Show Notes

Goal Setting for 2022

This really depends on what you want from your business. Every business goal is going to be different, so it’s important to set your own goals, based on your dreams and personal lifestyle.

Abstract Goal setting

This is something that’s not necessarily measurable (but could be), but more of an idea or a dream.

What is the fundamental thing you want?

• Vacations/Cars/House?
• Money to retire?
• A business to pass onto your family?
• Is it the freedom to do other things?
• Quit your day job?
• More time with family?

You want to make enough money to support your family, you want to prepare for retirement

Tangible Goal Setting

This is the actual numbers, this is measurable through specific things.

• How much you want to make [Profits]?
• How much do you want to pay yourself?
• How much time do you want to spend with your family/friends/hobbies?
• How much money do you want to have in the bank for retirement by year end? (goals can be a step towards another goal, maybe THIS year you want to put away $10k)

Example, you want to put $75k in your paycheck, you want to put $5k in retirement fund. Then you want the business to PROFIT $20k.

You will have to do some math on how much sales this means (which might be another convo)

let’s use a simple number that you profit after costs 40% so that means in order to reach your goals:

250k in sales,40% profit = $100k (75 to you, 5 to retirement, 20 to profit)

Goal Setting All The Way Down

Now that you know what you want to do each year. You have to consider how much that breaks down to each month and each sale.

(use last years data if you have it to help)

in the above example 250k / 12months = $20k per month.

If your average sale is $500 that means you are selling 40 deals a month

if your average sales is $1000 that means you are selling 20 deals a month

These should be your GOALS.

If you want to achieve your dreams, these are the goals you have to hit. Now you can alter these if you don’t like the numbers.

Examples:

• Well I think selling 40 deals is a lot of work, I want to sell 20 (then you need a higher average ticket)
• 250 k in sales feels like it should generate more profits, then make sure your costs and retail hit a margin that works for your goal
• You aren’t sure HOW you will hit those goals…. that is for the next podcast.

How to implement your goals, What can you DO to help you reach them? 

Transcript

Welcome to the Custom Apparel Startups Podcast. Your best source for information, news, tips, and tricks to get you off the ground running and earn success with your custom apparel decorating business. So get ready to soak up some knowledge. Now, here are your hosts, Mark and Marc.

Mark Stephenson: Hey everyone. And welcome to another episode of the CASPodcast. My name is Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila: And this is Marc Vila. And today we’re doing part two of the 2022 business planning, goal setting. If you’re just jumping on this, and maybe this is your first episode, or you’re just picking the most recent episode, I’d recommend go back and listen to that other one. We make some good points and we’ll reference it, but Mark, tell us what today is going to be about. What are we going to cover?

Mark Stephenson: Goal setting is a really, it’s a big topic, and there’s so much that happens when you set goals. So I’ve got experience in setting personal goals, and also goals for ColDesi, which we’re going through right now. We’re making some edits there. And maybe like a lot of you, I’ve got a side hustle, so I’ve got side hustle goals. And what I find is that, however poorly you do it, it’s still an incredibly useful exercise. And what Marc’s going to talk a lot about is kind of like the abstracts of goal setting, and then we’ll go through it, and we’ll narrow down the specifics. Because in general, the idea is you’re going to set where you want to be, and then you’re going to work backwards from that, and figure out what you’ll need to do to make that stuff happen.

Marc Vila: Yeah. And what I would say is when you listen to any of the big names, the gurus, the rich folks, any of the folks you see on YouTube that are doing well, anybody who’s written a bunch of books that does well, I would say in my experience, none of them say, “Don’t set goals. Fly by the wind. Make sure it happened. Just make things happen.” That’s just not what any of them say. All of them from Elon Musk to just any of them. If you listen to any of them, Tony Robbins, they all have to say the same thing.

It’s really important to write down goals, set goals, figure out where you want to be, because if you don’t figure out where you want to be, you’re never going to know if you’re on pace to get there. And you’re never going to know if you got there. The other thing about goals is really that it is 100% up to you and your business on what they are. It doesn’t necessarily mean making more money.

