Q1 here in 2025, but I wanted to end off 2024 with some tips for planning and goal setting. Now, if you're like me, you tend to get into this mode the last couple of weeks of December or the first couple of weeks of the new year. Some people plan a lot sooner than that. I like to kind of start the new year in planning mode and vision mode. So what I'm going to do with you in this episode here is I'm actually going to share with you an entire lesson from my business course.

Josh Hall:

If you didn't know, I have a web design business course. It's my flagship course. It's a big one. It covers everything from start to finish, client experience, from onboarding to project management proposals, invoicing, contracts, and we start with you, as in goal setting and planning and building up your business. So this lesson covers my five-step framework for planning and goal setting based off and building up your business. So this lesson covers my five-step framework for planning and goal setting based off of your goals, which could be revenue, but it could also be time. It could be what you want your schedule to look like this year, in 2025 and beyond, so I'm really excited to see how this helps you. I would love to hear from you on how this helps you plan and set goals for this year to help you have a successful 2025 and whatever that looks like for you.

Josh Hall:

The show notes for this episode are going to be over at joshhallco slash 359. And if you like this lesson, you're going to love the entire business course which is now inside of my community web designer pro. So, if you have not heard of this, we have just recently introduced tiers to web designer pro. So, if you have not heard of this, we have just recently introduced tiers to Web Designer Pro. So if you just want the business course and my entire suite of courses, you can now get that in the courses tier of Web Designer Pro, which is currently, at the time of this video, subject to change. It's only 49 bucks a month. You can join the community tier, which has all the courses and all the community aspects, and you'll find me in the forums and can tag me and interact with me in the community. Or, if you would like, coaching directly with me and get the full pro experience. We have the coaching tier at $199 right now. Now one thing you get is if you join the community tier or above. We also have our pro training library and we did a presentation a guest expert training that really ties into this episode before we dive in presentation a guest expert training that really ties into this episode. Before we dive in, chris Badgett, who is the CEO of Lifter LMS awesome colleague of mine, who I really have learned to view as almost a business coach. He did a training on an annual planning system and I have to admit I ripped off a lot of what he taught in this for this lesson and for this episode. So just another aspect of pro when you dive in that's going to be a great value add for you is Chris Badgett's annual planning system via a great additional step off of this lesson here that we're going to dive into for goal setting and planning for your web design business to make 2025 freaking awesome.

Josh Hall:

Happy new year, friends. I hope you had a great Christmas. Happy holidays everybody, and I'm real excited to I don't know about you, but I'm excited to start to turn the calendar year and start 2025. So let's start it off strong, shall we? Here we go.

Josh Hall:

My simple goal setting framework is this it's really a five-step framework that starts with having a revenue goal and again, depending if you're just starting out or if you're refining your business and reevaluating your plans and goals, either way, it's a good idea to have some sort of revenue goal. Now, what's interesting and I'm sure when you think about goals, just like me, you think, all right, I got to have a money goal. But the reality is, even if you're not in it for the money, necessarily you adjust your time and your freedom and your lifestyle about what your business is bringing in. Unless you're fortunate to have other income streams, or even if your business is a side hustle or you're a very lucky person who's on a trust fund situation like you're going to have to align your life around your revenue goals and what you're taking in. So that's why it's so important to have some sort of goal that, again, is reasonable and attainable but also gets you outside your comfort zone.

Josh Hall:

So for those of you who are thinking I'd like to hit 25,000, I would encourage you let's bump that up to 35 or 40,000 or, more than likely, 50. And if you're thinking 75,000, then I'm thinking well, we might as well go for six figures. If you can make 75, you can 100% make six figures with just a few tweaks. And same thing if you're thinking 100,000, then let's go 150. So with that in mind, revenue goals, let's say, to make this simple, because I'm not a math guy, I'm even nervous about getting into some math here with you, but I've got slides, thank goodness, 100k. Now the cool thing about an annual goal like this is it's very easy to break it down with the months and quarters. So if we divide an annual goal by a quarterly goal, that's going to take us to 25,000. So our goal is to hit 25,000 every three months and a quarter and if we break that down to a monthly goal, then that's going to take us to 8,333.

