The Expert Podcast

At the end of the year or the beginning of the new year, most businesses go through an exercise that they call goal setting or planning. A lot of times, they'll have sales goals for the next year, manufacturing goals, or profit goals. We highly recommend that if you're a business, you stop setting goals—stop establishing goals for the following year. There are better ways to do this.

Most businesses set their goals by saying, "Well, our sales last year were 2 million; we want to have a 10 percent increase or 20 percent increase," and that's what their number is—a certain percentage increase. Goals are not a good way to go. Here's why.

Here's a good example. In the game of soccer, or football in Europe, everybody on that playing field spends 90 minutes—an hour and a half—of solid play trying to score a goal. The whole game, all the players on both teams try to score goals for 90 minutes. At the end of many games, ten percent of the time, this is the score—zero to zero.

In fact, at the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, there were 64 games, an hour and a half each. That's 5,760 minutes of play, and they scored 170-something goals in 5,000 minutes. So, there are goals scored, but many times, nobody scores a goal.

If you're a business and you say, "I'm gonna try to achieve a goal," you might come up with zero if you don't have a rhyme or reason behind what you're doing. In fact, if you say, "We want to increase sales by 20 percent," well, why come up with 20 percent? Why not say 2 percent or 200 percent? Right? Twenty percent is, a lot of times, just a magic number.

Here's a better way to do it. This is a map. Maps have destinations. So, if you are starting here and you draw a route that you want to take to get to a destination, barring any unforeseen problems, you'll get there.

You can do the same thing with a business plan. If you say, "Our sales are 2 million, and we want to have sales of 3 million," here's how we're going to do it: we're going to hire a new salesperson, we're going to get 200 more prospects per month through this advertising, we're going to close 10 percent of those at this much gross profit, and this much sales net expense. Right? You can see where that goes.

Certainly, you may change your destination; you may change your route throughout the year, but at least you're starting with a destination in mind. More importantly, the difference between a destination and a goal is that you have a very specific route. You can see this blue line on a map—if you take all those turns, you're guaranteed to get to your destination if you're able to execute it.

Goals, like in soccer, just tell you, "Go out in the field and try to kick that ball in the net." You don't know how you're going to do it. You don't know how each step is going to happen. You want to make sure that you have a plan. That's why a destination is much more valuable than a goal.

I get it—it’s a word game; it sounds like the same thing. But the mentality behind it is that if you have it as a destination and you can articulate all the steps one by one that you're going to take to get there, you have a much higher probability of reaching that destination.

At the end of the year, instead of asking, "Hey, did we get our goal or not?" there shouldn't be a question. You should get there. When you go to work every morning and follow the route you take to work, you don’t think, "Maybe I'll get there, maybe I won't." You know you're going to get there if you follow those steps.

So, goals and destinations sound like the same thing, but they create a different mindset. A destination gives you specific actions to take so that it happens 100 percent of the time—or close to it.