Mark Stephenson: Right. Exactly.

Marc Vila: It doesn’t mean growing to a hundred employees. It might.

Mark Stephenson: Or it could be, and we were talking about this before the podcast, it could be making the same amount of money, but spending less time doing it. Or it could have nothing to do with money, and you just want to spend your time doing something that you love to do in a creative activity. And if that’s your goal, that’s cool. But before we move on, I do want to reference that first podcast, part one and planning, because one of the things that we talked about that you’re going to need, if you’re already in business, if you’ve already been doing this for three months or one month or a year, however long you’ve been in the business, you’re going to need to go back through and identify the numbers that you’re working with.

You’ll find that a lot simpler. Because if you have a financial goal of making $50,000 a year in the custom T-shirt or embroidery business, if you’re already in business, you should have the numbers and how many shirts that’s going to be, and how much time it’s going to take you to do each shirt and kind of do that math. So, that’s the reason why we suggest you go back, and do the first one. If you’re new, maybe this will stand on its own.

Marc Vila: Yeah, and I’ll agree. Like I said, like you mentioned, if you’re new and you decide just, “Hey, I’m just going to continue on, on how I’m going to set my goals because that’s really important.” Listen to it. And at the end, if you want to go back, there’s a lot of valuable information in there that we talk about on what a lot of people wish they would’ve done when they started, by tracking things correctly. But when we talk about goals, like you said, it could be, we just listed some things. We wrote some stuff down, right? It might be that you want vacations, cars, a bigger house, right? You just might want bigger toys and more fun things, or a house that better fits your lifestyle, or move to a different city or area of town, right?

Could be money to retire. You don’t feel like you’re on pace for retirement money. Or maybe you’re young, and you just, you’re thinking of what, “I want to prep my life for 40 years from now.” It could be you want to pass a business to your family. A lot of folks, which is surprising and not, when we talk to a lot of people about what they wanted to do-

Mark Stephenson: That was a big goal. A common goal.

Marc Vila: It was a big goal for people. And I think that when I talked to a few folks, they said that, “I guess that wasn’t a goal. But as soon as you said it, it definitely was.” Which is an interesting thing too. The freedom to do other things, just like you mentioned. You might have hobbies, snowing or fishing or painting or baking, that you don’t get to do because you work too much. And maybe the goal is to make the same amount of money, but be able to get to do your hobbies.

Quitting your day job. If this is a side hustle or a brand new thing for you. You’re not a fan of the nine to five. You’re not a fan of working for the man, and you want to do your own thing and probably you have other goals up top of that too. Right? Like your own thing includes you’d want to have some wealth to retire. You want to have a bigger, better house. You want to build a business, something to give to your kids or other members of your family.

Mark Stephenson: Yeah, and these are, I just want to reiterate, that these are all very personal, individual goals. I was speaking with a guy I know, very wealthy, and he loves all the toys. So his goal is like to get the toys, the wild cars, and all of that stuff. And it doesn’t even interest me at all. Like it’s not on my list anywhere. So it was an interesting conversation because when you go through this, it is, like even Marc Vila and I have different goals.

Marc Vila: Yeah.

Mark Stephenson: That is, so…

Marc Vila: That’s a good point. It’s a good point. The thing about goals is this, is you have to, and this is a bit philosophical, introspective, right? But you, or your family maybe, it might be multiple of you together. Your goals are for you, right? And your goals, it doesn’t matter what someone else’s goals are, or what somebody necessarily thinks about your goals, right. They’re for you. So if you want to have a lot of toys and Mark Stephenson says, “Why? That’s a ridiculous or waste of money.” And you could say to Mark, “Waste of money for you.” You know?

Mark Stephenson: Yeah. Absolutely.

Marc Vila: Like, “What about what you waste money on.” You know? And somebody might say to Mark, like Mark might say, “Well, I’m looking to save up more money to have a bigger nest egg.” And somebody might say, “Yeah, what if you die tomorrow, Mark? What’s that nest egg do for you? Why didn’t you have fun?” So, you can slice it a million ways. But the thing is, is the goals have to be personal. They have to be real. You have to really want them, I think is the number one thing. You have to really want it. Like, it’s got to be true, because if you have a goal that somebody else told you should be your goal and you don’t want that, the passion falls out the window and everything below this won’t actually happen.