Josh Hall:

Now the really important and cool thing about this is that suddenly six figures looks a little bit more attainable here, doesn't it Like? Okay, if you're thinking $100,000, you might be thinking, whew, gosh, that's a lot of work, that's a lot of projects. But if we're looking at what could we practically get to at around $8,000, suddenly that makes a little more sense. Because if I did, then we'll get into pricing here. But if goal pricing. If I had a project that's on average $4,000, then it's only going to take me a couple of those a month to potentially hit that goal and then, if I have additional services, we could totally hit this. And if we get on average $8,000, then we are on track to hit six figures, my friends.

Josh Hall:

So, and this is why it's really important to break down goals, I've found, into quarterly and monthly chunks, because it's just like weight loss If you want to lose a hundred pounds, you don't go outside and start walking or running to lose a hundred pounds. You start small, one step at a time, pun intended. So that's why it's really important to have a goal. Like you wanna have your annual goal, but you could even hide this if you need to, like set an annual goal, put a file on your computer or in a spreadsheet or whatever it is, or have it in the back of your mind and then break it down into more attainable goals. I actually really like focusing more on quarterly goals personally and then having and I'll explain, like, how to measure goals in this lesson here but you really want to have your focus on monthly and quarterly rather than annual. You want to have the light at the end of the tunnel, but you really want to focus on quarterly and monthly. That's my personal preference, when it comes to tracking goals at least.

Josh Hall:

So, for example, let's say when it comes to hitting $8,000 a month on average. Let's say we have a primary service that's $5,000. For this case it's probably going to be website services. You're going to have web design. No matter what your business model is, we'll look at that. Ideally, you're going to have one main service. In this case of the goal of $1,000 or, excuse me, $100,000. Yeah, $1,000 a year, we can definitely hit that really easy. Our primary service is likely going to be around the $5,000 range. So if you have a primary service of websites that are 2,500, two of those will bring us to $5,000. Now, ideally you'll probably have some sort of secondary and we'll get into some actual concepts of these here.

Josh Hall:

Next, and this is just my personal framework, to hit this goal, I would recommend having a secondary service that's maybe about half of what your primary service is going to be. So in this case, let's pretend that our goal is to hit $5,000 a month with the main service, $2,000 with a secondary service, and then you're guessing it. There's a little more space under here, which probably means that a third one's coming, which is a third service. Or in a lot of cases, what I found that worked for my business is to have a recurring service like hosting and maintenance, which would ideally get to around the fifteen hundred dollar a month range. And as your business grows, as you double this and triple this, that's when you can really get to six figures and multi-six figures sustainably when you have a recurring service that gets further up.

Josh Hall:

Now, with all these services, what we're going to get into in the business course here as we move forward is what I recommend, which are three categories, which are build, grow and support. Now, we're going to dive into this in the next module when we get into your services and pricing. But just a heads up, this is kind of a teaser into what we're going to get into, because build grow support is what I have in mind when it comes to these slides right here. So the first one web design services. We're hoping for aiming for 5,000 a month. This is going to be in your build category. These are going to be website designs from the ground up and website redesigns. Then we're going to get into your second category, which I like to consider like a growth type category. So this might be SEO, it might be marketing, it might be copywriting, it might be video, it might be whatever you're doing alongside your website builds and ideally, in this case we're going to try to hit 2000,. Which means our last service, which are recurring services, are going to be some sort of support, care plans, hosting, all that included. Ideally we would get to about $1,500 a month and with the goal of $100,000 total, this current setup as our goal would bring us to 8,500 per month.

