how to set realistic goals

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Quick announcement: these days, I’m working hard at building the strategy roadmap template most of you said you need to gain clarity. It’s a MASSIVE endeavor to help you plot your course with minimal effort. It will be live on September 11, so keep your eyes peeled for an email from me then.

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Goals shouldn’t kill your sanity. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to get there.

When I started out as a freelancer, my goal was modest: make a decent salary i.e. what an employer would have paid me back then. I blew past that in my second month.

This was my first mistake: my goal was much too low. I had let fear and uncertainty get the better of me.

When my income grew steadily every month and I launched my agency, I kept moving the goalpost. Made the yearly target in the first 6 months? Cool, let’s double it up. Neah, let’s triple it, why not make life harder than it needs to be?

This was my second mistake and the one that nearly killed my business: I didn’t know when to say “enough”.

Long story short, I never actually met a goal until my third year of business when I truly leaned into goal-setting and forgot about arbitrary numbers, rounded up to sound good. Context, historical benchmarks, industry averages, and economic factors all influence your goals and your ability to reach them.

This issue will teach you to be smarter than I was 10 years ago and avoid making my mentally draining mistakes.

Zoom OUT first, then zoom in

It may seem easier to look right in front of you, at the very first step you need to take. However, perspective enhances everything.

Whether you’re setting goals for next year or next month, take a second to look beyond that.

Where do you want your business to be in 5 years? Be specific, add numbers to it. Don’t worry about accuracy and realism just yet.

Do you want to make $100k a year? $1 million? $10 million?

Got the number that seems reasonable at first glance and would make you happy? Great! Time to put it to the test now!

Reality check: Can your business scale that much? Is there a wide enough market for what you’re selling, at the price you’re selling it? This is a good primer on the scalability potential of your business, along with resources to help you get an accurate number.

Psst, my subscribers read this before you did. Want to be the first to see analyses and roadmaps like this one? Subscribe to Ideas to Power Your Future and get them in your inbox every Thursday.

Your goals need to be S.M.A.R.T

S.M.A.R.T stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Let’s look at each of these:

Specific

  • Instead of “I want to grow my business”, use “I want to grow my business by 25% YoY (Year over Year)” or “I want to grow my business to $300K/year.”
  • Answer the 5W questions: What is my goal?, Why do I want this?, Who is responsible for achieving it?, Where will I be working on it?, Which are my resources and my limitations?

Measurable

  • Use numbers here, just like in the example above.
  • Not all your goals should be monetary. For instance, a stepping stone to $300k years might be increasing your social media following. Add that to your goals. (More on tiered goals below.)

Achievable

  • Do you have the resources to achieve those goals?
  • Based on historical data, how much extra effort will you need to get the extra growth you want?

(We’ll dig more into this below since I know this is what most of us have trouble with).

Relevant

  • Think back to your over-arching 5-year objective. Are the other goals you’re setting relevant for it? Will they help you reach it?
  • For instance, vanity metrics like social media follower count may be irrelevant for some businesses but crucial for others.

Time-bound

  • Add a clear date to all your goals.
  • This helps with accountability and reality-checks. Say you want to get to $500K/year in 3 years. Break it down and figure out what the YoY growth should be. Is it doable? In line with what you see other companies in your industry achieve? In line with your historical growth?
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How do you know if your goals are achievable and realistic?

This is the hardest part of goal-setting. Depending on where you are in your business, you have two options to test the viability of your goals.

#1: If you have been in business for longer than a year

Say you’re aiming for a 20% YoY growth — this is a perfectly reasonable target at first glance. To figure out if it’s reasonable for you, ask these questions:

  • Can you take on 20% more clients? If you’re a service provider, this might prove tricky. If it is, consider hiring more people or increasing your prices.
  • 20% extra clients are manageable? Look at the channels that brought you the most leads/clients. Can you up your efforts on them by 20% and STILL have the bandwidth to manage your business?
  • Is there a channel you haven’t tried out yet but that may prove profitable? Check out these 20 marketing channels for inspiration.

#2: If you run a new business

With a new business, you don’t have any historical benchmarks to guide you, so it feels like operating in the dark. You can shed some light on the viability of your goals through:

  • Industry research reports and statistics. Look up statistical data for your industry/type of business. A quick Google search on “how long does it take for X business to get to $Y” should reveal some information to get you started.
  • Go as granular as possible — if you are location-bound, look for similar companies in your country or area.
  • ​IDC, Gartner, and Statista are great places to find the benchmarks you need to set your own goals.

When in doubt, summon your Google Fu 🥋

Do you know how I came up with my own goals? I Googled industry averages, newsletter growth rates, and more, just like I Googled “what is the best month to sell online courses?”. [see below why this matters.]

I run an SEO content writing agency, so my Google Fu is strong. You can easily replicate the part of it that matters: if you look for industry-specific data to anchor your goals to, go as granular as possible.