Mark Stephenson: Yeah. So, you’ve got to have your why. You’ve got to have this abstract goal that is your end game kind of thing before you take the next step that we’re going to talk about, which is kind of the tangible goal settings. Because however esoteric your abstract goal might be, your overall goal might be, you’re listening to this podcast because you are in business or starting a business, and that means you have to set numbers. You’ve got to set tangible goals in order to achieve those abstract goals that you’re shooting for. Right? So, if it’s a vacation house that you want to buy, or if you want to pay off your house, let’s use that as an example, with a side hustle, then you’ve got to know, okay, what does that look like? I owe $100,000 on my house. I need to make this number of extra dollars to get there. How many shirts do I have to sell? Right. So, let’s get into tangible goals.

Marc Vila: Okay, great. We decided, I decided, you, Mark decided, one of us did, that we’ll just pick an example. That is a random example, unique. And we started talking, I think it started with, what about the side hustle person and what are they going to do if they want this to replace their job? And that’s where the influence came from this rum. So this number, that’s what this number is, but don’t take this says as this should be your goal. But the example we just said would be, you want to have a $75,000 paycheck, you want to put $5,000 into a retirement fund, and you also would like your business to profit about $20,000. So, that’s the goal, right? So, three different things that I wrote down here is just that this is the money you need to pay your bills, and enjoy your life, and have the quality of life that you need. Take care of-

Mark Stephenson: Yeah. So, I love this because your abstract goals that this might fulfill is if you want to quit your day job and have money to retire. Your day job, you’re generating, if you make about 75 grand a year or less, you get there. You replace that day job. You’re putting five grand a month in the retirement fund. Then you’ve got the extra 20 grand in business profit to make sure that that business continues possibly so you can pass it on.

Marc Vila: Yeah. And then there may be some other little back goal beyond this that you’re thinking about, because you’re thinking, “Well, one of the other goals is the bigger house, more property. And in order to get that, I feel like I’m going to need to pay myself $100,000 a year. But my first goal is to quit the day job, so my first goal is to get there. But I want to prep my business to grow. So I’d like to have $20,000, so when I quit that day job, I’m going to do something with that $20,000 for the business. I don’t know what yet, but step one of goal.” So, goal setting is, it can be in steps too, because the goal might not be, you could say, I want to make $10,000,000 this year. That’s hard. That might not be something that you’re-

Mark Stephenson: No, that’s lucky. That’s not hard.

Marc Vila: That’s lucky.

Mark Stephenson: That is buying the right lotto ticket.

Marc Vila: Yeah. So, you want to set a goal that’s realistic and I don’t know if we actually said that. But again, this is up to you. Anyway, let’s go ahead and just talk about what that means, because we have to kind of work backwards a little bit. If you want to work backwards from that, Mark, if you want to-

Mark Stephenson: Yeah. No problem.

Marc Vila: You need a hundred, you need a hundred grand.

Mark Stephenson: Right? So, if the goal is a hundred grand, and that’s easy math to do, you’ve got to look at your kind of niche market that you’re going after. And you’re going to use the numbers from the last episode, from the last podcast, to go, “Okay, I make… From what I do…” Let’s say you want to sell custom T-shirts, you’re a DTG printer. You’ve got a decent customer base, or you know who you want to go after, and you plan on averaging making $12, $10 or $15 a shirt, just to make it easy. If you make $10 a shirt, how many shirts do you have to sell to make a $100,000 in profit, right? You have to sell 10,000 shirts.

Marc Vila: Okay.

Mark Stephenson: 10,000 shirts times $10 in profit. And this is just the simplest way to do this math.

Marc Vila: Yeah. Okay.

Mark Stephenson: 10,000 shirts. How many is 10,000 shirts? You know, how many is that a month over the next year? Well, let me use my calculator.

Marc Vila: Yeah, I got it. 833.33. 33333.

