Well, it's 2007 already, and I'm stil writing "2005" on some of my checks. That's what you call a fast year. I suppose having a new baby, trying to hold onto the reins of a fast-growing company, and traveling a lot will do that to a person. You would think that being woken up two to three times a night for eight months would make life slow down, but I'm here to tell you that's not the case. It just makes you more dizzy during the day.
Enough about me. Happy New Year to everybody, and thanks to all of our customers for making 2006 another wonderful year for Homestead. We continue to be amazed by your passion, your creativity, and the ways you use our service. We've certainly fallen short of your expectations a few times, but you've been there to kindly point it out to us when we falter. You are what keeps making us better.
I thought I would use my first post of the new year to talk about something I've struggled with throughout my career: setting and achieving goals. I'm a firm believer that goals are a critical part of any business (or team for that matter), and setting aggressive goals is a requirement if you want to have achieve aggressive things. However, knowing how and when to set those goals, and actually hitting them, can be very difficult. At least for me.
So, I've gotten in the habit of doing major goal setting once a year (usually starting in December and finalizing in early January) and then doing "milestone" goals each quarter. A year can seem like a long time, especially for a new business, but it's gone before you know it, as I can attest this year. If you spend the whole year just dealing with your day-to-day problems, it's easy not to work on any of the big opportunities, or not make any big changes. The quarterly goals allow you to break down seeming unattainable annual goals into "bite-sized" pieces that actually pass a test of reasonableness.
Here are five guidelines I've developed for setting goals for myself and our business:
1. Do it. Make yourself set goals, always, always, always. I don't know anybody--whether it's a billionare business person, or an Olympic athlete, or a musician--who got to the top without setting hard goals. I'd go so far to say that you simply cannot be the best at what you do if you don't set goals.
2. Five is the max. The fewer the better, but five is the absolute max. I limit all of the people on my staff to three team goals, and up to two personal goals. Some of the most successful people I know have just one goal, and sometimes it takes them years to achieve it.
3. If you can't measure it, it isn't a goal. This sounds obvious, but you'd be amazed at the number of "fuzzy" or subjective goals out there. If you can't tell with 100% objectiveness whether you've achieved your goal at the end, it's not a goal, it's a slogan or a mantra. Here's an example of a non goal: be financially successful by the end of the year. Here are some related goals: make enough money so that my spouse can stop working; increase my savings by $20,000 a year; make more money than all of my friends (I wouldn't suggest this as a goal if you want to have any friends, and it would only work if your friends will actually tell you how much they make--I suppose you technically could accomplish this goal by default if you didn't have any friends).
4. Don't forget you. It's important to have goals that are quantitative and business focused, like % revenue growth or amount of profitability or landing X new customers. But don't forget about you. It can be very unfulfilling to achieve business goals at the expense of your waistline or your marriage or spending time with your kids. I usually insist on having 1-2 personal goals, both for myself and people who work for me. It rounds you out, and acts as a check and balance to make sure you are achieving the one thing that we all actually want more than anything else: happiness.
5. Don't forget about them. Goal setting is important, but what's more important is using those goals as tools to actually achieve what you set out to do. You'd be surprised how many people go through goal setting exercises and then forget what goals they set. If you can't remember what your goal is, chances are it isn't helping you achieve anything. Somehow I don't think that Michael Johnson forgot the world record time in the 400m when he was training 8 hours per day to beat it. Keep your goals handy, on a piece of paper taped to your wall that is right next to the window you like to stare out. Print them in big font. Memorize them. Make it the desktop of your computer. Do whatever it takes. But don't bother setting goals if you are going to foget about them.
There you have it. Hopefully some or all of this framework will help you with your own goal setting/realizing in 2007. Happy New Year, and as always, happy business building!
--jsk
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