Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of the Business Journey podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Rice, and today we're talking about how I set goals in my business. I'm a really big fan of goals, and if you're not and don't tune out because I really believe this episode will be helpful for you. So before we go too far, I did want to let you know about a brand new free guide that I have available just for you guys. This is what I call my three K Mini Sessions blueprint. Basically, it's a blueprint, a step by step guide that walks you through how to make your first $3000 in a single date of many sessions. Maybe you've done many sessions before and you've made more than $3000 in a single date. That's awesome. You can still download this guide and make sure that there's not anything you're missing. There could be a couple of steps that you've never thought about before or whatnot, so this is for you. Or maybe you're here and you've never done many sessions or you have done mini sessions, but you never made $3000 on a single date of many sessions. If that's you, this guide is for you. Go ahead and download it. I'll link it here in the show notes for you, just in case you can find. Rebeccaricephoto.com/3K-minis. That's the number 3 the letter K Dash Minis. So go grab that free guide. I know it's going to be helpful for you. So let's dive in to how I set goals in my business. Like I said, I'm a goals person. I'm in any game three. So achieving is, you know what we do. And I love setting goals just because I love, you know, checking things off the list, if you will. So I wanted to kind of give you an inside look at how I go about setting goals in my business in case you want to, you know, use this system for yourself or adapt it to make it work for you. That is great. So every year I say yearly goals, which are like two or three overarching goals that I have for the year, and then I set quarterly goals. I do one quarter at a time. So let's say, you know, in January, I'm going to have my yearly goals and then I'm going to look at just Q1 and say, What things do I want to see happen that are, you know, working my way towards my yearly goals? I like to see them as like Stepping Stones. Your quarterly goals are the stepping stones that get you to your yearly goals. So I use a tool called power sheets. And if you're not familiar with power sheets, Laura Casey with cultivate what matters? They have this goal setting system that's like the best way I can describe it. It's not a planner is I mean, it's a goal setting system, so they walk you through. There is what they call prep work. And I think there's like 50 or 60 pages of prep work in this system. And I love it because it really helps you break down. How did the past year go? You know, what were your disappointments? What were things that made you excited? Where do you see yourself? You know, when you're 80, what kind of things do you want to achieve? And it's very long term thinking, and I really, really just love the way they break it down. So they help you go from, you know, dreaming big down to very actionable. These are the yearly goals I have. These are the quarterly goals I have and all that. So I'm a huge fan of power sheets. I've used them for years. If you've never used power sheets I'll link them here for you, I don't have like a fancy discount code or anything. I'm not an affiliate with them. I just love them. And so maybe one day I'll be an affiliate for them, but they are just so incredible. Laura Casey and the whole team, they're just amazing humans and the system really works. I notice the years that I really commit to my parachutes are the years that I grow the most. They're all about cultivating what matters and progress over perfection. That it's not about being perfect with your goals, it's about making progress. And I just really resonate with that message. So big fan of power sheets. Another tool that I use when goal setting is Kat Schmoyer's printable calendars. So you guys know Kat is my integrator on my team. She's actually on the show. We did an interview a couple of episodes back. If you want to go, listen to that, we'll link it for you. But she's like the quarterly planning girl, and she has these printable calendars that are so awesome. I have them hanging in my office. I printed off super big and they're hanging in my office. So there's a yearly calendar and then there's a quarterly calendar, and I put them in frames and I use wet erase markers over them so that I can reuse the quarterly calendar. And it's awesome. It gives you a quarterly focus and you get to, like, plan out what the goal is for that quarter and it breaks it down by month. So it's a three month calendar. You get to say what the monthly focus is for the month. You get to plan out on the actual calendar portion, like what you have coming up and things like that, and it's just so helpful. So I have it big on my wall, but I also have the PDF on my iPad, where I loaded into good notes and I can write on it from there, so I do use it both ways, especially like I usually do all my planning at one time, and then every quarter I update my quarterly calendar up on my wall, so I will link all of those tools for you. But let's get into how I actually set goals in my business. So I follow a system called smart goals. And if you've never heard of smart goals, that is an acronym and it stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time based. Those are the like lenses that I look through when I'm setting my goals, my yearly goals and my quarterly goals is I want all of them to be smart goals, and I'll kind of walk through each of those pieces and what that looks like. So the first thing is specific you want your goals to be narrow and not too broad. So if I said for next year, I want to book more photo sessions, that's very broad. It would be a lot better to make it specific to say not just photo sessions, but I want to book this many maternity sessions, this many family sessions or fall minis or whatever. The more specific you can get with your goals, the better. The next piece is measurable. I think that specific and measurable kind of go hand in hand because you want it to be something that you can say, Yes, I hit this goal or no, I did not, or I am making progress towards this goal because you can measure that progress. So let's say you're setting goals for mini sessions for next year. You can say I want to fully book eight days of mini sessions or however many. And so it's not just I want a book more photo sessions. It's measurable. I want to book eight days and