What to do if your big goals seem to be unreachable

I don’t have to tell you that goal setting in business is important, right? You know that it is. But actually setting goals, breaking down these goals so that they become actionable steps and then following up is something else.

But what if you’ve set your goals and are doing everything you can and you’re just not getting closer to reaching them?

Then those goals that are supposed to help you are actually making you feel like you’re not getting anywhere. And the longer you’re not making the progress you are looking for the easier it is to get into a downward spiral.

But it does not have to be. So let’s have a look at a slightly different approach you can take after you’ve set your goals so it’s not so overwhelming

In this blog, we’ll look at:

• What it means to have a phased approach when it comes to your goals
• How a phased approach can help you to not feel overwhelmed by how far off you are from your goals
• And I’ll share 3 different examples of how you can use this phased approach

What is a phased approach when it comes to goal setting

A phased approach means that you set a goal but then break it up into smaller goals. So this doesn’t mean that you’re just breaking down the goals into actionable steps to reach the goal but that you have smaller goals on the way to your bigger goal.

Let’s say this year you are making 30.000 in profit. But ideally, you want to make 50.000 in profit. So you could set yourself this goal for next year. But the jump from 30 to 50K is quite large. Especially when you have been able to make this 30K with only one-on-one work because there are only so many clients you can take on at the same time.

To make this jump there is a large chance there’s quite a bit that you need to change, improve or develop to get to this number. You might want to launch website templates, brand strategy-related services like clarity calls or brand audits or maybe even full brand strategy sessions. All of these options mean that you have to develop these new services/products which takes a lot of time (and often even more than expected), especially if you’re fully booked most of the year. Add in additional education, like a program about brand strategy, and you can add in a couple more months.

Before you know it you’re already in the second quarter of the new year and nothing has been launched yet. Every time you look at your goal, you know that in theory, you’re getting closer, but there is nothing tangible you have to show for all your hard work and no extra money in the bank to confirm that you’re getting closer. This is where that downward spiral can come in, where setting goals actually has the opposite effect of what they’re supposed to do. And where you start to feel overwhelmed instead of motivated.

So to make sure that this doesn’t happen what you can do instead of working towards the end goal of 50.000, is setting yourself the goal of 40.000. And all the action plans that you’re creating are geared towards this 40.000 goal. This does not mean you’re not working towards your ultimate goal. All those things that you will put in place to reach your 40K are also necessary to reach the 50K.

But this will help to lower the pressure on yourself and for you to get the right things in place (whatever this looks like for your business) one step at a time to move towards the big goal.

Let’s look at some examples of how you can use this phased approach because it can be used for much more than setting big financial goals.

Phased approach for creating your full product suite

When you want to create a product suite based on an ascension model each service, package, course, mastermind, membership or whatever else you are offering will help your clients take the next step in their journey. So instead of offering services that are competing with each other, these services are actually building on top of each other.

As your clients are gaining more knowledge, experience, start to run into different struggles and with a growing budget, they can go from one level within your ascension model to the next. The benefit of this is that you can start working with a client from the beginning of their journey (basic tier service) and you can keep supporting them throughout that journey. This way, instead of having only one-off clients and having to find new clients constantly, you can spend less time on lead generation and the spend of one client is much higher.

But a lot of the time you don’t just start off with having all five tiers of the ascension model in place. So you want to have a phased approach to create this product suite so that you can build your business in a sustainable way.

You will start with where you are now, so the first phase is your current services. Then the last phase, and you might need more than 4 phases but for the sake of this example I took four phases, is your end goal. Every phase represents a new step.

BUILT A FULL PRODUCT SUITE – THE END GOAL & YOUR PHASE 1

Let’s look at an example of a product suite:

1. Top tier service = Custom design projects
2. High tier service = Done-with-you Group Program
3. Middle tier service = Brand or website audit
4. Basic tier service = Templates
5. Entry-level service = Brand Basics Course

So while this full product suite is your end goal, your phase 1 (what you are offering right now) might be custom brand & website design.

BUILT A FULL PRODUCT SUITE – PHASE 2

To determine your phase 2 you need to think about what would be the easiest service or product that you could offer (from the ones that you have already decided, no need to come up with anything new) and that you have the audience for. Because when you start to build out your product suite and start adding in more passive options you need to have a larger volume of people to buy your products to compensate for taking on 1 less or a smaller design project.

So while the templates might sound very tempting because you can do what you’re good at, designing websites or brands, they will take up a lot of your time initially to create. And you need to have an audience to sell them to. So if you’ve been working mostly based on referrals, word of mouth or retainer clients you might not have a (large enough) engaged audience.

If that is the case, the brand or website audit might be a better first step. You still need to create a framework to use but you will be able to do this based on the experience that you already have. And it can convert potential clients that don’t have the budget for your custom service. As you could do the audit and then create an overview with proposed changes including a cost overview if you would do this for them.

BUILT A FULL PRODUCT SUITE – PHASE 3

While you are offering these 2 services, you’re going to work on building your audience and increasing engagement so that you can work towards the new product for phase 3. In this case, I am combining the templates and the group program for phase 3 as I wanted to stick to 4 phases but you could break these up into individual phases.

When launching new programs or products you want to have some time in between the launches, for yourself and not to overwhelm your audience. So if you feel you have a large enough audience to sell a small beta group program you can start with this first and work on creating your templates in the meanwhile.

BUILT A FULL PRODUCT SUITE – PHASE 4

The final phase, phase 4, starts when you have built up your audience and feel they are ready to buy the brand basics course. This is where it really comes down to numbers and having enough people in your audience that are interested in a low-cost course.

Now let’s look at a phased approach to selling your services that you currently have.

Phased approach for selling your services

Not all of your services are created equal.

This might sound a little bit strange so let me explain. In general, you will see that you’re not selling each service the same amount of times. So this also means that not all services have an equal impact on the total revenue and profit that you’re making. Which in turn means, your focus on selling your services should also not be the same.

So to determine your focus of selling, you can make a list of your services and note how many times you sold each of your services so far. Then calculate what their contribution was to your overall revenue.

Let’s use the same example again and say you want to make £40.000 coming year in revenue.

You offer 3 different packages which you sell for £1.000, £2.000 and £5.000. You sell your middle package the most, and this is generally 1 per month. Now you can calculate how many times you need to sell each service to get to £40.000.

Now you know that you need to sell:

• package 1 -> 4x = £20.000
• package 2 -> 9x = £18.000
• package 3 -> 2x = £2.000

If it’s April and you have sold package 2, already 4 times, you are right on track with the contribution of this service towards your end goal. If you sold it 6 times and it is August you know you need to focus your marketing on this package as you will need to sell 1 per month.

So let’s put a bit of strategy behind how you can reach this goal by breaking it up into quarters.

Don’t just divide everything by four and say that if you would need to sell package 1 4x in a year that you will do one each quarter. Look at the months on their own. Will December and the holidays have an impact on your business? Do you see less demand in months like July and August when there are school holidays?

Think a bit out of the box with this as well. Are they any big names in your industry that have a big yearly launch like Marie Forleo’s Bschool in February or Ashlyn Carters Copywriting for Creatives that could impact spending habits?

Then map out your holidays or any other periods that you are limited in time. Now you can spread these services out over the months that you have left. This will give you a better idea of when you need to sell what (considering lead time) so that you can direct the focus of your marketing efforts and how you spend your time (yep, this is where your ideal week comes in again and using theme days and time blocking)

Now let’s look at a phased approach to your marketing efforts to sell these services.

Phased approach for marketing your services

When you know how many times you need to sell each service it’s time to break the goals down into actionable steps to reach your revenue goal. Think about what you need to improve or set up within your business to be able to reach those quarterly goals.

Maybe this is:

• Increase visibility because there are not enough people who know about your business (Maybe start with or improve Pinterest traffic, go on a podcast each month)
• Take a course about brand strategy so that you can offer brand strategy related services
• Start tracking time because everything seems to take more time than expected and you need to see where you can take time back.
• Improve brand messaging as there is not a lot of engagement on social media posts with the result that there are no clicks on the website
• Grow newsletter subscribers to 400. How do I get to 400? Let’s say you’re looking to do a beta test of a course or website template beta with ten people. And so far you have an average conversion rate of 2/3% (this is quite a normal conversion rate), your list needs to grow to at least 400 to convert 10 people.

What these actionable steps will look like depend on where you are in your business, what you already have in place and what is and isn’t working well. But I am using an example that most businesses need to work on to sell their services: drive website traffic. But as this is something that will take effort over time, this is a great task to use a phased approach for. The phased approach could look like this:

1. Evaluate (month 1): you first need to know where you stand. So the first step is to evaluate where your current traffic is coming from. What is the spread between the channels? Do you see a large variance between volume channels and quality traffic channels?
2. Plan (month 1): now decide where you are going to focus your efforts. Is Instagram the only social channel that is driving your traffic for this source? Then spend some time diversifying and working on other channels, or hardly getting any organic traffic? Then you need to work on your SEO.
3. Track data (Set up month 1 -after that track weekly/Quick check daily): you don’t know if what you’re doing is working if you are not tracking your website’s traffic. So start monitoring your website’s data weekly in a spreadsheet. And if you can, have a quick check every day to spot if anything is not going right or if you see a massive spike.
4. Increasing your website’s traffic takes time and is a long game, but you need to keep working on it. So let’s say you need to add another social media channel to diversify, and you choose Pinterest. You can use a phased approach for this as well:

• • Week 1: Set up an account

  • Week 2: Create initial 15 boards with 20/30 pins

  • Week 3: Set up tailwind to make scheduling easy

  • Week 4: Create pin templates for your blog post

Now, within a month, you have set up Pinterest and can start driving more traffic to your website and not be reliant on one social media channel the next thing you need to work on.

AND THERE YOU HAVE IT

There you have it, a step-by-step plan to get started with a phased approach to achieve your big goals. So that you can get intentional on how to achieve your goals and transform your business to be more sustainable and profitable.