As Q4 approaches, every small business owner wants to end up the year with a great financial finish. One essential tool for optimizing the chances of having a great last quarter is to set definite goals. As human beings, we stand apart from all other living things in that we are not behaving strictly on innate and predetermined instincts. We have the unique ability to make choices, set goals, and change direction. Along with our imagination and creativity, this is the most powerful tool we possess. There a few key concepts one must understand to successfully implement effective goal setting. I hope that the application of these principles will bring you and your company across the finish line of 2019 in excellent fiscal health.
The first critical step in unleashing the massive potential power in goal setting is to set goals! Now, this may seem obvious, or even ridiculous, but I can assure you it is not. The vast majority of people never set any goals, and if they do, they rarely put their goals in writing. It is practically impossible to achieve greater results if you don’t know what it is that you are trying to achieve. So, the first step in having a terrific 4th quarter is deciding what you want the company to achieve and writing it down.
Secondly, don’t keep these goals a secret. Share these goals with everyone in the company. Make yourself, and your team, accountable. If you are a one-person shop, tell a friend, business associate or family member what you wish to accomplish in the next 3 months. Again, accountability really makes a difference. This principle has been supported by a study done at Dominican University in California by Dr. Gail Matthews, a Professor of Psychology, who looked at the power of goal setting.
The third step in effective goal setting is to be very specific. Simply saying to yourself that you want the company to be profitable, or that you want the company to have its best quarter ever, isn’t enough. You must be highly specific. For example, if you say I’d like us to make more money this year than we did last year for the final quarter, you may make an extra 30 cents, but would that really fulfill your intended desire? It’s better to say, “our goal is that we earn $50,000 more in profits this year than we did for the same period last year.” Give yourself an actual numerical target to shoot for so you know what it is you’re actually trying to achieve.
Think about this for a moment — if you were to ask a ship’s Captain where they were headed as they left port, they could give you the exact coordinates of their scheduled destination. They could also tell you when they expected to arrive. An answer like “oh, out to sea for a while,” wouldn’t make any sense from a professional mariner. Know exactly where you are headed at all times. Otherwise, you are much more likely to find your company aimlessly adrift without a rudder or a sail hoping to wash up into some bountiful port merely by accident. This is not the kind of chance you should be willing to take. The odds are too heavily stacked against you. The seas of business are too rough and unpredictable for that approach. You must be a better navigator than that and have a precise map to follow.
The fourth critical piece of advice is that when setting goals, you must always think and speak in the positive present tense. For example, rather than saying, “I hope my company makes an extra $50,000 in the last quarter of this year,” you would say, “we earn $375,000 this quarter” (assuming last year the company did $325,000 in Q4). The reason for this is simple. The subconscious mind only understands the positive present tense. By saying this, writing this, and reading this over and over, the subconscious mind will be programmed with this strong belief and it will dictate that you act in such a way that you produce the desired result. By the same token, you would never say, “I don’t want to lose money this quarter,” because the subconscious does not understand negatives. In that case, what the subconscious hears is, “I lose money this quarter.”
I strongly encourage you to study and employ goal setting. In my own academic, personal, and business life, there is no other skill that has come close to being as effective in producing results. There is no great achievement I have made that didn’t first exist in my mind and then written on a piece of paper before being transmuted into the physical realm. I suggest you try it for yourself. The results are quite astonishing.
