Let’s cut the wishy washy “this can be YOUR year”, “you can do anything if you just believe”, blah blah blah! Let’s actually set some realistic, achievable targets for this year that you can meet and hopefully exceed. First things first, what do you actually want to achieve? I find the easiest things to track are ones with numbers for example, a target wage, number of newsletter subscribers, amount of sales etc (yes I do realise the irony of a bookkeeper saying they like numbers!). Now we need to break that down into smaller monthly targets, so just take your number and divide by 12.

Once you’ve got that number you can look at what you need to do to meet it. How many sales do you need to make or people to sign up to your list etc? You can of course keep breaking the number down into smaller and smaller chunks if you want to but I find if you get too precise it can have negative effects. Imagine the stress when you haven’t achieved the sale you needed in that 30 minute time slot!

Let’s look at an example:

Meet Joan. Joan wants to earn £6000 a year. She divides that number by 12 to get her monthly target of £500. Now Joan can look at what she sells and how many of each item she needs to shift to meet that. Fortunately for Joan everything she sells is a nice round number of either £10 or £20. To meet her target she would need to sell 25 of her £20 items or 50 of her £10 items or a mix of both like 10 of her £20 items plus 30 of her £10 items.

Now Joan knows her numbers she can plan exactly what marketing to do each month to sell the number of items she needs. Joan ends the year rolling around in all the money she has earnt by not only meeting but exceeding her targets.

Be more like Joan….but put your money in the bank for goodness sake!