Josh Hall:

Now, how cool is that? We took the idea of 100,000, six figures, which looks a little daunting, right, but we broke it down into these three categories of services and this looks much more attainable. If you could do one website for $5,000, if you could do two sort of like growth plans for clients at 1,000 each per month, and if you got your care plans and hosting let's say you have 15 clients paying you 100 bucks a month then you could I don't want to say easily, but you can very practically get to right here 800 or, excuse me, $8,500 per month, and that's going to bring you to six figures. That's exactly what we're wanting to get when it came to our goal. So we just looked at where that leads us 8,500. What was our goal? Just over 8,000, to hit our quarterly goal of 25 and our annual goal of 100,000. So that's a few tips for setting annual revenue goals. Of course, your numbers can fluctuate depending on what your goal is.

Josh Hall:

Now the second tip I have for you is to make sure, really quickly, that we separate net versus gross. So we talked about $100,000, but I think if you're brand new to business heads up, you're not going to take home $100,000 when you make $100,000 as a business owner. This is a big mindset shift, I see for people coming from the corporate world into freelance and web design and I realized this too early on is I had to remember well, if I charge $3,000 for a website, I'm not making $3,000. And I know your family and friends are going to be like dang, you're making three grand on websites. No, no, I'm pulling in three grand for the business, but I'm not taking home three grand. There's a difference between net versus gross and if you don't know, or if you need a quick reminder, net is what you take home in your business Gross. I intentionally added this icon because, ew, that's what gets taxed and that's what expenses come out of. So again, net what you keep, what you take home, gross ew. It's called that for a reason it's because you're going to get taxed on it and all your expenses come out of that.

Josh Hall:

Now there's one other area of this that I want to hit on before we move on to the next point, and that is profit. Now, profit's interesting because profit is the money that's left over after taxes, after expenses. Or if you read Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, when I had him on my podcast, we talked about this you can also move profit as the first thing you worry about, and then taxes and expenses. As long as you pay your taxes. Like you can't tell the IRS to not tax me, I don't have enough profit. No, that's not the way it works.

Josh Hall:

But you can use profit for two different purposes that I've found, and the reason I wanna share this with you is because it may just depend on where you are in life and in business with what you do with the profit. So I tend to take a lot more profit currently for me and my family. That's because I'm a little more established and I know whether I have good months or bad months. I know I'm going to make plenty of that be our expenses and I'm going to have that left over. But there are seasons where I invest more profit into the business. So profit can either go more over towards net, towards your personal income, or it can go more over to the gross expenses, like building your business. It can go into ads, it could go into hiring, it could go into systems, tools, anything for business growth, and of course you can take a little of both.

Josh Hall:

So ideally you would have some sort of what you need to take home. And then, apart from that, let's say you need to take $50,000 home. In a year you make $100,000. Let's say 30% of that goes to taxes, 10% goes to expenses. You got another 10% that you can either use to grow your business further or you can take it home and go on a really nice vacation that year. That you can either use to grow your business further or you can take it home and go on a really nice vacation that year. That's an example of net versus gross what you take home, what gets taxed and expensed on, and that profit baby, whatever you want to do with it, and ideally you want to make more and more profit. Now, I'm keeping it very simple with the numbers, but that's essentially the framework that I've used. That's really helped me out with net versus gross income.

Josh Hall:

Now there's something when it comes to planning and goal setting that I want to touch on Again. We're just scratching the surface on this, but it's the idea of rocks, stones and boulders. Because when it comes to goals, I'm sure you're like me and thinking business program, which are like specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely type goals and that's all great projects for building our business that are going to be really big projects, ie boulders, kind of mid-range projects, ie stones, or just little things that we could kind of put in there, depending on what season of life we're in and how many projects we have. So let's take this into a deeper level, shall we? Let's look at rocks, stones and boulders. Now, again, like I just said, rocks are going to be small, weekly goals.

Josh Hall:

For example, maybe making an SOP, like maybe you go through my web design process course and you're ready to implement this. Maybe you want to put this into base camp or whatever you're using for project management, which, yes, we're going to get to shortly. Um, if you want to create an SOP for yourself, for your team, I would consider that a rock. It's a small goal, it's something that helps your business and it's likely something you'll be able to do within a week, maybe even less than a day or just a few hours. But when it comes to aligning your big goals, you could totally put this inside of some sort of goal sheet for your business in order to hit those numbers.