Mark Stephenson: So 800 shirts-

Marc Vila: Ish.

Mark Stephenson: 800 shirts a month, 200 shirts a week. Or one big order. So, okay. You’re going to keep going. So you know, what do you have to do to sell 800 shirts a month at $10 in profit? Or you’re going to go look at, “I don’t think that’s for reasonable for me. I am a custom, high end, custom embroidered jackets. I sell them for 150 bucks a piece. You know, my profit is $120 or $100.” Well, how many of those, or it’s a mix, how many of those do you need to sell to get to that big number that you’ve got in mind?

Marc Vila: Yeah. At that point it’s only 100.

Mark Stephenson: And honestly, it already looks good to me because 800 shirts a month is not a lot of shirts. That’s very doable. A lot of our customers do that.

Marc Vila: And that’s one of the things to think about when you’re thinking about these numbers, because sometimes folks will do the math and be like, “Dang, dang. 800 shirts.” But you know, for one, there are companies out that aren’t that big, that they don’t really do orders that are smaller than that, for one.

Mark Stephenson: Right, absolutely.

Marc Vila: The other is, if you get a sub sandwich shop that wants to buy shirts from you, and they have six employees, and each employee wants five shirts, six shirts, I mean like that one customer right there is what, 30, 40, 50 shirts? Something like that. And they’re just a small little place. If you get a school or you get a business with a restaurant that has 40 employees, quickly that one restaurant being your customer for one order, you hit your goal for the month.

So, try not to be intimidated while you’re doing some of these numbers. The other comment I was going to make on this though is you might, that’s a simple way to do it, right. A slightly more complicated way to do it is if you already have business, you already have a profit, a percentage that you make on each order, that you can do math on as an average for last year. So you can take that number, right? If it was 40%, that means if you sell $250,000 in sales, 40%, $100,000. Okay, so now you know you need to sell $250,000, because maybe you don’t just sell shirts, you sell like 25 different things, but they average out, right? So at that point in time, you know you need to sell $250,000 in sales.

The other part that I think is a little bit tricky here is you can do your margin, and how much you made in sales, and your goal, and you’ve built this triangle. And then you are puzzled on how it’s going to happen because you’re like, “I don’t see how I’m going to do this. I don’t see how I’m going to triple my sales to hit my goal. That just seems… I worked so hard.” Right? So there’s a couple things in there. For one, we can work on a plan in the next episode and how you can triple your sales potentially. Right? The other thing is can you charge more money? Right? So, this is a triangle. You can alter your goal, you can alter your sales, you can alter your profits until the triangle fits perfectly together, and it’s a true whatever you call the typical triangle you imagine. I don’t remember all the names for them-

Mark Stephenson: No, I get it. And that’s a great point. So first of all, we don’t want you to get hung up on this episode, and for this exercise on how you’re going to accomplish it. Right. The how to episode is coming. We want you to set real goals and we’re just giving these examples so you can start to think about how you’re going to get there, not focus on it. So, if it’s $100,000 and we just said 800. And chain shirts, if you’re going to make $10, Mark’s point is if you make $15 a shirt, that’s a lot less shirts that you have to make.

Marc Vila: You can do the math real quick because I do have a calculator up.

Mark Stephenson: Sure.

Marc Vila: That’s 550 shirts.

Mark Stephenson: Okay. So now that’s 125 shirts a week, instead of 200. How many orders is that? And like, honestly, we’re going through the same exercise right now for ColDesi. If our goal is a 20%, 28% increase in sales. So, Marc Vila and I start to tear our hair out now trying to figure out, “Okay, working backwards, we need to grow 28%. How many people do our sales people have to talk to? How many digital heated FX machines do we have to sell? How many DTG printers? How many DTF printers?” We’re going through that exercise right now with you.

