My Goal Setting Process to CRUSH 2024

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,410 growth-minded accountants.

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

Today’s issue takes less than 10 minutes to read.

I have an offer for you.

Today’s newsletter is about goal setting.

If you read through this and take a stab at setting goals for 2024, email them over to me and I’ll give you my feedback.

I’ll do it for free through next Saturday.

Setting goals properly is critical to your success and I want to help if you’ll let me.

I used to suck at setting goals.

Year after year I’d fail to hit my growth and margin targets. My team was good but rarely aligned. And our performance reviews for comp and bonus purposes always felt highly subjective.

But I’ve since refined my goal-setting practices.

Now we have firm-wide alignment and accountability. Performance reviews and comp conversations are easy and our people know where they stand throughout the year.

Knowing how to set goals and cascade them throughout our firm has been a game changer.

Unfortunately, many firm leaders make common mistakes like I did that hold them back.

Biggest Mistake: Setting a Goal that isn’t a Goal

How many times have you set goals that look like this:

• Post 8 YouTube videos per month

• Host one webinar per quarter

• Integrate new (software/AI/tech) into our firm

• Hire a new manager by X date

• Set up an internal knowledge base to store walkthroughs and trainings

These are all wonderful activities, but I have bad news…

None of these are goals.

Goals are outcomes. Measurable results backed by data that you can improve year-over-year.

The above list are drivers and projects.

Drivers and projects are an important part of goals that you’ll measure weekly. These are your KPIs that drive accountability throughout the organization. In theory, if you achieve your drivers and projects you’ll achieve your goals.

An example will help.

If you tell me your goal is to post 8 YouTube videos per month, I’m going to ask you… why? What is the point of posting 8 YouTube videos? How does the firm benefit?

LEADS.

The firm gets more LEADS.

Posting YouTube videos is not the goal. Generating leads is the goal. Further, generating qualified leads is the goal.

If you changed the goal to “generate 20% more qualified leads year-over-year” I guarantee you’ll think about the content of those 8 YouTube videos differently.

Posting the YouTube videos drives the ultimate goal: generate leads.

This is an important distinction because if you post 8 YouTube videos every month for 6 months and find you’re not generating more qualified leads, you’ll kill the YouTube project and find a different way to generate leads.

But if posting YouTube videos is the “goal” then you won’t kill the YouTube project, even though it’s ineffective.

Here’s another example:

You want to build an internal knowledge base for your employees. It will include process docs and video walkthroughs.

But how does the firm benefit?

Answer: efficiency, higher quality work, effectiveness.

How do you measure this?

In theory, total production per employee should increase. Or perhaps you want employees to answer their own questions to free up your tax manager’s time during tax season. Maybe you are looking for average project “time in status” to decrease once it’s in the manager’s hands.

Building a knowledge base is not the goal.

It is a project that enables you to achieve something else… what is that something else and how do you measure it?

Now that we understand the difference between goals and their drivers/projects, it’s time to set your own goals.

Step 1: Imagine it’s December 2024… What Has Your Firm Accomplished?

Put yourself into your future shoes. It’s December 2024, what has the firm accomplished?

Write down the revenue and margin target you want to achieve. Think about client retention, new client sales, team expansion, production per employee, brand positioning, market influence, etc.

This exercise should not be done haphazardly. I spend roughly 40 hours thinking through what I want our firm to accomplish next year and gathering data to understand how achievable the goals are.

Step 2: Create Measurable Outcomes and Assign Them Out

Now that you know what you want the firm to accomplish, it’s time to refine and set measurable goals.

“Revenue of $3M with a net margin of 32%.”

“Increase qualified leads by 15% year-over-year.”

“Increase employee production by 10% year-over-year.”

“Decrease project time in X status by 3 days, on average.”

These goals are then assigned to key members of your team to execute. Ideally, the key members are a part of this goal-setting process and come up with these goals largely on their own with you coaching them through it.

Step 3: Ask Each Person What Activities Must Be Completed to Accomplish the Outcome

After each person has their goals set (no more than 3-4 per person) you ask them, one-by-one, to define the drivers and projects that must be completed in order to accomplish the overall goal.

Challenge their thinking to help them gain clarity on these activities.

I will ask questions like: how do you know when the project is complete? What does success look like? How will you create time to do this? What happens when you fall behind on these drivers and projects? What happens if you are completing the drivers and projects but we find out it’s not helping the goal?

Lock in these drivers and projects and measure them on a weekly scorecard that everyone reports on.

You’ll have more success in accomplishing your goals and those dreaded performance reviews will become easy and clear.

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

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See you again next week.

Cheers,

Brandon

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