Josh Hall:

So that would be more of a mid range, a goal that you would likely try to get done within a month, and that would be, in this case, maybe like a new website page and not like a portfolio page or a blog post. But, um, well, it could be a blog post, but I'm talking maybe you do like a big, revamped, uh, success stories page, for example, which is something I highly recommend for you and your business. So in this case you don't want to rush it, and within a week maybe if you're managing a bunch of other projects, I would make this a stone. I would make this a monthly type goal and it's going to take some time, but it'll really behoove you in the long run and benefit your business. So I would put this goal as kind of a stone. Also, I mean other monthly goals could be like hiring a subcontractor, or it could be in any number of things that aren't going to take several months, but they are going to be a decent amount of time that you don't want to rush. And then, finally, those big goals.

Josh Hall:

That's a boulder baby. These are the big needle moving type of projects or goals in your business. These are going to be usually what I do personally. I do these quarterly, I didn't. I generally try to have like four quarterly boulders and then stones and rocks fill in with the rest of the projects that I personally want to get in here, and I'm going to show you my goals for this year at the time of recording the revamp version of this course in 2023 here.

Josh Hall:

But, for example, for you as web designers, maybe it's launching a new service, maybe you have a lot of web design services going and you're doing some additional retainer work, but you have not yet built your hosting and maintenance plan. This would be a boulder. You go through my maintenance plan course. You get everything ready to go. I mean you could do it in less than a month. For sure. You technically do it less than a week, but when it comes to marketing it, selling it and getting things going. I would consider this a boulder. This would be like like how great would it be to finish a quarter of your year and think I got my maintenance and hosting plan going? Yes, that was a boulder style goal. So I'm going to show you my actual quarterly planning goal list for this year. Would you like to see it All right? Here we go, check this out. So it's not super technical, not super wild. It is literally a Google doc for me. This is what I do Now.

Josh Hall:

I like to label each one of these main goals that I'm going to do within a quarter as a boulder stone or a rock, like I just shared with you. Um, so I'm recording this in Q2. Rock, like I just shared with you. So I'm recording this in Q2. So in quarter one, in quarter one, q1, I did rebrand what was formerly my web design club into what is now my web design membership. Web Designer Pro set up some sequences and automations. Again, this was something I was able to do, mostly within a week. Launch Pro, which was a biggie. Solidify SEO for web design, business pages and content.

Josh Hall:

I didn't do that cause I don't know what the heck I was talking about. I don't remember. Uh, there's a good example of making sure your goal is uh, make sure whatever goal you're doing makes sense, cause I don't remember what the heck I was talking about. So I could just you know what. I'm just going to check and say I did it, uh, because it's working. So my Boulder was launching pro, uh big project was, or, excuse me, my Boulder was just reconfiguring and redoing it, uh, re revamping it, the the stone for me was launching it, and then the little things involved with that were uh, kind of a rock, the the week, kind of stuff.

Josh Hall:

I'm in Q2 right now. Look what I'm doing. My Boulder for Q2 is revamping this course, the next version of the course. Then I've got a few stones that I'm going to do and the cool thing about this you'll see, like over here I don't even know for sure what I'm going to do in Q4. You could really map this out, but essentially what I'm doing is I'm just getting an idea for, like, what's the big boulder for each one of these quarters. Now, you may have a couple boulders depending on the size of the project, but I would not recommend doing too many huge projects every quarter, especially for you as you're managing your web design projects. And then I, when it comes to goals, I like to have a little saying like, at the end of this year I want to be able to say I started these things or I completed these things. So this is just a look at what I'm personally doing for this year. So, again, very simple. Mine is a Google Doc. That's it. Nothing wild. You can go as wild as you wanted to make it.