Marc Vila: Yeah. And there’s various ways to achieve the goals, which we’ll get into next episode. So I do want you to look forward to that, because there’s a lot of different things that we can like, to tease into talking about, you could be talking about selling deeper into current customers. You could talk about selling to more customers. You could talk about increasing your average ticket value. So there’s a lot of things to do to hit your goals. The important thing is, is that you have something written down that you know that you want to do. And I was going to say something. I was listening to a podcast. I’ll see if it comes to my head. The guy was just talking about how much charging, right. How much he charges. He was saying that he talks to a lot of people, because he is in the business consulting business, that’s the business he’s in.

And he had said that most of the time when he looked at people’s paperwork, and their goals, and their numbers, and they looked at that little how much they’re going to sell, and how much they make, and all that stuff. He said, “Most people weren’t charging enough.” Well, how do I know that? Because I talk to tons of businesses that sell very similar things, and I see what some of these people are charging. Some of these people are charging double what the person behind them was charging. And they’re flourishing, right? We’re diverting a little bit, but there’s I think [crosstalk 00:21:00] good stuff to talk-

Mark Stephenson: That’s okay. It’s worth it because you reminded me, we did a podcast on it called Buying Customers. It’s a great book by Brad Sugars. He’s done business consulting for thousands of businesses. And it was really interesting because I found this to be true. Almost anything you sell, you can probably raise by 10%. Unless you’re already have been aggressively increasing your prices, there’s probably another 10% of room there that your customers don’t care about. No one is going to make a decision whether or not to buy a shirt from you if it’s $12 versus $13.40. They’re going to make the decision to buy from you and you’re going to make extra money. You’re going to make that extra 10%. And the vast majority of customers, almost every ad we do, when we say this, we advertise a Digital HeatFX printer for $10,000.

We get an entire group of people that just say, “That’s so much money. No one could ever make money. You know, spending $10,000 a printer.” And then we have a hundred people a month that spend $10,000 or more on a printer setup that end up making a huge amount of money. They end up making $10 or $15 a shirt so with a great ROI.

So this idea of looking at what you’re charging, putting your goals down first with a clear head, and not focusing on the products you sell and how you’re going to accomplish it, before you figure out how you’re going to do it is the most valuable part of this part of the exercise. It’s to do like Marc said. You pick your intangible goal first, then you work out the tangible goal you’re going to need to accomplish it. And then you start worrying about what you have to do in each one of the categories. What do I have to do for my, how much do I have to sell stuff for? Do I need new products? Do I need to charge more for the current products? Do I need to figure out ways to save money on my expenses? All that stuff serves the goal that you set first.

Marc Vila: Yeah. That’s what I think the next episode will just be all about that stuff. But I think the really important reason and why we bring it up today is because so many people look at the intangible goals. This is just real life in general. They look at the intangible goals. They look at how they actually can make that happen and then they start working the numbers. It can become discouraging. It can become really exciting or it can become discouraging to some folks. You have to get it all down first and not let yourself be discouraged. You can look at that number and say, “A quarter million dollars in sales, woo.” You could take that breath, but then just say, “I’m going to get to figure out how it’s done because a lot of people do it, and a ton of businesses.” A $250,000 a year business is not necessarily that big of a business. Like when you just add up businesses that are all out there. It’s not many-

Mark Stephenson: It’s funny. It actually drives me crazy when I hear, so Tampa is a fast growing city. And we’re constantly talking about startups. There’s all kinds of small groups of startup help, and technology startups, and all of this stuff. All of those people, when they talk about startups, they mean people that have gotten millions of dollars in investment. They’re talking about people that start high, not start up. So the quarter million dollars may seem like a lot of money for you, but don’t let that stop you from writing it down as your goal and working out the math as you try to get there, because there is so much money out there. There’s so much available, capital and assistance, that you just need to pick that number first and then work through how to-

Marc Vila: Yeah, and go work through it. Now that we’ve kind of set our goal, right. We can move on to, so we know in this case we want to do $250,000 in sales, right.

Mark Stephenson: In this example.

