How to Turn Goals Into Profits

A new year brings endless possibilities for your life goals and business goals. If you’ve already sat down and made your 2022 goals, it’s time to ask: are you living the life you envision?

Long work hours lead to a 1.6 times greater risk of depression and a 1.75 times greater risk of anxiety.

If you’ve built a business that becomes your life, there will need to be a time to step back and appreciate the accomplishments of your hard work. Instead of taking a business-first approach to goal setting, it’s time to create a life plan.

Create a Life Plan

Do you already have your plans in place for 2022? Do they include your life plan? If you forgot to add in your life plan, it’s time to edit them 

Your life plan is what you want your life to look like. Business owners often focus on their business to the point that they let their lives fall to the wayside. In fact, 48% of people who work too much say that their family relationships suffer due to working long hours.

Break free from this by asking yourself:

• How many hours do you want to work per day?
• How many days per week would you like to work?
• What type of work do you like doing the most?
• What type of work do you dislike?
• Do you want to retire soon or take a lesser role in your business operations?

When you outline your life plan, you can see what you want from your business life. Perhaps you want to only work with certain types of clients, or maybe you want to start passing off some of your duties and take on a much lesser role in the business.

Once you have your goals defined, you can then create a business plan centered around your life plan.

Create a Life-Centric Business Plan

Do you have a business plan? If not, you’ll need to create one that is goal-centric. If you have a plan in place, you can revise it to meet your life goals. Remember that your life goals are intricately tied to your business goals.

Let’s assume that you want to:

• Reduce working hours to 30 hours a week
• Adjust your services to only work with non-profits

Of course, you may have more plans than the few outlined above, but they’re a great place to start for the purpose of this article. Your business plan should address these two issues. For example, you may include:

• Hiring personnel to take on the hours that you’re reducing your hours
• Slowly reducing hours by 5 per week each month to hit your goal
• Start phasing out clients that are for-profit

Small milestones must be added into the mix, too. If you plan on taking a backseat to your marketing and HR duties this year to focus on core responsibilities in your business, you’ll need to find resources to hire someone else to take on these roles.

Cash flow will also dictate your ability to reach these goals.

Consider working with a business coach and accountant to help you put a plan in place to reach these goals, while keeping the business healthy. 

Create a Business Tax Plan

Cash flow will allow you to take advantage of opportunities in your industry and dictate which avenues you can take to reach your business and life goals. While you should focus on business growth and revenue-generating opportunities, you should also have a tax plan in place.

Tax planning goes well beyond just filing your taxes.

Instead, a tax plan can help you free up cash flow and make smarter business decisions. Your business is unique, so it’s difficult to provide an example tax plan that could help you reach your goals.

However, your tax plan should align with your life and business objectives and determine:

• When the best time is to invest in new assets, equipment and personnel.
• When to accelerate expenses or deprecation.
• Etc.

You may find that the additional expense of hiring an employee to take over some of your responsibilities is tax advantageous, allowing you to absorb some of the expense and cut back on your work hours faster.

Smart tax planning should be a part of your yearly business plan and align with your yearly goals.

Don’t Forget to Align Your Team With Your Goals

You have goals that you want your business and personal life to meet this year. However, you can’t reach your goals if you leave your team in the dark. We recommend that you create or revise your plan and then develop ways that your team can help you reach these goals.

For example:

• If HR knows that you want to cut back on your hours in the office, they can help by hiring new talent that can take on some of the non-core roles you perform.
• Marketing teams may find that you want to work with more non-profit organizations, so they can work on adjusting your marketing strategy to reach these goals.
• HR may have a candidate who is vying for a promotion and can immediately step into your position if you want to step back from the business.

However, if you don’t sit down to discuss your goals with your team, they can’t help you reach them. We recommend sitting down with all stakeholders to show them your vision for the year(s) ahead and drum up ideas on how to reach these goals.

Often, you’ll find that your team has solutions or ideas that can really accelerate you reaching your goals.

Reaching your business and life goals is possible. With the right plans in place, you can reach your goals, enjoy more free time away from the business and live the lifestyle that you want.

A happier you means happier employees and clients, too.

Do you need help developing strategies to reach your goals and manage your business properly? We can help. Our team knows the importance of creating a business that clients love while also building the life that you envision.

Schedule a call today.