How to Set More Realistic Goals in 2024

Is my goal realistic?

This is one of the most common questions I hear from clients, and I think the interesting thing about that question is we all want to be right. We all want to be able to predict the future, guess the outcomes that we're going for and get there, right? And when we don't hit those goals, it can often feel like a total failure.

So if you're thinking about your business and your business growth and your goals for 2024 or any other year, the question you want to ask yourself isn't, is this goal accessible, achievable, or any of those things? The question that you really want to ask yourself is, what information do I have about the numbers in my business so far, and how can I use that information for me to set a stretch goal?

When you think about it that way, you start to shift away from am I right or wrong to what information has my business given me to help me get there.

So here are the numbers that I want you to look at and think about. One is the most obvious, your audience size. If you have 100 people in your audience and you are looking to make $300,000, that is going to potentially pose a challenge unless all of them are ready to pay you.

You don't have to have a massive audience to make a lot of money. I say this all the time, I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars and my email list just recently crossed over to over 1,000 people. So you can make quite a bit of money with a small audience, but that initial number is important because let's just say you are thinking about selling 30 spots to a list of 100 people, that's a 30 percent conversion rate. That is tough. So you know your audience size – what historic conversion information do you have? If you just look at your email list, let's say, as the representation of your audience, what was the conversion rate for your email list last time you launched, the last time you promoted something? Whether that launch was a four figure product, or if that launch was simply just a $95 product that information is still relevant.

The truth is when it comes to conversion, the price point itself is typically less indicative of anything than the actual conversion rate. So what is your audience size? What was your conversion rate? Super super important.

Then the other piece I want you to think about is what other revenue channels are there? Are there upsell opportunities within your audience? Are there new offers that you haven't launched yet that you plan on launching? There are a lot of different ways to get you to your goal, and once you have a sense of how big the audience is – what the conversion rate is – then you can actually start to get realistic based on your price points.

So that is just a high level view of how I would start to break it down. Then a really ugly but true fact, true fact that I want you to keep in mind is we just don't know a lot of the time. Everything that we do in our business is an educated guess, and the goal is not to necessarily get it right, although that is nice when that happens, the goal is to create an infrastructure that is as right as possible.

Let me know what you think about that, and as you look at the numbers in your own business, ask yourself, what do I do with these numbers? Where do I go from here? What do I now know about my audience size? What do I now know about my conversion rate? And how can I maximize some of those figures to really help me get closer to my goal or the bigger goal that I'm not sure is possible or not?