Have you ever sat behind the steering wheel of a car without knowing where you are going? Sounds bizarre, right? What is more bizarre is that we do this every day in our professional lives without finding it disturbing! If you are smart (which I am sure you are and that is why you are reading Like Chapaa!), then you would have figured out that we are talking about GOALS which are important when we leave the house as well as when we want to go ahead in our personal and professional lives.

In fact, my take on this is that having a goal makes life easier by giving us a direction and sense of purpose. If you want to be successful, then one of the things which you need to do is to set goals in EVERYTHING YOU DO. This may seem like a lot of work, but goal setting a habit forming activity and when you see the results, you will not regret it.

So how do you SET goals?
Goals are usually things which we want to achieve in life. Personally, you might have a goal to lose weight (ouch!), professionally it can be to increase turnover, employee productivity, customer satisfaction etc. Once you have a broad goal…you pretty much have a direction which then needs to be broken down into activities that lead towards that direction.

How do you DOCUMENT a goal?
You can have long term or short term goals and their categorization is dependent on the time frame it will take to achieve them. For example, you can give yourself two months to lose four pounds or twelve months to increase customer satisfaction. Once you categorize this, you need to backtrack a bit and break it down into activities which will lead you to the goal.

Remember my analogy about the car? Activities to reach a place, usually involve, starting the car, checking the route, driving, parking, etc. Similarly, you need to document steps which will help you get to this goal.

After documentation comes EXECUTION
This is actually the most difficult part of achieving your goal….you can only get it right if you execute the various steps correctly. This is the place where the difference between KNOWING and DOING can be understood well. Good planning makes it easy to reach a goal. Each step should be understood properly as that will influence the overall quality of the results of achieving your goal. For example, a well planned campaign for higher customer satisfaction is likely to get you close to 80% of your goal while a poorly planned one may get you only 10%.

A goal is only as good as its metrics!
Metrics are nothing but numbers which can help you measure your goals and are as important as setting a goal in the first place. I have to lose weight is a meaningless goal if you don’t tie it with a number. Similarly, a goal to increase sales numbers is unlikely to be of any point if you don’t attach a number to it…let’s say a 30% increase from current levels. In fact, it is only with metrics that it makes sense to have goals in the first place.

There…I have put up my strong feelings towards goals and their measurements and hope to cover metrics in a business in another blog very soon!

This article was submitted to Like Chapaa anonymously.

To be frank – your best clients and your easiest jobs – I don’t want. We don’t look for typical clients looking to build a website or implement some online marketing. We turn down all requests that come our way.

Here Is The Goldmine I’ve Discovered…
Create “products” for niche markets and sell them to the masses of small businesses who are eager to buy them.

We’ve perfected the formula. It goes like this. Pick a niche. Develop something that works and passes the following test:

1. It is simple and inexpensive to produce
2. It can be priced to produce a killer profit
3. It can be marketed like crazy

Successful Businesses Create Niches Where They Don’t Exist
Most businesses are the same company with different owners and a different name and logo. They’re all chasing after the same prospects and leads with the same marketing and sales methods and the same products.

Successful businesses, on the other hand, sell a different type of product or service. They are not carbon copies of their competitors. They have found a different type of product or service to sell to their clients.

• Maybe they add something to their product to make it different from what everything else sells
• They sell their service as a premium version of the commodity that everyone else sells, since it is unique
• They are able to control the price as their product/service is unique

Do SOMETHING different than everyone else. Usually that involves the product or service that you sell. When you dig real deep, it might be the same type of thing that your competitor is selling. However, successful businesses have done something different – made it more special somehow. Once you do that, it’s easier to sell, you can make more money, and you don’t have to struggle to reach a hotly contested market. Why stay in the shark-infested waters when you can seek out the deep blue ocean?

For example, if you run a web design company, or if you do web design on a freelance basis, do you really think you can compete in today’s market? Everybody and their mother is a web designer nowadays! If you run your business just like every other web designer out there you will be dead in a few months. You have to be smart. So be smart. Be different.

Here’s an absolute gem of an article from Seth Godin:

“The number one reason people give me for giving up on something great is, “someone else is already doing that.”

Or, parsed another way, “my idea is not brand new.” Or even, “Oh no, now we’ll have competition.”

Two big pieces of news for you:

1. Competition validates you. It creates a category. It permits the sale to be this or that, not yes or no. And this or that is a much easier sale to make. It also makes decisions about pricing easier, because you have someone to compare against and lean on.

2. There are six billion people in the world. Even if your market is hand-made spoke shaves for left-handed woodworkers, there are more people in your market than you can ever hope to track down.

There are lots of good reasons to abandon a project. Having a little competition is not one of them. Even if it’s Google you’re up against.” – Seth Godin