Ask questions the way your grandmother would: it’s better if your search query is an entire sentence or a phrase.

One other important point here: go beyond the first two or three results. It pains me to say it, but the SEO industry made search much more difficult if you’re looking for real data.

Lastly, beware of inherent biases in research reports. Most reports you see online are usually designed to serve an industry or a player in that industry, so they are…too optimistic (yes, even the sources I mentioned above).

Use tiered goals to help you track progress and stay accountable

There are two ways to tier your goals and I recommend you use them both. The first one is the most obvious:

Split the big, hairy goal into smaller, more approachable pieces

Say you want to make $300K in 2024. This means:

  • $25K/month
  • $6K and change/week

In real life, things aren’t so easy to divide equally. You’ll have good, average, and bad months, especially if your business is impacted by seasonal trends (as it happens in eCommerce, for instance).

So before you throw your goal off the window, think about it in terms of average months and great months.

For example, a great month can be November, when you offer Black Friday discounts and make $45K instead of $25K. This means that you will have to make only $20K and change in the average months.

Next, think about the products/services that will help you meet your goal:

  • Analyze their ROI: Which of them brings the most profit with the smallest time/money investment?
  • Which are your best-selling products? Is there any seasonality to them? Seasonality isn’t always obvious. For instance, did you know that January is the best month to sell online courses? It’s the beginning of the year and people are committed to getting better at *something*.

Attach your monetary goals to other types of goals

The bigger your audience, the greater your chances of selling more. I know, we think of social media followers, web traffic, and email subscribers as vanity metrics. They are but there’s no selling without them.

  • The average organic social media conversion rate is 3% (it varies WIDELY across platforms, though, so take this with a large grain of salt).
  • The average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%.
  • The average email conversion rate is 2-5%.

These are cross-industry averages, so it helps to balance them out with your own metrics. For the purpose of our example, let’s stick to a 2% average conversion rate across channels.

Let’s say you sell a $500 product. To make at least $20K/month, you will need to sell it 40 times each month. This means you need one of the following or a combination of them:

  • 2,000 opened emails (not sent emails, OPENED emails, so take your open rate into account, not your subscriber count)
  • 2,000 unique visitors on your landing page
  • 2,000 unique viewers of your social media post (unique views are the hardest to figure out on social media, so a better benchmark may be follower count).

Now tier them up to get to your financial goals:

You need 2,000 pairs of eyes on your offer every month to make $20K. Your first tier is the audience, not the money.

Take a few other things into account:

  • Most people will need to see an offer more than once before they buy it. My launch email sequence and my 1:1 strategy session are always at the footer of my email and pinned at the top of my LinkedIn profile. But if I don’t mention them specifically, they sell more rarely. There’s a significant uptick in sales every time I write about them.
  • A sizeable chunk of your audience has already decided they won’t buy your product. This is why audience growth has to be an ongoing game. You stand a better chance to meet your $20K goal if you can get 2K different pairs of eyes on your assets.
  • Not everyone in your audience is equal. The rule of 10s is an interesting hypothesis for email subscribers — use it to inform the way you set your prices: “Every time you increase the price by 10x, you’re reducing by 10x the number of subscribers in your audience who would pay that price”.

I’m calling this a hypothesis and not a theory because I have found very little evidence to support it. It seems correct intuitively: the higher your prices, the fewer people will be willing to pay them.

How do you know your goals are realistic AND that they help you make progress?

Missing goals is very common. It happens to Fortune500 companies all the time and they have huge teams that map out these goals and work to meet them.

So don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t quite there. Barring significant events out of your control (economic downturn, a new plague, a war, and so on), if you are 25% below or above your goal, minimal tweaking is needed. You’re on the right path.

If you’re more than 25% below or above your goal, something’s off. Either your goals are unrealistic or your plan to meet them is lacking.

I have a solution to the latter. It launches on September 11 and it will be your roadmap to clarity, accountability, and goal-setting.​
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Perhaps the most important part about setting realistic goals

…is that they are your own goals, tied to what YOU want. I know online bubbles are set on an arbitrary amount: $10K months, 7-figure years, and so on.

Before you set a goal, make sure it’s what you want, not what the hive mind says you should be making. Don’t go chasing other people’s goals and expecting your own contentment in return.

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That’s it from me today.

See you next week in your inbox!

Here to make you think,

Adriana

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Adriana’s Picks

  1. The EU’s Digital Services Act just went into effect! This means EU-based social media users get more insight into how algorithms work. You can finally decline personalized feeds and opt for chronological ones instead.
  2. AI gets denied. 70 of the world’s 1000 top websites, including Amazon, CNN, Quora and The New York Times, started blocking GPTbot from accessing their content.
  3. I’m currently in love with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast, “Wiser than Me”. She chats with older women about growing old graciously and with purpose. My favorite episodes are the ones with Jane Fonda and Isabel Allende.

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