Does this sound familiar? You've been working hard (team no sleep!) at launching your business, but when you check the progress, it seems to be more stagnant than the advancement you've calculated in your mind. Before you throw your computer across the room consider this: In order to succeed in business, you need to learn how to set business goals.
Why? Without goals, you will never know if you are on track, or be able to create the right kind of strategy to reach them. If you don't know where you're headed, how do you expect to get there? Let's look deeper at what your business is probably like right now.
You have no idea how much you're going to make next month, also known as projections. You aren't entirely sure what you made this month if we're being honest. You have this overly-ambitious to-do list that you don't know how to prioritize. You have never done a business or blog audit, and make most of your decisions based on instinct and what you read on the Internet, rather than facts.
Translation: Most areas in your Google Analytics are dusty, you don't have a marketing plan to follow, and your metrics scare and confuse you more than they inform you.
Does this sound familiar? It has to be, because I used to be you. I also used to be stressed out and struggling. Now, I'm able to help people, pay my bills, AND have peace of mind every single day. My accounts are profitable, I know what I need to pay in taxes each and every quarter, and I have this renewed sense of clarity and focus in my business that I never had before. So what changed? I learned how to properly set business goals and stopped making 2 critical mistakes.
The 2 Most Common Mistakes That Keep Us from Reaching Business Goals
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MISTAKE 1: NOT BEING FULLY COMMITTED TO YOUR GOALS.
The number one reason you're not reaching your goals is because you have yet to fully commit to reaching them. They look cute in your notebook, but you're not really about this life. The truth is, you're letting self-doubt and fear stop you from trying. Because when you really try, failing feels like it will be the end of the world. But it's not. You have to want it more than you're afraid of it. Your lack of conviction is causing you to leave goals unattained, because you're constantly starting over or never start at all. Shift your mindset to a growth mindset and be open to doing what it takes to reach the level you aspire to be at.
MISTAKE 2: YOU AREN'T TRACKING THE RIGHT METRICS.
You haven't reached your business goals because you've been tracking the wrong things. You have let yourself get consumed by insignificant vanity metrics like followers, pageviews, time on site, and likes. Why don't these really matter? Because vanity metrics can easily be manipulated, and they don't help us make business decisions. The metrics you need to track are the ones that indicate the health of your business.
You should know some key things such as:
- The conversion rates for your products, services and funnels
- The cost of acquiring a customer
- The referral source that drives the most traffic
- The channel that drives the most sales
- The channel that is most engaging for your audience
- Your best performing content
You might be like: "Allllllllright Emm, chill out. You lost me at customer acquisition channel." My bad. I get carried away with this stuff. As a digital marketer, my job is to connect these dots for the brands that I work for, and I've transferred that over into small businesses. Just because you don't run a multi-million-dollar company (yet), doesn't mean you shouldn't apply the same practices. I want you to learn how to use your data to make better decisions in your business. But first, you need to get organized, so you can actually find this data and have the mental capacity to process it all.
How You Can Properly Set Business Goals
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First things first, you must stop everything that you're doing. You been doing too much, and you need to take a seat. Yes, you need to take a huge step back, so that you can make a comeback. To get organized in my business, I take December off every single year. I don't take on new clients, projects, or create new content for 60 days. I create my marketing plan for the following year and take time to dive into the metrics of my business. We spend so much time consuming information and trying new strategies, that we overlook the best resource that we have: our existing data.
You need to break down those business goals into monthly and weekly milestones. Those bite-sized, short-term goals are what hold you accountable and allow you to assess if you're on track.
How to Set a Monthly Business Goal
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- Decide what you want to accomplish for the year and why. How much money you want to make, how much merchandise you want to sell, how many people do you want in your class, etc.
- Divide your goal number by 12. That's your monthly goal. If you want your weekly goal, divide your monthly goal by 4.
- Calculate your conversion rate by dividing your pageviews by the number of sales you had.
- Take your monthly or weekly goal and divide it by your conversion rate. This will help you identify the amount of pageviews you will need to reach your goals.
- Break your goals down into tasks. How are you going to achieve your goal every week/month?
- Have an accountability system. How are you going to assess if you're on track?
It may be overwhelming to take this all in, but understand that learning how to set up realistic goals and attacking them will help you finally check off some items on your "Goals" list.
Featured image by Getty Images
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Skylar sees things differently. At the time, she was shooting content on her iPhone. Temi came into the picture with a new perspective, an understanding of tech, and, eventually, a camera. “He doesn't give himself enough credit,” Skylar says. “He wasn't just my tripod. He wasn't just standing behind the camera and going ‘click.’ He was giving advice. He was giving me insight to how I could look at things from a different perspective. And I was like, 'Oh, he’s an artist.' I think it was maybe a heartbeat of that kind of energy of like, ‘Baby, can you take this picture?’ And it turned so quickly into, we're partners. We can work together in a way where we're advancing each other's creative thinking.”