Marc Vila: Yeah. In this example, right, because we said that maybe last year you made a 40% profit on everything you sold as an average, or maybe that’s just your goal of what you’re going to set for your business. You’re going to say, “I’m going to try, I’m going to shoot for 40% on everything I sell.” And you have to do $250,000. The next important thing about goal setting is just as people, our brains don’t really see things that far out in advance as the achievement. Right. It seems so far away. It seems so big. Our brains kind of almost can’t comprehend on what’s going to happen. Right. So, if you’ve got to break goals down to something closer, achievable, and something that you can reach, right. If you think about it for exercise, pushups or something like that, if you say, “I’m going to do 10,000 pushups this year.” And then you start counting from one, the thought of you doing 10,000 seems stupid almost. You’re like, “What?” You know?

Mark Stephenson: Right, right.

Marc Vila: But that’s 26, if I did the math right. That’s 26 pushups a day. Ish. 25 times 30 times 12. 9,000. So whatever. 25-ish pushups a day. If you could do 10 at a time, which isn’t even that good of a push up person, like you could do 10 when you wake up, 10 at lunch, and five before you eat dinner.

Mark Stephenson: Wait, now I’m just fascinated with the idea that they’re good pushup people. Do they think of themselves like that?

Marc Vila: Well, I mean, someone-

Mark Stephenson: A good push up person-

Marc Vila: I think Alex, that we work with, can do like a hundred something pushups.

Mark Stephenson: I can too. It would take me the year though.

Marc Vila: Yeah.

Mark Stephenson: It would take, I’d do like half a day.

Marc Vila: That’s why it’s important to break down goals. If you just say, “I’m going to do 10 pushups in the morning, 10 pushups in the afternoon, and five pushups before dinner.” That’s 25 pushups a day. You’re going to do 9,000 pushups at the end of the year. Ish. So versus saying, “I’m going to do 9,000 pushups.” And starting at one.

By the time you get to like the fourth day, a hundred, it seems, “I’m just never going to hit this number.” Right. Because you’re thinking about 10,000. So when you’re thinking about that $250,000 goal, it’s important to break it down into a number that your brain can see, that your mind can envision, and that you can hit. And give yourself a gold star and a high five because you hit that mini goal. So, $250,000 divided by 12 months is about $20,000 a month. Is that right?

Mark Stephenson: It’s $20,833.

Marc Vila: Okay. There we go. So about $20,000 a month. If you are in business, and your average sale is about $500 last year, that means you’re selling to 40 customers. Okay. And then you can break that to 10 customers a week. Right? So, that’s your goal.

If maybe your average is a thousand, that’s 20 deals a month, right? So I mean, you can figure that out and you write this down. The number may start to look much easier now. The number may start to look more intimidating now. But that’s why, if you say, “Well, last year I sold 500. I feel like getting to 40 is going to be tough for me.” Well, what if you said, well, “What if you can get those 500 people? What if you can move your average up to 750?” You’re at 30 now. So you need to sell to a little more customers, a little more money, and then we’ll talk about all techniques about, we’ve talked about plenty of episodes [crosstalk 00:29:57]

Mark Stephenson: Yeah. There’s podcasts on like maybe you sell to the same amount of customers, but you increase the average sale value by 20% some way. Or maybe you sell to the same amount of customers, but you add something additional that causes them to order twice as often. There are a lot of strategies to do this as long as you have that number. If it’s 20,833, then you just break it down into smaller pieces in more ways.

Marc Vila: Yeah. And I think it’s great to have the small goals that you can easily hit, and give yourself a high five, and a gold star, and a green check mark. And then you can see yourself getting on pace to hitting your goal for the year as that happens. Right? If you’re doing it by week, and you look at a 12 week period, and you’ve got 10 out of 12 green check marks, maybe a little behind pace but maybe some of those weeks you sold more money. But you’re kind of looking at yourself and you’re looking at your pace, you see it happening, you’re actually doing it.

And if it’s not happening, then you know that there’s something to change. There’s something to do, which is the importance of the goal big, and the goals small, because that means that you’re noticing your pace. And if you’re noticing lots of green check marks, then you know your pace is going well. If you’re noticing lots of red Xs, then your pace is going wrong, which means you need to change your method, change your goal. You need to change something until you start turning it into the green check marks every week.