it's specific of mini sessions. Maybe you want to say, I want to book this many spring minis or this mini fall mini. Whatever it is, make it specific and measurable. The A in smart is attainable. Is the goal actually attainable? It's one thing to, you know, dream big and shoot for the stars, but it's so important to be really realistic with your goals. I'm the kind of person that I don't want to set goals that I know I'm not going to hit, right? The whole purpose is to set goals that you can hit. Now I want them to be, you know, big enough goals that I'm going to have to stretch for them. I don't want it to be within my comfort zone and oh, that's easy. We did it last year, so we'll do it again this year. That's not what I'm looking for because I want to grow. And so the only way you can grow is by getting out of your comfort zone. So when I'm setting those attainable goals, you don't want them to attainable that. They're easy. You want to have to stretch for them, but you want it to be a realistic goal. And when you're looking at, you know, realistic goals, it's important to recognize the season that you're in. OK. What does your current season look like? Are you a mama with five kids at home? If you are, then adjust your goals to know like what your capacity is with five babies at home. You know, are you pregnant this year and you're going to have a baby next year? Keep that in mind when you're setting your goals, whatever you know things look like. Do you have a full time job outside of photography? Then adjust your goals to make sure that your photography goals are realistic and attainable. Keep it to where you can hit it. I know for me I like to set goals that I know I can hit, but I have to stretch for. And then when I do hit it, then I adjust the goal to be bigger. So, for example, I'm reading books. This year I had a goal to read. I think my original goal was I wanted to read like 30 books. Maybe I started with 20. I don't know. I started with some low number low. I mean, that's not low, but still I started with a lower number than what I'm out now. And as I hit, I read 20 books and then I read 30 books, and now I'm up to, gosh, I think I'm at 38 books right now for the year at the time of this recording. And it's I keep changing my goal. And so now my next goal is 42, and then it's going to be like 48. And then if I can hit 52 books in a year, that would be so incredible. But either way, as I hit my goal, it's a stretch goal and I know I'm going to have to work for it. Then I change it and I adjust it to continue to grow. So we have specific, measurable, attainable. The fourth thing in smart is relevant. Are your goals relevant and pushing you toward your yearly goal or your long term goals? Because as I'm setting my quarterly goals, I don't want it to be some like random off the cuff goal like I would like to, you know, I don't even know some random random goal. You want it to be relevant to your yearly goals. So if your yearly goal is to make, you know, six figures in revenue, then you want to make a goal that's relevant towards that goal. OK? So to make six figures in revenue, I want to bring in this much each month or I want to book this many, you know, photo sessions at this price. Either way, make it relevant. And then the T of. Smart is time based, time based goals, so for those quarterly goals, they are naturally time based because they're only for three months. So as I'm looking at my Q1 goals for January, February and March. The time factor is the goal is to hit it by March. And then when March comes, I'm going to assess and say, Did I hit the goal? If not, did I make progress on it? And that's really what I want to see, and then I can adjust it for the next quarter. That's one reason that I really like quarterly planning is because it gives us the permission in the space to reevaluate every single quarter that maybe you had a goal and that goal just isn't relevant anymore in Q2, because life has changed. Maybe you found out you're pregnant, you're like, Oh gosh, that's great. But the goals that I had in Q1 is not going to be like realistic for the rest of the year. And that's OK. Whatever your like, season of life is, that's why time based goals are super helpful so that you can, you know, set it for the quarter and then at the end of the quarter, reevaluate. And if you need to reset and refresh your goals, do that. That's one thing that the power sheets really help with is they have a quarterly refresh. So every quarter you go through a series of refresh pages kind of reevaluating the goals that you have and deciding what goals do I want to continue over into the next quarter? What goals do I want to just change up and completely refresh and it's OK to change your goals. You know, you don't have to keep a goal through the entire year. You know, that's one reason I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions because they're not flexible with life, you know? Yes, I do have some overarching yearly goals, but those yearly goals every quarter I refresh and I adjust those yearly goals as needed. So that's a quick look into how I set goals in my business. And I'm curious to hear like, how do you set goals if you don't have a system, feel free to use me and my model as a system for you. Go get power sheets and use your smart goals to be able to do, you know, quarterly planning, get Kats, calendars. They're very inexpensive, you guys, and they're so beautiful and so helpful. Such a great tool. So I'm like, I said, I'm going to link all of those tools for you. The power sheets, the calendars for you to check out and take this as you will can copy my system to a tee. You can use pieces of it and adjust it for yourself, whatever works for you. The whole goal here is to start doing it. And now is the perfect time that as we're heading into the end of the year to start thinking about what goals you want for 2022, and that's like so weird to say that we're headed into 2022. I feel like this year flew by. And so for next year, what do you want your year to see when you look back a year from now? What do you want to have accomplished and give yourself the permission in the space to dream a little and process that as you're, you know, thinking about those goals that you want to set? So I got for you. Hopefully this was helpful and I can't wait to hear about your goals. If you want to brainstorm or chat about it, feel free to hit me up on Instagram at Rebecca Rice Photography, and I would love to chat all about goals. So with that, we'll go ahead and close out for today. We will see you at this time next week. Bye, guys.
