Originally published January 2018 ยท Updated October 2026 · By SM Web Development
Most business owners have goals. More work in the slow months. Fewer evenings doing paperwork. A second truck. The trouble is that goals made in a quiet moment rarely survive a busy week. By March, you’re back to whatever the phone tells you to do.
This is a simple way to set goals you can actually check, and keep at them when the work piles up. It takes an hour with a pen and paper, then a few minutes a day.
1. Work out where you are now
You can’t plan a route without knowing where you’re starting. So start with an honest look at today.
Split your life into a few areas, so you don’t only think about the business and let everything else slide:
- Money: what the business earns and what you keep
- Work: the business itself, the hours, the kind of jobs you do
- Personal: friends, hobbies, learning something new
- Family: your partner, your kids, your parents
- Health and fitness
- Whatever gives you meaning outside work
Draw a circle, cut it into six slices, and label each one. Picture what a great life would look like in each area. Then give each slice a score from 1 to 10 for where you are today, with 10 being that great life.
Be honest. If you’re working six days a week and haven’t had a real holiday in three years, your Personal and Family scores probably aren’t 8s.
2. Decide where you want to be
Go around the circle again. This time, write the score you’d like to have five years from now, and a sentence about what that looks like.
Now you have a starting point and a destination for each area. The gaps tell you where to put your effort.
3. Make each goal something you can measure
On a sheet of paper, make a column for each area and two rows: What will it look like? and What will I have to do to get there?
Fill in the first row with targets you can check. “Better work-life balance” can’t be checked. “No quotes or invoices after 7 p.m. on weekdays” can. A few more examples:
- “Bring in 40 new furnace maintenance customers this year”
- “Get to 50 Google reviews on our Business Profile”
- “Take two full weeks off in summer with the phone off”
- “Call my parents every Sunday”
A goal you can measure tells you whether you’re on track. A vague one just makes you feel guilty.
4. Work backwards to this month
Five years is a long way off, so set what you need to hit in the next twelve months to stay on course. Then work backwards.
Say you want 50 more jobs this year. That’s about one extra job a week. Where will that one job come from? Repeat customers? Referrals? People finding you on Google? Each answer points to an action.
In the second row of each column, write three kinds of things:
- What you’ll need to learn, such as how to price maintenance plans or how to read your own numbers
- What you’ll need to give up, such as doing every quote yourself, or answering every call while you’re on a job. Our post on finding hours in your week through automation covers the admin side of this
- What you’ll need to do, such as asking every happy customer for a review before you leave the driveway
The point is a short list of actions you can take every month that move you towards the goal.
5. Keep a goal journal
This is the part that makes it stick.
Get a planner or a wall calendar you’ll look at every day. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it: on the kitchen counter, by the coffee maker, on the dash.
At the start of each month, write down:
- One goal for the month, like “launch a maintenance plan offer”
- A goal for each week, like “follow up with 10 past customers”
- A small goal for each day, like “20 minutes on the business before I leave for the first job”
The daily goal matters most. It’s small enough to do on a bad day, and doing it every day is what turns it into a habit.
6. Mark every day you hit it
There’s a well-known story, often told about comedian Jerry Seinfeld, of marking a big red X on the calendar for every day he wrote jokes. After a few days you have a chain. Your only job is not to break it.
Do the same. Put an X through every day you hit your daily goal, every week you hit your weekly goal, and every month you hit your monthly goal. It sounds childish. It works, because you’ll find yourself doing the 20 minutes at 9 p.m. just so you don’t leave a gap.
On a week when you feel stuck, flip back through the pages. Seeing a run of X’s is a good reminder that you’ve been making progress, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
7. Check in once a month
At the end of each month, look at your journal. What got done? What didn’t, and why? Adjust next month’s goals. Some will be too easy, some too ambitious. That’s normal. The habit of checking is what keeps you on course.
Goals that don’t depend on your time
When you look at your list, notice which goals need more of your hours and which don’t. A busy owner can’t grow by working more evenings forever.
A website is one of the few things that keeps working when you’re not. A clear site can bring in quote requests while you’re on the tools, answer the questions you’d otherwise answer on the phone, and show your reviews to people who’ve never heard of you. If “more work from Google” or “fewer tire-kicker calls” is on your list, your website is part of the plan. Our post on why your website needs a clear call to action is a good place to start.
Get a starting point
Before you set a goal for your website, find out where it stands. Ask for a free website review. We’ll look at your site on a phone, the way your customers do, and tell you the three things we’d fix first. If you’re a trade and starting from scratch, see how Trades Launch works. Request your free website review.