Mark Stephenson: Listen, we’ve got tons of resources and prior podcasts that you guys can use to accomplish those goals. One of my favorites is we did the series on how to make more money next week. Like it’s sales call and it’s how are you marketing? How are you shipping products? What are you including? Are you asking for referrals? There’s tons of ways to get to that number that you are setting out here for yourself. And constantly reminding yourself that number is not just a number, it’s in service to that abstract goal that you set. You’re not doing this so you can make another sales call. And you’re not doing this so you can hit $20,000 a month. You’re doing this so you can pay off your house, you have money to retire.

You’re doing this so you can have a business to pass off to your family or quit your day job. I mean, these are why you’re doing these things. You’re just doing math right now, and breaking down what you have to accomplish every day in order to get to that picture that you’ve drawn yourself in your head. Or on paper. I think in addition to breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces, it’s the old, “if you just invest that $1.50 you spend on a cup of coffee every day, you’ll be a bajillionaire by the time you’re 12.” So, just like that, except that it’s not a bajillionaire is necessarily your goal. It’s one of those things that you truly want.

Marc Vila: Yeah. And I think when we talk about the abstract goals and we break them all the way down, you can have the abstract goal be I want to retire on the beach. Okay. So what does that mean? “Okay. Well, I probably need a million bucks to buy a house.” Right. Whatever it is.

Mark Stephenson: I mean, 10, but sure.

Marc Vila: How? Condo. Small condo.

Mark Stephenson: Condo. Yeah. Okay. There you go.

Marc Vila: But I’m actually, but maybe that’s okay. Like.

Mark Stephenson: Condo near the beach.

Marc Vila: Condo near the beach. Condo near the beach. Now maybe you only need 500 now, but anyway, maybe that’s the big goal. And you rent an apartment now. That’s fine. Oh gosh, I’m 40. Okay. That’s fine too. Right. So what’s the goal? Is you need to have X amount of money to be able to retire, X amount of money to buy this condo. And you need that in what, by the time you’re 60, you said 60? Okay, 20 years. 20 years divided by this. That’s my goal this year. Divide that by 12. That’s my goal for each month this year. And then at that point in time you can, the first time you hit that goal, you’re like, “I’m literally one step to the beach condo, to the near beach condo.”

Mark Stephenson: To the near the beach condo. And you know what, like I’ll say this, and we can probably wrap up pretty soon, but Marc Vila and I are not the smartest, most famous, most interesting people to ever talk about goal setting.

Marc Vila: No.

Mark Stephenson: Okay. So, it’s an easy, it’s a skill that you can develop, that there are tons of resources to help you do that. You can do it in books. You can listen to Tony Robbins. You can find a podcast just on goal setting. You can find tons of materials on the web, simple ways to set your goals. If you just start doing that, like take what we’ve given you here, pick up the notes that you wrote down from listening to the first 2022 planning episode that we did, and combine it with all the famous, smart people that are out there that have done stuff on setting goals too, and what we’ve reminded you of today. Write all that stuff down and get all this stuff on paper, because the next episode we do on 2022 planning, it’s going to be pretty specific, so you’re going to need all that. So, there’s some homework. I know Marc Vila loves homework.

Marc Vila: Well, I don’t think we’ve said homework in a bit. It’s been a minute, but-

Mark Stephenson: I think, I think that needs to be a goal.

Marc Vila: Yeah. It should be a goal. There should be homework every episode on… So, the homework really is to get introspective with yourself first. Have some tea, sit on the porch, lay in bed, and just think about this. Find a quiet, simple place, or talk with your husband or wife or whoever you’re doing this with, and say like, “What do we want? Like really? I don’t like a million dollars. Why? What do you, what do we want?”

Mark Stephenson: What is that going to get you?

Marc Vila: “What is that going to get me? I don’t want to have to worry about money. I want to be able to do the fun things I want to do. I want to be able to spend time with my family.” These are all like simple style goals. “Okay. How much money do I need to do that?” Start to break it down, start to write it down, get it written down. Even if it seems a bit lofty, get it written down and figure it out.