The pair often says they’re two sides of the same coin. Skylar is an Aquarius. She attended art school, paints, and loves poetry. She’s more than happy to let the couple’s management firm and agency, Kensington Grey, handle their admin work. And, she loves to sleep in. Temi, on the other hand, wakes up early. He’s a Virgo. He loves a to-do list and regularly checks in on the couple’s brand partnerships spreadsheet to make sure everything is on track.
Because his storytelling was steeped in his love of technology, he didn’t always think of himself as a creative person. “Where I [am] the dreamer who wants to pluck things out of the sky and spend all day with my head in the clouds, Temi [is] so good at grounding me and helping me figure out how to make things make sense on paper. We just work together in such a complimentary way,” Skylar says.
It’s been more than six years since Brooklyn-based couple Temi and Skylar started dating, and nearly four since they cemented their working relationship. On TikTok and Instagram, the couple’s travel, fashion, and home content regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views. They’ve worked with brands such as Coach, Aesop, Away, and Liquid IV, bringing their vibrant perspectives to every campaign they execute. Still, nearly two years since both Temi and Skylar committed to full-time content creation and creative directing, the couple says their romantic connection remains their priority.
“We told each other we would much rather go back to full-time jobs and preserve our relationship than to be full-time freelancers, barely getting a night's rest [and] barely kissing each other because we're so busy shooting,” Skylar says.
Working from home can make it hard to separate work from personal life for any entrepreneur. It can be even more challenging when your business partner is also your lover. Temi and Skylar had already used couples therapy as a tool to help them effectively communicate with one another. When they ran into challenges while working together, their therapist helped them set physical boundaries to help combat the issues.
"We told each other we would much rather go back to full-time jobs and preserve our relationship than to be full-time freelancers, barely getting a night's rest [and] barely kissing each other because we're so busy shooting."
“It actually took us doing very specific physical things to create boundaries between work and play in our relationship,” Skylar says. “So, for instance, we will only have conversations about work when we're out of bed or we're at the table or in the office. Initially, when we started, we had to light a candle to say that, 'Okay, this is a space where we're connecting, we’re not talking about work.' We needed really hard boundaries at the top. And then it became a little bit more organic.”
The boundaries have been crucial to implement, especially because the couple began working together so naturally. When the pair first met, Skylar was NY-based a social strategist for BuzzFeed and was using content creation to drive business to her lingerie company. She was shooting her own content. Temi was working for Microsoft in D.C. He’d recently traded in his DJing equipment for a camera. “I've always loved taking pictures,” he says. “Even when I was a kid, my African mother would wake me up at 3:00 a.m. [during a] party, and be like, 'Come take the family picture.'”
Growing up, Temi says he watched his parents support each other and be the true definition of partners. He knew he wanted the same for his own relationship. But, the couple also wanted to make sure they were being financially responsible. The pair didn’t quit their traditional jobs until they’d saved up two years' worth of their cost of living. And, Temi received his Master of Business Administration from New York University with the knowledge that it could either help him advance in his corporate career or be applicable to his business with Skylar.
Temi and SkylarCj Hart @hartbreakToday, they say their working relationship is more of a “quiet dance.” They still implement some of the boundaries they learned in therapy, but they also lean into their natural strengths and deep love for one another. When we speak, Temi has planned a date for the couple to see Princess Mononoke in 4K IMAX and added it to their Notion so they can factor it into their busy schedules. “I fully plan to date for the rest of my life,” he says.
Skylar says the couple doesn’t just wait for date nights to check in with one another, though. This often happens in the mornings, after Temi has made her peppermint tea and poured himself a cup of coffee. When they ask each other how they slept, she says, it’s not just a “nicety.” It’s a genuine question meant to foster connection.
“A lot of it happens during the day in the midst of work. We'll stop and we'll hug. Or we’ll slow dance in the kitchen,” she says. “Sometimes it's hard to set a whole date night when you have 7,000 things going on. So, we must grasp these moments and check in when we can. And I think it's become so organic to us that I actually didn't even realize how often we do it. But all day long, we're like, 'Are you good? I felt like your energy shifted,' because we're best friends, we just know. We just feel it happen.”
What’s better than being in love? Building wealth while doing it. Watch Making Cents here for real stories of couples who make money moves together.
Featured image by Cj Hart @hartbreak