How To Work Backwards To Set Your Business Goals

How To Work Backwards To Set Your Business Goals

Today I want to share the thinking process for setting smart business goals with you. Working backward from a financial goal to daily to-do lists creates a stronger plan of action. Here’s how that works. It always starts with a money goal. It helps if that goal has a meaning beyond the dollar figure. For example, let’s say that you want to buy a new car. The payment is around $400. To account for things like taxes and just to be safe, you’ll bump the goal up to $600. In other words, you need to add an extra $600 (or more… more is always better) to your monthly bottom line. Once that’s done and you are seeing that level of income on a regular basis, you're ready to order your new car.

Once you know how much money you have to make, you can start to think about different ways to do just that. You could find more customers for one or several of your existing products. For example, if you have a $10 eBook, you would have to make an extra 60 sales per month. From there you can work backward. If you know that on average one out of 10 email subscribers buy the book within the first month of signing up, you need to add 600 new subscribers to your list, which in turn takes 4,000 new visitors to your site. If that’s your plan, you know that your daily to-do list needs to include plenty of action steps to ramp up my traffic by an extra 4,000 people per month.

Of course, that’s not your only option. You could also create another product, bonus, or eBook each month and sell it to both your existing and new subscribers. You could create a new higher priced item so you need to make a lot fewer monthly sales to reach your $600 goal. For example, if you create a nice $20 product, it would only take 10 sales per month to pay for the car. Or if you bundle a set and sell for $100, then I would only need 6 new sales per month.

Since the car payment will be an ongoing thing, it also makes sense to look into recurring payments. This could be your own membership site, or you could look into affiliate offers with recurring commissions. Depending on your market, there’s a lot out there that you can promote. One option could be to create some content around your current products, or provide a freebies on a monthly recurring bases (short stories, new art, insiders updates on upcoming books, background for your books that only members have access to, and special deals for members only).

A $17 per month subscription with a 90% commission would mean an you can expect over $15.30 in commissions each month. Let’s say it’s 15 to keep the math simple. You only need 40 members to pay for your car. Once you reach that number, you only need to add the occasional new member to balance out cancellations. Getting one or two more members in each month going forward should more than cover that.

Now you have a concrete goal to work towards which is convincing 40 people to sign up for the membership. My daily tasks will include things like creating content that includes an offer to the reader membership site, a short story or product that adds bonus to your reader and story world. You can even get with other authors, create a bundle, and offer as an exclusive to your membership on say a quarterly or six month bases at a discount they couldn't get by buying from outside your membership.

Then start driving traffic to your content and the opt-in offer and start mailing regularly about the reader membership. You might even craft a short autoresponder sequence to create an evergreen funnel.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You could approach the other authors to see if they would be interested in writing some guest blog posts, answering some questions for an interview style post, or even do a webinar, all of which would, of course, lead to the promotion of your membership.

By thinking outside the box and putting in some time and effort initially, it won’t take you long to get those 40 signups that pay for your new car payment. Because you really want that new car, you're going to be motivated to get it done and grow your business by those extra $600 per month. In fact, chances are great that you'll overshoot the goal by several hundred dollars and it’s something you can continue to grow month after month.