Then you can dive into breaking it down. Right? Well, I’m a brand new startup, literally financing this with some money in my bank account and my credit. And I’m buying an embroidery machine or a T-shirt printer or something like that. And I need to get to quarter million a year. Okay. Well, year one, I still have my full-time job. What can I do in year one? Right. And you just start writing down these goals and figuring it out. It’s not going to be easy. And honestly, when I set goals, I struggle with it. I struggle with it a lot, unless I have a lot of history.

So, right. So when we talk about ColDesi stuff, like we’ve got a ton of years. We’ve been around for a ton of years. The company’s been around for a ton of years. We got a bunch of historical data and we can just say, “X percent looks good. What does that math mean?” And then we can do it. And you’re lucky if you’re there because you’re already in business and you could say, “This, that’s 30% growth.” And you do the math. But when you’re brand new, like what do I start? What’s ridiculous? What’s too hard? What’s not hard enough? You just got to pick something and put it down there. It should, in my opinion, be a little bit out of your comfort zone. Right. And then start working towards it. And then you start figuring it out. You’ll get it. You’ll get better and better at it as you go along.

I think now when I think about goal setting, since I’ve done it a lot, especially probably over the last 10 years of my life, I can sit down with just a sheet of paper and crunch out some kind of goals that I want, whether it’s for anything. Fitness, health. And you get better at it. So if you’re new to this and you’ve never done it before, just do it. And goals change all the time too. I think it was, might have been Tony Robbins I was listening to, I don’t remember, a long time ago, but he had kind of said like, “A goal isn’t like something that’s cemented into the ground. It’s a stick you put in the ground with your fist because you know that you’re probably going to have to lift and move this stick depending on a million other things. The goal was this, then you found out you’re going to have a baby. You’re not going on the year trip to Europe, we’re going to buy a house now.” Whatever it is. Right.

And you pick up the stick, and you move it, and you stick it in a spot. So find a place to put the stick, get it all written down. And then if you have to move it, you move it then. But I think that’s about covers it up. The homework is to write down goals, write down what the high level value type of goals are. The high stuff. What do you want that’s not money? Something, right. What are things you want? What are things you want to do? What are things you want to enjoy? Then you write down how much money you need to have to do those things. Then you write down how many things you have to sell in order to get that money. And then you break that down to maybe monthly, weekly. And then now you have some real written goals on what you’re going to do. And then in the next podcast, we’ll talk about different ways to help you reach that.

Mark Stephenson: Cool. And hey, I have a personal tip that I did.

Marc Vila: Love it. I’m going to write this down.

Mark Stephenson: That actually worked. It actually worked really well. You know everyone is always being asked to reset their password?

Marc Vila: Okay.

Mark Stephenson: For everything. I actually did my financial goals for 2023 as part of my password.

Marc Vila: Okay.

Mark Stephenson: I make this number, or I have these things, or I’m in this position. Those words were my password on several different things. So, log into your Gmail account, log into your bank account, make it, your password could be, “My business makes $250,000.” And then you’ll remember that. And you’ll just be saying it and typing it in over and over again. Worked for me. I’m a year early.

Marc Vila: Nice.

Mark Stephenson: So there you go.

Marc Vila: I think that the other homework would be find some book that talks about that and read it, or podcast, or audiobook, or something like that. I personally am going to say a book or an audiobook, because podcasts can send you into a rabbit hole of just a lot of people that aren’t necessarily experts or just ramble on about other things.

Mark Stephenson: Listen, Marc Villa, you and I both know that podcasters, no idea what they’re doing.

Marc Vila: No idea.

Mark Stephenson: Like completely.

Marc Vila: Yeah. So find a book or two or three, get that on your list of goals. Get an audio. If you can’t read well, or you don’t like to read, or it bores you, you fall asleep, do audio. If you can’t do audio, find that authors who has a YouTube series, watch those. Find somebody who made a movie. Whatever it is, start getting into that stuff. Get your mind right, and do your homework on this. And then we’ll talk about how to achieve it.

Mark Stephenson: Love it. This has been Mark Stephenson.

Marc Vila: And Marc Vila.

Mark Stephenson: You guys have an amazing business this year.