5 Months ‘Til Year End… Don’t Be Afraid To Re-Set Goals

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,618 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

This month, I’ve spent some time with my partners re-setting goals for the remainder of the year.

We did this last year as well - it seems every six months our old goals become stale. We gain new knowledge and data and identify a clearer vision of what it is we want to accomplish.

In the past, I’d stick to the goals we set at the beginning of the year no matter what.

Today, we are more fluid.

If you are feeling the need to reset goals and gain alignment, follow these steps:

Step 1: Identify what outputs are needed by Dec. 31

By now, you should know what you want to accomplish by the end of the year.

Identify and document the expected outputs:

• Financial measures

• New sales

• Client retention

• New hires

• Etc

Note: focus solely on outputs at this stage.

For example, an output related to hiring would be “new staff hired” or “offers sent to new hires” or “number of interviews booked.”

An output would not be “post a job ad” or something of the like.

Inputs are important, but building goals around inputs emphasizes being busy, not driving results.

Step 2: Identify who will own the outputs

Now that you have your outputs clearly documented, it’s time to build ownership and accountability into your goal setting system.

Without ownership and accountability, you will accomplish goals only with luck.

You know you lack ownership and accountability if you’ve ever thought/said:

“I hope they can get the job done”

Hope is not a strategy - it does not put you in control of your future.

Identify who will own each output/project and move to step 3.

Step 3: Challenge those people to define the one or two most important levers 

If you could focus on only one thing to drive the results, what would it be?

Too often we focus on being busy rather than being impactful.

This question challenges people to drown out the noise and focus on what is most important.

Step 4: Identify milestones 

Now it’s time to identify the inputs, and more specifically, when the inputs need to be completed by.

For example, let’s assume we know we need to hire one senior associate for the tax team and they need to start in January.

We work backward from there:

• The offer needs to be sent mid-December

• The final interview with 2 candidates needs to be early December

• Round one interviews need to be completed by mid November with at least 6 candidates

• We need to place the job ads by 3rd week of October

• The job ads DRAFT needs to be approved by 2nd week of October

• We need to determine salary before the draft

• We need to buy a salary data set to do that

• Etc

• Etc

What are the inputs that result in hiring one new person by January?

These become milestones, or tasks, with deadlines.

And when you set this up with the person who will own this project, you get their agreement that (1) this is possible; and (2) they will do it.

When they complete everything, you celebrate it.

If they miss a deadline, you hold a 1-1 with them and remind them how critically important this is to you.

If they miss two deadlines, you immediately remove them from the project (which will send a strong message to the rest of your team - do not mess around here).

All we are doing here is setting clear expectations and holding people accountable.

(See my post last week on the website for more context).

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.

Cheers,

Brandon