This week, I launch season 3 with a look at how to fix the new year’s business resolutions you haven’t even thought about again — and set business goals that you can achieve going forward. Listen now:


Join the Grow Your Side Hustle community on Facebook to connect with your fellow side hustlers and get your questions answered.

Got questions or want to be featured on the podcast? Use the voice message button or link on the episode page or email jennifer@jennifer-roland.com.

Don’t forget to subscribe and download the episodes in your favorite podcast app so you won’t miss any of our future episodes with other side hustlers and experts to help you deal with some of those small and large issues that come up when you’re running a side hustle. I’d also love it if you could share this episode with any of your friends you think would be interested. Finally, please leave a review and a rating in your podcast app — this is huge for helping us find new listeners.

Get notified of new episodes and other updates by email. Sign up today. You’ll also get access to the Grow Your Side Hustle resource library, with useful tools to help you turn your side hustle into whatever you want it to be, including a goal setting cheat sheet, the “leave your day job” checklist, and more.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to season three, episode one of the Grow your Side Hustle Podcast, the podcast to help women grow the business of their dreams, whether they want to run it as a long term side hustle or build it into their main business so they can control their time with their families and control their money.

I’m your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente, here to provide short, actionable episodes that will help you build your business. In this week’s episode, we’re going to be talking about whether your new year’s business resolutions are broken already. If so, why and how to fix them.

But before we dive into that, I wanted to let you know that I have opened up a brand new Facebook group where we can all connect and ask questions. I’ll be going live to answer your questions. And you know posting in there and you can post for me to answer anytime. So you can find that on Facebook if you search for Grow Your Side Hustle community, or I’ll just have a link here to it in the show notes.

So today, I’m asking you are your new year’s business resolutions broken? You know those goals that you set for yourself at the beginning of the year? And if so, let’s figure out why. So you can so that we can fix it.

I see a few different things happening.

First, it’s that people set these new year’s resolutions, these yearly business goals that are just not specific enough. So you know, if you’ve worked in business planning at your day job or you know focused on health goals, you might have heard people talk about making sure that your goals are smart, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. And that’s a great framework to use when you’re looking at your own business goals as well. So, you know, if you just want to grow, like, you know, that’s not a goal that you can really measure, or really plan for, how do you want to grow? What do you want to grow? How much do you want to grow? Those are the things that that you can, you can measure and plan to achieve. And you’ll know when you get there.

So a better goal might be to grow sales by 10% over the first two quarters, or increase your profit by 15% over the course of the year. So you see in those examples, we’ve got a number that is specific and measurable. We’re not you know, shooting too far. 10 15% is something that you can, you might reasonably expect to achieve, you can look at past years, to see how much you’ve grown, to decide whether the goals you’re setting are achievable. You know, someone may be able to grow their business by 200%. In one year, someone else might struggle to get to 5%. And you know that 5% may be great, depending on what your business is doing already, and what you need your business to do in the future. It’s not that you have to set the biggest number. We want you to set a number that you can achieve, and that you can measure. And so you know, when you’re looking at relevant that’s usually a pretty easy one. In business, you know, if you want to grow your sales of a particular product that is relevant to your business, if you want to do something completely unrelated to your business, maybe it’s time to, you know, focus your that as a personal goal. And look back at your business goals, to make sure that they’re they’re relevant for your business. And for the timeframes. Again, that’s a place where you might want to look back on previous performance to see what timeframes are reasonable for your goals.

So if when you set your business goals for this year, you didn’t follow that SMART framework. Go back and see what you can do to change them.

The other big problem that I see is that people will set a goal and maybe it is specific and measurable. But then they don’t think about what it means. So let’s say you want to increase your income by $100,000 over the course of the year. So what does that mean? What does that break down to? Let’s pull out the calculator. So 100,000 divided by 12. That’s $8,333 a month. So a little over $2,000 per week, if you’re looking at a four-week month, so what is it going to take for you to create that growth?

One of the things that I look back on in helping me plan is the work that I used to do in setting up PR plans. So when you’re creating a PR plan, you first outline your goals. We always made sure they were SMART. Then we did some research, you know, to make sure that that they really were achievable. And then we set some objectives and tactics to figure out what it’s going to take to achieve our goals. So when we look at that $100,000, that that can be our goal. The $8,333 a month, $2,000 per week, that can be our objectives.

And then you want to dive really deep, and say, what are the tactics that you can use to help you achieve those goals? So if we’re looking at $2,000 per week, what products does that focus on? Do you want to sell your most profitable products? That maybe you need to sell fewer have to hit that $2,000 goal? Or do you want to sell the things that you know, you can hit a lot of volume on, then maybe you don’t earn as much of a profit on each one, but you’re confident that you can increase the volume to get to that $2,000 a week objective.

And then what are you going to do to create that growth? Are you going to spend more time creating great social media posts to share? Are you going to be running paid ads somewhere? Or you’re going to be partnering with other vendors and other people who do things that are related to what you do. Like if you’re a writer, maybe you want to partner with a designer who can loop you in on projects that you’re working on. Or vice versa, if you’re a designer, look for a copywriter who might be able to include some design services and what they’re selling. If you sell jewelry, maybe you want to cross-promote with someone who skills who sells skincare to the types of people who would be wearing your jewelry and see if that can help you both grow.

Think about the ways that have been successful for you to to market yourself and what you’re trying to sell in your business to really drill down and see what specific actions you can take.

And make sure that there are things that you can achieve in the time that you have, you know, your your goal should be specific and measurable. And the actions that you take should also be specific, measurable and achievable.

Finally, make sure that you’re building in time to measure the results. That was always a huge part of our PR plans. So you know, for going back to that $100,000 increase in income, set some time aside at the end of every month to see if you’ve hit that goal. If you’ve hit you know your objective for the month. So you can think about what that’s going to look like for you. Maybe it’s setting a reminder in your calendar, last day of the month, last business day of the month, or one of the first few business days of the next month to go back and assess how well you’re hitting those objectives. And if you’re not hitting the objectives, look at what you might change to help you get there. If you are then you know, decide whether you need to keep doing the same thing, different things more of the same less of the same. Just take some time to use those results to guide your actions.

That really leads to the third big problem that I see with goals. And it’s that people set them and then forget them. So put it in your calendar, do something so that you will remember to go back and make sure that you are continuing to work towards your goals, because the goal that you forget about is the one you’ll never achieve.

So I look forward to hearing if you have any questions in that Facebook group. Again, that’s the Grow Your Side Hustle community, and the link will be in the show notes. Also sign up for the email list so that you can get notifications of new things you can get access and you can get access to the Grow Your Side Hustle Resource Library, which has some of the tools that I’ve created to help you achieve what you want to achieve with your side hustle. If you’ve liked today’s episode, please feel free to share it with someone that you think might enjoy it. Make sure to click the button to subscribe in your podcast app and leave a review that always helps more people find us.

All right. Talk to you next time. Hope to see you in that Facebook group.