How To Reach Your Next Business Goal
Hey Reader,
A few weeks ago, I was talking to an agency founder who was completely burnt out. They were working 14-hour days, chained to their laptop, answering client fires on weekends, and physically exhausted.
Their goal was clear: grow the business without continuing to work 14-hour days.
Yet, their revenue had been stuck at the exact same number for nearly a year.
They thought they already knew what would get them there. In their mind, more customers were the path from where the business was to where they wanted it to be.They came to me saying:
- “I need to hire a lead generation agency to fill my calendar.”
- “I need to run aggressive cold outreach campaigns.”
- “I just need more sales volume to break through this ceiling.”
But before we built a plan around getting more customers, I wanted to know whether the business could actually support that kind of growth.
I looked at them and asked: “If a lead generation agency put 20 great new clients on your calendar tomorrow morning, what would happen?”
The answer was immediate silence. Followed by: “I would completely break down. We couldn't handle it.”
That was the moment we realized the goal wasn’t the problem. The path they thought would get them there was because their capacity was the bottleneck and that is what I needed to help them overcome.
This is the same reaction I have when someone says they need to go viral. What exactly would happen if you got 200 orders today? And what happens after the viral post? You can't just keep going viral, and once that trend is over can you keep those buyers?
Scaling The Chaos
In this case, more marketing wasn’t the next step "yet". Their capacity was the first thing we needed to solve.
Usually there is something in the way like this keeping your from your ultimate goal, could be you just don't have a solid strategy to get results every day, could be you aren't "techy" but want to do things that require tech. Could even be you just don't know how to position what you are offering so people get it. The list goes on...
So with this client, their workflows were largely manual, their processes weren’t standardized, and too many things required the owner’s involvement before they could move forward. (There was a lot of opportunity to harness AI).
So if their goal was to grow, the first step wasn’t creating more demand. It was creating the capacity to handle the growth they wanted.
If they had launched a successful lead campaign at that point, more clients could have created missed deadlines, unhappy customers, an even more burned-out team, and potentially less profit.
They knew where they wanted to go. What they needed was a plan that addressed what stood between where the business was today and where they wanted it to be.
Start With Your End Goal In Mind Then Work Backward
Once we knew where they wanted to go and what was standing in the way, we could start building the right path forward. Before adding more customers, we needed to create enough capacity for the business to actually support the growth they wanted.
We looked at everything that depended on the founder, where work was getting stuck, and which parts of delivery could be standardized or handled without their constant involvement.
The goal wasn’t to remove the founder from everything overnight. It was to create enough room for the business to grow without requiring more and more of their time.
Instead of asking, ‘How do we get more customers?’ we started asking, ‘What needs to change so this business can handle more customers without the owner working even more?
That became the first priority in the plan. Marketing then came next step and I was able to provide them with the marketing they needed without the overwhelm.
For another business, the first priority might be completely different. That’s why I start with the goal and work backward instead of assuming every business needs the same growth strategy.
The Real Question: What Has To Happen Next To Reach Your Goal?
This is why knowing your goal is only the beginning. The harder part is figuring out what actually needs to happen next to move you toward it.
For this business, the answer was capacity. For another business, it could be demand, pricing, profitability, conversion, retention, delivery, or something else entirely.
- What it is: Start with the outcome you want, then work backward. Look at where the business is today and ask what stands between the two. That gap is what should determine where you focus first.
- Why it matters: Without that clarity, it’s easy to keep adding things to the business because they sound like good ideas. More marketing. A new offer. Another hire. New software. AI. A new website. None of those things are inherently wrong, but they may have very little to do with the goal you’re actually trying to reach. A good strategy helps you decide not only what to do, but what doesn’t deserve your attention right now, often helping you do less and getting to the ultimate goal you have in mind.
- How to do it: Start with one question: Where do I want my business to be in 12 months from now? Then ask: Where am I today? What do I believe needs to happen to get there? What has you stuck? What’s actually standing between the business I have today and the business I’m trying to build? Are there other paths to the goal that I haven’t considered?
You don’t need to do everything. You need to figure out which moves are most likely to get you where you’re trying to go, and in what order.
Inside the Studio
I been working on something new behind the scenes this week.
I’ve noticed that most business owners I talk to can tell me where they want their business to go when we meet. They want to hit a certain revenue number, become more profitable, work fewer hours, create recurring revenue, expand, or build a business that doesn’t depend so heavily on them.
Where things get harder is figuring out how to get there.
There are so many possible moves you could make in a business that it’s easy to end up trying a little bit of everything without knowing which things are actually moving you toward the goal.
And what I have learned in working through this with business owners is that sometimes they find there is an easier path to get what they really want. I end up handing them a strategy and a plan that is far less overwhelming than they thought.
So I’m building a new tool called The Business Goal Roadmap™.
It starts with a very different question:
Where do you want your business to be 12 months from now?
From there, it helps you look at where you are today and explore the different paths that could potentially get you closer to that goal.
I’m still building it now, but I’m excited about this one. I want it to help business owners stop asking, “What else should I be doing?” and start asking, “What actually needs to happen to get me where I want to go?”
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