[00:00:00] Welcome to the creative business launch podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures, whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. 2024 is here and I want to talk about goal setting in today's episode. So I think goal setting and more so being clear about where you want to be a year from now is extremely important to determine your long term success here.
So I want to talk about how I walk through how I think about my goals, and hopefully that's going to help you with your own goal setting methodology. So for some context over the last four or five years or six years, I've approached goal setting, um, in a very systemized way, almost. So I like to have a lot of structure inside my goals.
Um, so. The first instance where I can remember really setting an ambitious goal was in 2019, uh, January. I set out to do an [00:01:00] Ironman triathlon. Now, for those of you that don't know what that is, it's a 2. 4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and a 26. 2 mile run. Now, Yes, this is not really related to business or creative business, but bear with me because it's all going to come full circle in just a minute here.
So the reason I set this goal for myself was so that I could prove to myself that I'm someone that's capable of doing hard things. That was the point of this goal. The point wasn't to get a medal at the end of the race. The point was to prove to myself to gain confidence for myself that I'm someone that's capable of doing hard things.
At that time, a Ironman triathlon seemed like the hardest thing I could do. And fast forward nine months, I crossed the finish line. I finished the race. Um, and because I finished that race, I had the confidence in myself to actually go out and start a business. That was my criteria. [00:02:00] If I could finish this race, then I'll be able to start a creative business, start a photography company.
And for me, that's what I had to do to prove to myself. Um, that I was capable of doing this type of thing. Now, I'm not saying that everyone that wants to start business should or has to do a race like this. That's not the point of this. Um, but the reason I set this as a target was because I knew I could break this down, this goal down into actionable steps that I could put effort towards every single day.
So let's talk about how I set this goal and how it relates to business goals. So for an Ironman triathlon, it required a lot of training. Um, I was training six days a week, every single day, every single week leading up to that race for nine months. Now that's a very long time to commit to. And I knew I had to commit to that in order to prove to myself that I could do the actions required to start a business because business comes down to the daily actions you do.
It doesn't come down to the. Random [00:03:00] chances, the random clients that come in your way. It's the things you do every single day that build up those consistent results over time. So let's take that Ironman goal. Um, we had six days a week of training and from those, uh, within those days, I had to have specific training regimen.
So some days it was a bike ride. Some days it was a swim. Some days it was a run. And I got very specific. Each and every day of what I had to do. So if I was running, it was a specific running target that would get harder and harder as the months went on. Same with swimming, same with biking. And that's kind of the core of the goal setting here.
I took this big goal and I brought, broke it down into small manageable chunks. Now let's pivot for a second and talk about a business goal. A lot of us may have. So I know for a lot of photographers or live a lot of business owners, 10, 000 a month is a really popular goal that I see thrown out in the online creative business space.
The reason I [00:04:00] think this goal just sounds pretty, it's a bit over six figures, which if you can hit that goal, that's incredible. Um, but saying something like 10, 000 a month doesn't do much. You can say that's your goal, but it's just saying that's a goal doesn't really bring you anywhere close to actually accomplishing the goal.
Sure. It's great to have that vision, but every vision, every goal has to be broken down into a standard that you can follow. So you can complete that goal. So what do I mean by a standard? So these are the actions you're going to be doing every single month, week, day, leading up throughout the year, leading up to you completing that goal.
So for example, 10, 000 a month, where do we get that 10 grand? Well, that comes from client work. Right. You're making money from client work. Most likely if you're starting a creative business, next up, um, how do we get that client work? Right. So there's a couple of ways to actually land [00:05:00] clients. You could do it through outreach, posting content, running paid ads.
So these are all ways that you can actually land clients. Um, to get to the 10K a month mark, you just have to pick one of these methods and stick to it. So let's say we want to do outreach, right? So if our goal is to get 10K a month through landing clients via outreach, we can further keep breaking down this goal.
So if you notice the trend here, I'm taking this big picture goal of hitting Some sort of financial number. Um, and then we're breaking this down into smaller and smaller chunks that we can actually put effort towards, right? That's the whole point of creating, um, a standard here. So we say we're going to do outreach to land clients.
What kind of outreach, let's just say cold email. Now we know we're doing cold email. How much cold email do we have to do? Well, that's going to depend on how well you convert your clients. So you can either send a thousand cold emails and get one response. [00:06:00] Or send a hundred cold emails and get one response or 10 cold emails and get one response or three cold emails and get one response.
So in order to figure out these numbers, now, this isn't, this is not a podcast episode around cold email. That's not what this is. If you want help with that, uh, message me on Instagram. I'll set you up with that, but there's a lot of variance there depending on so many factors, namely how good your systems are set up and the copy and a whole bunch of other things.
So let's just say you are able to land a client from every hundred emails that you send, right? So you send a hundred emails, you land one client, and you know, you're able to land this one client because you know, your sales conversions, you know, how many people will come back later. You pretty much know, um, all the metrics behind the cold email here.
Now, once you've got these metrics down, you should know like what your average purchase size is from clients. So let's say that's 2000 bucks a month. [00:07:00] Um, so you're able to land a 2, 000 a month client. By sending a hundred emails and by doing that, you're already at 2000 a month. So all you have to do is multiply two by five to get 10.
