Setting Business Goals

By Lenny Ventimiglia IV, Vice President, Apollo Image Enhancement Center

We all go into a New Year with personal goals in mind. Some of us want to be healthier - going to the gym and/or losing weight. Maybe you want to travel more or spend more time with loved ones. As business owners, we should be setting goals for our business each year as well. What do you want to achieve in 2025?

The first step is figuring out what your biggest goal is for the year. Do you want to increase revenue? Profitability? Total client number? Obviously these are all great steps in the right direction, but you should be specific and set one major goal that can be broken down into smaller and more achievable steps.

Let’s say for example your #1 goal for the New Year is increasing your total annual revenue by 10%. I like to break everything down into monthly and weekly numbers to know exactly how I’m pacing towards my goals. In this example, last year my company made $500,000 in revenue. To increase by 10%, our goal for 2025 would be to make $550,000. In order to reach our goal we would need to make $45,833 per month or $10,576 per week. Now that these numbers are smaller and easier to plan for, you can start setting small milestones to reach your goal. Maybe you need to make two more sales each month to reach your revenue goal. Or, maybe it’s time you increase prices to make up for any increased costs you’ve incurred. To increase revenue for the entire year by 10% in this example, you’d only need to make about $900 more each week. Are there new products you can offer or start promoting to your current clients? Can you upgrade clients to higher end services?

So many business owners in our industry still work behind a chair, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. For many, that may be how you decided to go into business for yourself in the first place. But while you may spend most of your day working in your business, make sure to set aside a little bit of time each day or each week to work on your business as well. A few minutes in the morning dedicated to reviewing company performance can be the difference between reaching your goals and missing the mark.

Every single morning, I track the revenue, profits, sales, and marketing performance of our company from the day before. It’s much easier to take five minutes out of the morning to update our companies performance numbers than doing an entire week or month at a time. When we are consistently tracking everything, it’s easy to pinpoint which areas need improvement. Are you selling the people that are coming in the door, but still not making enough sales? You probably could work to improve lead generation and marketing. Are you getting a bunch of people calling your business but not making enough sales? It’s possible that a sales course or sales coach could help improve revenue.

We set goals as a roadmap. It’s always easier to reach your destination when you know where you’re going and how to get there. Set the destination (your big goal) first, and then map out the road for the rest of the year. Set little goals and checkpoints along the way to make sure you’re on the right path. How much revenue do we need to make each quarter? How many sales do we need to make each month to reach our goal?

No matter how big or small your company is, there is always a next step you can take towards growth. Your yearly goal may be small, but there should always be something to work towards and to aim for. If you aren’t focused on improving and growing, it’s very easy to stay stuck in the same place year after year. This year, let’s try putting more of our focus on our goals and working daily/weekly/monthly on tracking our progress and see what we can accomplish. As Tony Robbins said, “Where focus goes, energy flows. And where energy flows, whatever you’re focusing on grows”.