Josh Hall:

Now let's wrap this lesson up with a few things when it comes to your planning and goal setting. So we talked about revenue goal. Now we have a really good mindset of what we're keeping versus what's in the business and what's going to be taxed. We talked about the goals that we're going to have and what size they are. A big thing when it comes to your revenue is your pricing. Now, we're not going to get far into pricing here, because we have a whole lesson on pricing, but one thing I do want to just make sure to tease you with here is that you want to make sure your pricing aligns with your goals.

Josh Hall:

So if you have a goal of $100,000, but you're charging $1,000 for websites, guess what that means? That means you're going to do 100 sites a year and eight sites a month, and unless you have a very templatized structure in place where you can crank out two websites per week, I don't know anybody who is able to do that. That's what you would need to do, and I know I'm using these numbers because I got to a point in my business and my journey where I wanted to hit six figures, but I was charging about a thousand dollars on average. So it dawned on me that, like if you put this out on a spreadsheet, you can't even want to. Literally, I would do need to do a hundred sites a year and eight sites a month. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can't do that. Now, if you double your price points, that gets a little closer. Ideally, you would triple or quadruple this, which is what I'm going to teach you here later on in the course. That will lead you to six figures as an example. So I just wanted to make sure that your goals, your pricing excuse me aligns with your goals. Just remember, no goals equals very unclear pricing. So for those of you who are just not sure what to charge, look at your goals. What's your revenue goal? What do you want to take home in a month. That's going to help determine your pricing. And then, finally, just a real quick note before we head on to the next lesson.

Josh Hall:

When it comes to measuring your goals, I showed you how I recommend doing annual, and then quarterly and monthly. When it comes to measuring this, this is a big hang up I see with a lot of people, and that is you do not want to. Well, let me share this. First, my recommendation is that you measure quarterly meaning right here. You don't want to live and die with every week of your business. Uh, my mother-in-law was working for a home inspector who used to be one of my clients and, uh, she recently got let go because he is now going into realty. He got out of the home inspection business, but one thing I noticed with him is he would spin like crazy when they made a lot of money and then he would like lay people off whenever they had a bad week, and it was week to week, and this is no way to be a sustainable business owner. So, when it comes to your web design business, do not live and die with every week. It's why I recommend measuring quarterly.

Josh Hall:

Now, monthly is good too. You want to see what you're taking in month to month, but you're going to have good weeks and bad weeks. You're going to have good months and bad months. I don't want that to put you on cloud nine for too long and I also don't want that to destroy you if you have a bad month. I'm learning this and I've continued to learn this as a as an entrepreneur, for many years now. I'm expecting really good months and really bad months, but I look at quarterly. What did I make this quarter? Cause it's a lot more achievable, more attainable. I want you to get out of the week to week and month to month trap. It's basically like a hamster wheel because you're literally just live and die again with this week-to-week or month-to-month mentality.

Josh Hall:

So a quick recap Josh's simple goal-setting framework Set a revenue goal, make sure you separate net versus gross. Set those goals as rock stones and boulders. Make sure your pricing aligns with the goals when it comes to your revenue goal and then make sure that you measure it in a way that's suitable for you, knowing you're going to have good and bad months. So that's suitable for you. Knowing you're going to have good and bad months. So that's the biggie right there how and when to measure. Well, I hope you enjoyed that one. Friends.

Josh Hall:

Again, this is a lesson from my web design business course, which is available in Web Designer Pro Link below. You can just go to webdesignerprocom. You can just join the course tier if you want to get access to my business course and my entire suite of courses, or we have the other tiers for you If you want a more engaged and immersive experience. Again, the training I mentioned with Chris Badgett on the annual planning system is what this lesson that I just shared with you is kind of based off of. So I took a lot from his training that I've applied in my business and it's been super helpful, and I hope this has been helpful for you. I would love to hear from you. If it has, you can drop me a note at joshhallco slash 359, which is where this episode show notes will be at. I hope you had an awesome 2024. If it wasn't so great, then I hope this helps make 2025 awesome. So can't wait to hear from you. Happy new year, and I got to pull the old dad pun, the dad joke. See you next year.