Time to start thinking about next year. Setting goals, making plans.

How much would you like to grow your practice and income? Ten percent? Twenty? Twenty-five?

You’re not thinking big enough.

Do yourself a favor and choose a bigger goal. A much bigger goal, such as growing your practice and income by 250%.

Crazy? Impossible? Not going to happen?

For just a minute, stop thinking like a lawyer and hear me out.

There are two reasons for choosing bigger goals.

The first reason is that when you set a target of 25% growth, you tend to focus on doing things that can bring incremental growth–better execution, new ways to do what you’re already doing well, fixing things that are holding you back.

That’s okay but if you fall short, you might achieve only 5 or ten percent growth. When you shoot for 250% growth and you fall short, you might “only” double your income.

Which leads to the second reason.

Setting a big, audacious, crazy goal of increasing your income by 250% forces you to do things that are radically different than what you’re doing now.

You can’t simply do things better, you have to do better things.

You’re forced to get creative, think outside the box, and take massive action because that’s the only way you’re going to hit your target. Small, incremental goals don’t have the power to inspire you to do that.

So ask yourself, “How can I grow my income 250% next year?” And get excited because things are going to change for you.

Because while your conscious mind is telling you it can’t be done, your subconscious mind is looking for ways to make it happen.

Thinking outside the box about getting more referrals

If you’re looking for a new take on goal setting (and achieving), take a look at the book, Measure What Matters, by John Doerr. I just read a synopsis and was intrigued by the way his system has you choose and monitor key metrics to keep you moving toward your goal.

His O.K.R. (Objective, Key Results) Goal Setting System has three key ingredients:

(1) An Audacious Objective. Set big goals that inspire you but that aren’t so big that you don’t believe you can achieve them.

(2) Quality and Quantity Key Results. Choose 3-5 metrics (e.g., revenue, new clients, referrals, new subscribers, etc.) that allow you to measure progress towards your goal.

Metrics should be quantitative, e.g., 100 new newsletter subscribers per month, and qualitative, e.g., from search terms like ‘divorce attorneys Orange County’–so you’re getting subscribers who are searching for an attorney to hire, not just looking for free information.

(3) Color-Coded Check-ins. Each week, month, or quarter, look at each of your key results and label them green, yellow or red.

GREEN: indicates you are 70 to 100% on target. Continue doing what you’re doing.
YELLOW: you are 30-70% on target. In this case, you should develop a “recovery plan,” to get back on target.
RED: you are 0 to 30% on target. Create a recovery plan or replace the key result with something different.

Doerr says that if one of your key results are almost always green, however, meaning you’re nearly 100% on target most of the time, your goals or the key results metrics aren’t challenging enough and you should adjust them to get a mix of green and yellow.

I like this system because it forces you to choose appropriate metrics, helps you monitor your progress, and allows you to change what you’re doing when you’re either not hitting your target or you’re hitting it too often.

How to get more subscribers for your newsletter

You have a goal. A big one, I hope. My question is, “Does it scare you?”

Some say our goals shouldn’t be stressful. When we think about them and work towards them, we should be filled with pleasant thoughts. If our goal doesn’t do that, they say, we should choose a different goal.

But is this true?

I say any goal worth having should be scary. If it isn’t, it means we’re playing it safe. We should choose goals that make us a bit anxious. After all, anxiety and excitement are two sides of the same coin.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t choose a goal that is so big it scares us to even think about it. We tend to dismiss those kinds of goals as impossible pipe dreams.

Take a look at your big goal. What benefits will you obtain if you hit it? How will you be better off? That’s what’s at stake for you and the idea of attaining this should make your heart beat a little faster.

Also, think about how you will you feel if you don’t reach your goal. Take a moment to explore the sadness and disappointment this would cause.

Ultimately, there should be a balance between the two. Just enough at stake on the upside to keep you excited and motivated every day, and just enough at risk to remind you why it is so important.

If you’re about to sit down and write some goals for the new year, there are a few things you should consider.

First, understand that the purpose of goal setting is to gain clarity about what’s important to you, and thus worthy of your focus and commitment. You have limited time and resources so limit your goals to no more than three. One is better. One big goal for the year, the achievement of which will make everything else easier or better.

Second, goal setting isn’t done until you determine what you need to do to achieve the goal and you commit to doing it.

You can’t control outcomes, you can only control your behavior. What activities will you do to achieve your goal? What new habits will you acquire? What will you give up so you have the time and energy to do what’s needed?

Finally, make sure your goal is something you truly want, not something you think you should want or something someone else wants for you.

When you think about the goal and imagine having achieved it, you should feel excited. As you imagine yourself doing the daily work needed to achieve your goal, you should be just as excited.

The right goal will pull you forward. When you wake up each day, your first thoughts will naturally be about your goal and the work you are doing to achieve it, and you will feel good about that. You’ll want to run to your desk and get to work. You’ll want to stay up late reading, making notes, writing down ideas.

If it’s the right goal, you will, as Napoleon Hill said, have a burning desire to achieve it. You will be single-minded in your devotion to it. You will be like a successful friend of mine who describes himself as, “a monomaniac on a mission”.

Examine the goal you have chosen and see how you feel about it. If it feels good, you won’t struggle to achieve it. Yes, you’ll work hard but the time will pass quickly, and if you fall short, you won’t mind that much because you’ll know where you’re going and you’ll know you’ll get there.

This will help you set and achieve your marketing goals

My daughter and her husband are in town and have been going with me on some of my walks. I learned from them that I don’t need a wearable device to measure the number of steps I take in a day, I can do that with an app. And so now I’m tracking my steps.

But that damn app is mocking me. Granted, it’s only been a couple of days (over Christmas), but it’s telling me I’m nowhere near the 10,000 steps it sets as the default.

I’ve been walking six days a week now for several months and it’s going well. I’m losing weight and getting stronger and it’s a habit I know I can keep. But I’m so far from the goal it’s not motivating me, it’s doing just the opposite.

What to do?

Do I lower the goal from 10,000 steps for now and increase it once I hit it?

Do I leave the goal at 10,000 steps and work harder?

Or do I give it a week, see how it’s going, then decide?

You might have a similar process to go through in your goal setting for the coming year.

Let’s say you would like to gross one million dollars in 2018. You know that’s unlikely but not impossible. You also know that if you get to the middle of the year and you’re not even close to the pace you need to be, you’ll probably get discouraged and tell yourself “next year”. (You know this because that’s what happened last year.)

I have a suggestion. Something I’ve written about before (and done). It’s a way to set goals that you never fail to achieve.

That’s because instead of setting a singular goal, you set three versions of the goal.

Version one is your “dream” goal. Let’s say that’s $1,000,000 gross. You know you probably won’t hit it but just thinking about it gets you excited and motivated to explore new ideas and increase your activity level.

Version two is your “target” goal, something you know will take significant effort but is not out of reach. If you grossed $500,000 this year, your target goal for next year might be $600,000. You know you will have to work hard to get there but you see that this is something you can probably accomplish without herculean effort.

The third version of your goal is your “minimum”. It’s something you absolutely know you can do without much in the way of extra effort. You keep doing what you’ve been doing, and a little more, and you’re almost certain to get there. Your minimum goal might be $550,000.

Breaking up your goals this way all but ensures that you’ll accomplish one of them. You are thus continually hitting goals, feeling good about it, and inspired to reach higher.

If I apply this to walking, my dream goal is 10,000 steps, 5,000 is my target, and 4,000 is my minimum.

And, yippy skippy, I see I’m already close to hitting my minimum for the day.

What are the three versions of your marketing goals?