And from there you're at 10, 000 a month by sending 500 cold emails a month. Now, what we did there, a lot of math here, but the math isn't as important as the system that we followed. So what we did, we broke down. This random goal of 10, 000 a month into actionable steps that you can take every single day.
So if we know we have to send 500 emails a month, you just divide that by 30 and you send that many per day. And there you have the core action required to hit that goal. Every goal can be broken down into this kind of format. You can break your goals down into the core actions required to actually hit that goal.
And the whole point of this [00:08:00] exercise is to prove to you that goals aren't some, something that you just get lucky with goals, need to have some sort of standard that you can follow every single day. And then you'll hit that goal. The hard part is committing to that standard. Most people think that in order to get some sort of big milestone, they have to get lucky or.
Everything has to align perfectly, or they need these fancy hacks or some fancy trick is out there that will lead them to actually get this, get this milestone. But the reality is way more boring than that. The reality is that there's no fancy tricks that's going to really get you to your goal. Now, yes, there's strategies you should be following that will help you get there faster.
Just like I mentioned, the. Uh, you could send either a hundred emails or a thousand emails and get very different results. There's strategies in there that you can follow, but at the end of the day, it comes down to consistency and consistently doing the core [00:09:00] actions you've identified to reach your goal.
Now, that's it. That's all you have to do. Those core actions consistently now over time. You may, you may think you only need to do 10 core actions per day, when in reality it's a hundred per day. Um, and that's fine. You just adjust over time as you get feedback from whatever you're working towards. So if your goal again is to get that 10, 000 a month mark, if you realize that the emails you're sending aren't converting.
Well, maybe it's time to switch up your copy. Maybe it's time to work with a coach that can help you get to that point faster. Whatever it is, there's ways to adjust your strategy there. Same with any other goal you have. If your goal is to grow a YouTube channel, for example, it's going to take a lot of consistency.
When you hear any big YouTuber talk about how they grew their channel, They talk about how many times they've uploaded a video and it's gotten 10 views, 20 views, no one watched it. If you hear about MrBeast talking about his early days of YouTube, [00:10:00] he uploaded hundreds of videos that no one watched. And no one really remembers that because now he's huge.
And this goes for every single YouTuber I've really heard about. Um, they all spent some portion of time Going through this stage where they were uploading videos consistently and getting no traction and then after a year or two, their channel explodes and it's not that video that they uploaded two years in that causes the channel to explode is those 200 videos that they uploaded.
Over the course of that time, right? Those 200 videos that they stayed consistent with, they slowly improved over time. They knew what the core actions were required to grow that channel. They did those consistently and their channels grew. And that's how I approach goal setting, right? So we take that big goal of 10, 000 a month.
And we break it down to the small chunks of sending the 500 emails a month. And that's how we accomplish the goals. And I'm going to [00:11:00] end this with how we measure progress. So if we, I keep going back to the same goal over and over again, just cause that's what we're talking about. But if we have that 10, 000 a month goal, we shouldn't measure success with whether or not we get 10 K a month.
That's not really relevant to, um, the goal. Now, bear with me. What is relevant here is the actions you do every single day. Because we can track how many emails we send every day. And if we send the emails that we say we're going to each day, then we feel accomplished. And over time, the results will come as a, the results will just come because we're doing the actions every day.
Now, on the other hand, if we're measuring against the outcome, the 10k a month, Well, on day one, if we send 15 emails, we're not going to hit that 10k number on day one. No. We're going to send the 15 emails. So we shouldn't measure on the, based on the outcome on day one, because we're going to get discouraged because [00:12:00] it's not going to come for a long time.
Now, this goal of 10k a month, that's hard to hit. So, your goal shouldn't be to hit this in month 1. Your goal should be to hit this in month 12. But then again, still, the goal should be the actions that you're doing. The goal shouldn't be the end result. The goal should be completing the actions every single day.
This is how you can measure progress. This is how you can keep momentum. And momentum is everything. When you're, when you have a big goal like this, whether that's growing a YouTube channel, building a business to 10 K a month, momentum and consistency go hand in hand. We're going to show up every single day and do those core actions that we identified, and then we're going to build momentum over time because month one, we might send 500 emails and no one's going to sign on to work with us.
Same with month two or three, but then month four, we might just skyrocket to 5k a month. And then month six, we might get to 10 K a month. And it's not the actions that we did on month. On those two months that got us to that point, it's the actions we did every single day [00:13:00] leading up to those months. So, the point here is to take your outcomes and make them irrelevant.
Don't worry about the outcomes, we need to worry about the daily process, the standard that we're following each and every day. And that's how we can actually accomplish goals.
This is exactly how I've been able to accomplish my goals that I set out to. I figure out what the end result is. I ignore the end result. I just work on the standard, the daily process that will get me to that level. This is what I did to grow my YouTube channel to 66, 000 subscribers. Over the course of two or three years, this is what I've done for Instagram.
This is what I've done for my photography business. This is what I've done for my online program. Create a biz launch. I always follow a standard like this and that's how I'm able to accomplish so much. It's because I'm focusing on the daily standards, not the end result. If you can focus on the daily actions that you have to do and do those actions every [00:14:00] single day without expecting an outcome.
Then you will hit your goals. Now, this is how I recommend you set goals for this year. It's worked really, really well for me. I hope it works well for you. That's all I got today. My name is Chris Pieta. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you later.
