7 Steps to Goal Setting Success as a Business Consultant
This blog post was created from Everything Business Consulting podcast episode 55, 7 Steps to Goal Setting Success as a Business Consultant. To view the episode page, click here.
Everything in the world, starts with a thought. It’s a thought in somebody’s head and it doesn’t matter who it is, were they are, what they do, what the thought’s about, but it all starts with a thought.
Resolutions, that is New Year’s resolutions, are decisions that we make now to make next year a better year. They are on the cards. So the proven theory of success, is this a resolution or is it a goal?
The difference between resolution and goal
A resolution starts by time leading from one year to next, when a thought of something to change comes in, how do we make the next year better than this one? This is a lightweight goal, because it is only a thought, which will end up as a wish if it is not acted upon.
To successfully achieve a resolution, it needs thought and to be turned into a goal. A goal, the idea of the future or desired result which a person or group envisage, they plan and commit to. These people also strive to reach goals within a finite time, by setting deadlines.
High achievers use goals as the foundation for success to work towards what they want to achieve, they add a system to help them work towards it.
Seven steps to success:
Step one starts with having a long term goal.
Step two is breaking that down into sub goals.
Step three we place milestones at each significant point along the way.
Step four break these down into absolutely bite sized pieces that we can chew on and do on a monthly basis.
The fifth step is to have a system to manage this.
The sixth step is to have someone that's going to help keep you accountable.
And the seventh step is to have ongoing management to ensure that you can achieve what you set out to.
Step one - set long term goals
Long term goals are big picture, visionary goals which can take anywhere between 5 and 10 years to complete. These goals are big, but a bigger goal helps pull you towards it, and with 5 years out, you have the time to achieve it.
For example, as a personal goal, you can’t go from renting to buying a house in three months, unless you have the money. But over five years, you can build up a deposit and work towards the goals using the time you allowed. For a business consulting example, a long term goal could be to help your clients become the market leader in their industry.
Once you have your long-term goal, you write it down and create a vision that you look at every single day. ConsultX Founder, David Thexton suggests load of things you could do:
Put pictures on your office wall
Put the goal written on the bathroom mirror
Create a vision board
Download free software so that your computers rest screen has a reminder of your long term goals.
Step two - set sub goals
How do you eat an elephant? One teaspoon at a time. So once you have your long term goal, you want to break it down into smaller, more managable pieces.
Going back to the example of a business goal, becoming market leader in your industry, you can break this down into different categories within the business. If it’s a personal goal, you would break this down into different areas of your life.
Now we have our main goal, broken down into smaller, manageable goals, we are ready for step three.
Step three - set milestones
Once we have our goal broken down, we want to set milestones to measure our success, because if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
For a personal goal of losing 10kgs, your milestones would be at each kilo lost and attach that to a chronological date, “I want to lose two kilos by the end of March”.
By setting smaller milestones, it gives you enthusiasm, inspires you to achieve your goal, and also keeps you on path, whether you are going good or going bad. It is easier to work towards a milestone that is closer to you than a goal that is five years out.
Back to the business goal example, you could divide the market into different categories, for example a juice factory which makes sport drinks, fruit drinks, spring water and energy drinks. They could work on each category, each year, which are their milestones to becoming market leader. Their timeline would be to release the product before summer, then see how the product performed inline with their goal.
Now that the juice company has got some milestones to work towards, what’s their next step?
Step four - creating tasks
Thinking back to the eating an elephant analogy, we can break our ssmall goals and milestones down further into stepping stones, or tasks. We take our large, five-year goal, break it down to yearly/twice year goals, and down again into monthly or even weekly tasks to complete to stay on our path.
With our juice factory, we can break down becoming the market leader, to becoming the market leader in each range
(sports, fruit juice, fruit drink, energy and spring water). So becoming the market leader in sports drinks would divide into the different tasks, for example, brand development, product development, packaging development, marketing and advertising.
This framework help break down the goal into more manageable points that seem easier to achieve and help you with seeing the first line. It becomes the roadmap, with clear instructions on how to get to your success.
Step five - managing your goals
Have a system to manage it. There are applications which can help track your progress and some of them only track seperate pieces in regards to our seven steps.
The applications we recommend are:
Trello
Taskly
Mind Manager
Strides
Google Calendar
An Excel spreadsheet, with each page as a different set of goals/tasks
ConsultX - helps with managing businesses
ConsultX itself has a system intergrated to aid with managing businesses that their business consultants use. It works well because it breaks down the goal right down to the task level, and it makes it easy to see how the business is performing, right down to the people, the tasks they are working on, and what percentage they’re completed with.
Step six - accountanbility
Whether you are creating a personal goal or a goal for your business, it is important to have someone as an accountability partner to help with commitment to achiving your goal. For a person goal, it could be someone close to you.
For a business, your accountability partner can be your business consultant. They would make sure tasks are being met to help reach their sub goals and their major goal.
Step seven - on-going management
To achieve your major goal, after setting out your sub goals and taks, you need on-going management. This can be done by tracking the progress on a monthly basis at the least, which can be used to reflect on what you’ve done, and see where on your track you are. If you need to make an adjustment, now is the time to redirect yourself back on the roadmap.
For the consultants
As a consultant, you need to have your own goals and sub goals broken down in our framework so you can know where you want your own consulting business to be in the future, and the steps you’ll take to get there. It is the same way Business Success Partners work with their business owner clients to get their businesses where they want to be in five-ten years.
Goals you could have as an consultant include your earnings, your lifestyle, your time at work, number of clients, types of clients etcetera. It could even be a physical, mental, or self education goal as well.
As a business consultant helping a client, you’re helping them achieve their goal, which could be personal or business, but they are interlinked. So as a business consultant, we help give them direction as to how to get where their goal is. And because more often then not, helping them acheive their business goal, they will achieve their personal goal.
Our challenge to you
Our challenge to you then is to apply this in your everyday life. In a few months when we will be looking at a fresh year, what 2022 will be, don't set a resolution. My challenge to you is to set goals and to break them down into steps so that you can actually achieve something rather than ending up like the person who signs up to a gym and ends up quitting within a month.