Welcome to my 12-week guide on helping your home services business with marketing. Today, we’re going to start with planning your long-term business goals. It’s important that your goals are clear if you want to actually improve your business.
“If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.”
Zig Ziglar
Why are you doing this?
So if you’re reading this, I assume you’ve decided that you want to improve your marketing for your home services business. But why? Do you want to:
- Reach more customers in the area so you’ll increase sales
- Reach higher-paying customers so you’ll increase profits
- Develop a recognizable brand so you can increase community involvement and charitable giving
- Sell your business and move to Fiji
It’s important that moving forward, you know what you want your business to look like and why. Only then can you create a marketing strategy and then get to the cool tools and tricks I’ll show in later weeks.
Once you get a clear vision, you can then set goals. Once you set goals, you can break those goals into projects. Once you create projects, you can break those projects into bite-sized weekly tasks that will move you closer to the vision you have for your business.
Aw… do I have to?
No, not really. You can sit on the sofa and binge watch old Star Trek episodes.
Just kidding.
Yes, you have to! You have to get a clear vision of what you want your business to look like and why you want it to look like that. If you don’t know what you want as the end result for your business, then your marketing strategy will be like aiming a shotgun in the air and hoping you hit something like a bird. That trick worked in the classic game Duck Hunt for the Nintendo Entertainment System, where you could just aim at a light and pull the trigger. But it doesn’t work that way in real life.
I’m struggling right there with you
I’ve struggled with long-term goals too. I still do. But I’ve found taking long-term goals and then breaking them down helps me focus. Having focus helps me avoid the danger of feeling overwhelmed and wanting to give up.
How to plan your long-term business goals and break them down into quarterly projects
Whew, that’s a long title, but you get the point.
Step 1: Write out a clear vision
Write down in a sentence or two the clearest vision what you want your business to look like in 5-10 years. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but something that you can focus on for the next quarter year or 12 weeks. Pray about it, but then say amen and write something down. The Apostle Paul planned to go to Spain, but likely didn’t, but that didn’t keep him from writing in down in his letter to the Romans.
Step 2: Translate your vision into S.M.A.R.T. goals
You’ve written a vision statement. Now you need to write down goals to aim for, goals that may take 5-10 years to accomplish.
Here’s an example in sports: A vision might be to be a championship-winning team. A goal might be to win the championship, or win ten games.
Come up with 3-5 goals that are Specific, Measurable, Action-oriented, Reasonably-risky and Time-bound.
- Specific: The more specific the better. Don’t say “I want more business”. Say “I want more customers” or “I want to increase profits”.
- Measurable: Having a measurable amount is a key to dividing your goals into projects and tasks. Don’t say “I want more customers”. Instead say “I want 100 more customers” or “I want to profits to go up by 50%”
- Action-oriented: Your goals need to have action verbs, or they’ll be difficult to translate into tasks. If you have 50 customers, don’t say “I want to be more profitable” but instead “I want to increase profits by 50%”.
- Reasonably risky: Michael Hyatt’s “Best Year Ever” shows research about how goals need to avoid the extremes of being dull or delusional. They need to be reasonable (i.e. you’re able to accomplish them) and risky (i.e. you’re not able to accomplish them without some hard work). Don’t say “I want to increase profits by 1%” or “I want to increase profits by 1,000,000%” but pick a number that’s reasonable and risky.
- Time-bound: Have a deadline is critical to breaking goals into projects and tasks. You must give yourself a deadline, which can play into how reasonable or risky your goals are. Lacking a deadline means you can put it off forever. Don’t say “I want to increase profits by 50%” but “I want to increase projects by 50% by the end of this year.”
Once you’ve got your S.M.A.R.T. goals set up, you can break them down into annual milestones.
Step 3: Break your goals into annual milestones
For each of your SMART goals, look at what would be a milestone over the next 5-10 years.
For example, if one of your goals was “Generate $1 million in annual sales by the end of five years” and your current sales are $200,000, then you can map out your goal incrementally:
- Year 1: Generate $200,000 in sales for this year.
- Year 2: Generate $400,000 in sales for this year.
- Year 3: Generate $600,000 in sales for this year.
- Year 4: Generate $800,000 in sales for this year.
- Year 5: Generate $1,000,000 in sales for this year.
See why it’s important to have measurable and time-bound goals? Once you’ve come up with annual milestones, you can focus on this year and further break it down into quarterly or 12-week projects.
Step 4: Divide your annual goals into quarterly projects.
Suppose your annual goal is to generate $200,000 in sales. Now it just becomes a matter of dividing by four:
- Quarter 1: Generate $50,000 in sales for this quarter.
- Quarter 2: Generate $50,000 in sales for this quarter.
- Quarter 3: Generate $50,000 in sales for this quarter.
- Quarter 4: Generate $50,000 in sales for this quarter.
You don’t need to worry about how you’re going to generate sales for each of the quarters, as you’ll focus on those later. For now, we’re going to focus on your current quarter or 12-week period and ignore the rest for now.
Step 5: Focus on this quarter and divide into a 12-week sprint
It’s now that you can brainstorm marketing ideas that will push you toward your quarterly sales goals.
If you don’t have any ideas, I’ve got you covered. Over the next 12 weeks, I plan to show you how to try out new marketing ideas such as:
- Creating a landing page on your website to get new business leads.
- Creating social media profiles for your business on Facebook, Google, Yelp and LinkedIn.
- Creating promotional videos with easy-to-use tools and on-hand equipment.
But before we get to those fun marketing things, we still need to cover:
- Prototyping your week so that you or others on your team can focus on improving your business without feeling overwhelmed.
- Managing quarterly marketing projects into bite-sized weekly tasks that you or someone on your team can complete.
Once you’ve got a prototype week that fits your schedule and we’ve set up a way to manage marketing tasks, you’ll be set to start working on your marketing.
See you next week. Don’t forget to subscribe to get my Tweeton’s Tuesday Tips for a friendly email reminder.
Additional resources
Want to dive deeper into goal setting and project planning? Check out these resources: