🧩🖊️🌳  Dear Agency Founder

How to set meaningful business goals that drive real change

Discover the practical strategies to overcome goal-setting paralysis and create targets that actually transform your business, without getting stuck in perfectionism or fear of failure.

I get the goal setting urge a lot.

There are times it’s especially strong.

New Year, the first day after a holiday, most Monday mornings, and every afternoon after some light stretching. I get back to my desk and think, "now, I'm going to be productive."

And I set myself some goals.

I set goals beyond revenue numbers or leads in the inbox. Goals around what I really want for my business.

It's a good feeling. But overthinking it can actually slow you down. Every team I've ever led has got stuck, probably because of me.

Why setting goals is hard

These can all be removed, here's how to do it.

Choosing the 'correct' target

The goal isn't the target. You set targets because you want to create change.

When I ran my agency, one of our goals was for our work to become more strategic.

To do more strategic work we needed to win more strategic work. To win more, we needed to pitch more. So we decided to measure how much strategic work we pitched.

How many pitches before we say this is a success? It didn't matter. Whatever amount we picked would help us change the business.

At that point in time we weren't pitching strategic work. By having the conversation about how we'd do it, we started doing it.

So, to avoid getting stuck, worry less about the right number There is no right number.

There is a consideration about the size of the number. This represents the size of the change.

If you target 10 times what you can currently do then the ideas you are going to generate to achieve that are going to be radical. If it's a steady increase then you'll hear more detailed tactics based around how you currently operate.

You can make a decision and move forward. It's completely in the rules to adjust the target as you go. Later we'll look at how reviews are the most valuable part of the process.

Hold your number lightly and focus on the change.

What you don't want is just as important

Another major source of friction is because they are scared of unintended consequences.

Consider the famous "cobra effect" from India in the late 1800s. The government offered a bounty for dead cobras to reduce the snake population, and people began breeding cobras to collect the reward. When the government discovered this and ended the program, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes, resulting in an even larger cobra population than before.

If you incentivise more leads how do you make sure they remain qualified?

Increasing client happiness can hurt profits as clients get more unbilled attention and, conversely, incentives around your own commercial performance can lead to clients getting less love.

There are no metrics that can't be gamed to the detriment of the business.

One way to tackle this is to think hard about the specifics of the goal and weave some language around unintended consequences into there. Or to make sure your goals are perfectly balanced with one incentivising profit and another incentivising client happiness. But this sort of thing increases the discussion around goal setting and therefor stops it happening.

There's no rule around the format. Why not introduce some targets you don't want? Each of your goals should come with some statements around what you are not going to do.

These are the bumpers on your bowling lane. It's much quicker to just collect the outcomes people are worried about and list them out, than it is to keep fiddling with the specifics of a goal.

Reduce the friction and increase the conversation about what you do and don't want to happen.

Fear of failure

It goes without saying that achieving goals gives you status. Even the LinkedIn posts about failure are really written to highlight that, actually, that person is doing really well now.

This stems from our nature to care what others think.

It introduces another unwanted element to goal setting that will stop you creating the change your business needs.

The whole point of setting goals is the discussion around not hitting them. Making them easy or not setting the ones people are scared of not achieving makes the whole exercise less effective.

Failure is a data point on the journey of the change you are trying to make.

Your job as a leader is to reframe and delve into the challenge. Be open about the fact you personally fail too. Go first when it comes to discussing what you tried that didn't work. And then lead people through that discomfort and onto the next set of ideas.

Judge yourself, your business and your people on the ambition of the change you took on and the innovation you showed in trying to get there.

The review

A key element in the process is the review. This is not a time to criticise the team or point fingers. It's to analyse the reasons why the change isn't happening and to adapt the plan.

Even when you perform well, if you don't ask why then you've missed the point. Was it a one-off or do you have a new tactic you can repeat?

This review is where you need to have set a culture where it's safe to talk. You need an open conversation about why it's hard and you need people to be able to freely call out problems and suggest ideas.

In the review you can completely change what you are measuring if you need to. As long as you are having the review you can do what you want. Whatever it takes to get yourself the change that matters.

Don't give up

Target setting is hard. Everyone experiences all this baggage and it stops them. Getting experienced at doing it will set you apart.

The only ways you can fail:

Like all meaningful change the results will happen slowly. You'll also become better at having open conversations. You are that business now 🎖️

You can do less than you think in a week, and more than you think in a year.

And you can certainly do more than you think in half a decade or a quarter of a century.

Just keep doing the right things.

Pushing to be a little bit better.

And then forgive yourself for not being as good as you said you'd be.

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