What will 2015 be like for your business?
I ask this of our business every year (here’s last year) and spend considerable time thinking about it. Last week, I shared the business roadmap to achieve your goals in 2015, but how do you set these goals? That’s what we’re working on this week as well as internally at 9 Clouds.
Two Questions to Ask About 2014
Thursday, my partners and I spent the day answering two big questions:
- What went well last year?
- What didn’t go well last year?
Based on those two questions, we reflect on what we’ve learned and the foundation we’ve built for the coming year.
Why should you care? By looking at our methodology and goals, you can outline your own business goals for 2015 and help your business make quantifiable steps forward as you continue to make a dent in the universe.
A Look Back
Before looking ahead, we want to reflect on what worked and didn’t work. These goals are 9 Clouds’ goals, but by going through them, it will give you a sense of what type of goals to consider and how to judge your progress next year.
We set our business goals for 2014 and checked them once a quarter. This act of checking our goals regularly was actually a goal in itself. (I know, so meta.) So, we met that one!
We looked at business goals in three categories last year. (I liked the first two categories but will be changing the third category this year.)
Revenue
Revenue is obviously an important goal, and most businesses know what they need to earn to keep the lights on. Think big in 2015 about how your business could grow. This is how 9 Clouds considers revenue, the top rung on the ladder that we push ourselves to reach.
Our goal in 2014 was to double our revenue with a mix of marketing clients and other streams of revenue. As you’ll read throughout our annual review posts, goals need to be quantifiable, so we specifically aimed for:
- Six new clients
- 90% retention
- 150 Academy members
- Speaking and workshops twice a month
I’m happy to report we hit everything except the Academy goal. Not bad. A month ago we refocused and launched My 9 Clouds as a way to provide more free educational content for homesteaders like you. We hope to see that effort grow our Academy membership in 2015.
Takeaway: Consider goals that force you to focus. We know that retaining and attracting marketing clients is key to our business, so our goals in the future will be less connected with additional products/services and more about being great at what we do.
Content
Content is not a goal most businesses consider in their annual planning. Content is essential because it is the path to hitting your revenue goal.
Think of content as all the marketing materials and ideas you will share with the world in 2015. If you share useful, inspirational content, you will attract customers and build trust among people who read your work. This inbound marketing is the core of what we do at 9 Clouds, so it’s an important goal type for us.
In 2014, I wanted to maintain content frequency on the blog, write 250 words a day, surpass 5,000 downloads of our free book, Navigating Social Media and create a 9 Clouds Manifesto and additional large publication.
Here, I struggled.
We did publish 109 blog posts (with a week to go), up from 92 in 2013, so that was a win. More importantly, our quality in content took a huge leap forward as we continue to find our voice. That is a big success as we enter the new year.
I didn’t get 250 words a day written, nor did we hit 5,000 downloads, ending up just under 1,000 total downloads before considering purchases.
Our Manifesto is near completion, and we discovered that updating a website may need to be considered a large publication since it took tremendous work to get that out the door.
Takeaway: Admit when you miss the mark and identify overall trends that may point to the need to change behavior. For us, consistency is the key characteristic that will help us hit our content goals moving forward.
Learning
Often considered a personal goal for me, I wanted to include learning for the business as part of our business goals in 2014. The reasoning was that employees that continue to learn continue to improve, and businesses with employees who are learning are businesses that are also improving.
This method didn’t work in 2014 for me personally.
I failed to read a book a week, learn a new language or take a course on code. Instead, the majority of my business learning was around management and building our team. Fortunately, I realized that this type of learning (and teaching), is essential for business success.
I’ll be changing the learning category into a “team” category in 2015 because it is more important that everyone on my team is growing and learning than if I learn a few new things personally.
Takeaway: Learning new skills may not always be as important as learning how to better the skills you have or need.
A Look Ahead
I learned lessons in 2014 that will prepare 9 Clouds for an even better 2015. We continue to focus on embracing the model of inbound marketing and identifying great clients that we want to work with. These threads run through our goals in 2015.
Revenue
Revenue is an excellent place to start for business goals because it creates a quantifiable light at the end of the tunnel. Remember that as you set the goal for revenue to also map out how you’ll get there and create “way-finding goals,” those small milestones that keep you on pace for your big goal.
For 9 Clouds, our big audacious goal is to double our revenue (again) in 2015.
To get there, we want to attract 12 new clients, or one client a month, while maintaining a 90% retention rate. Additionally, we want to raise the value of our average contract.
A big part of what we do for clients is establish their sales funnel and work to improve conversion rates. We know that 4% of people who learn from us end up working with us, so we want to increase that conversion rate to 5% in 2015 while attracting more subscribers and visitors to our site with great content…which is our second goal type.
Content
The most important reason we create content is to help homesteaders like yourself build your businesses and communities. If our content doesn’t hit that target, then we have failed. If our content does provide this value, our content goals should take care of themselves.
In 2015, we want to maintain our content creation pace (100+ blog posts, weekly newsletter) and focus the content around our digital homesteading mission. We have a few way-finding goals to get us there:
- Maintain a 30-day content schedule so our content is focused and building towards key topics
- Create one large content piece (a book, course, etc.)
- Increase our digital homesteaders 50%
You are a big part of this goal, so let us know what you want to see in 2015!
Team
In previous years, we have focused on learning as a key goal type. This year we are going to change that to team.
As our business has grown, I’ve realized the importance of having an awesome team and working to grow and build that team environment. If our team has the skills they need and the vision and mission to create meaningful work, our business will succeed. Think about your team as a potential area of focus in 2015.
For team goals, we have the big audacious goal of adding four new team members to 9 Clouds by the end of 2015. To keep the team focused, we want to complete our vision, mission and manifesto statements and host an annual team retreat to continue sharing ideas and feedback on the direction of the company.
Most importantly for our team is clarifying team roles. As a start-up, we often wear many hats, but as we grow we aim to eliminate the number of hats we have to wear and help our teammates get really good at wearing certain hats (I may have over-extended that metaphor, but you know what I’m saying.)
Finally, we know that if we will be growing our team that quickly, we will need to extend our current 30 day on-boarding process into a 100 day on-boarding process so we smoothly add team members and make sure everyone is equally trained, passionate and integrated in everything we do.
What are Your Goals?
As the year comes to the close, I encourage you to choose the goal setting method that works best for you and set your 2015 business goals.
Then, leave us a comment on this blog post, and we will include your goals in an upcoming blog post so others can learn from your planning.
Sharing your goals is essential. It creates accountability and forces you to check-in on your progress throughout the year.
Creating goals should not set you or your business up for failure. Instead, it points to the North Star and gives direction on the year to come. That focus and vision makes your business unique among competitors and establishes a decision-making framework that will help you throughout the year.
Happy 2015. Here’s to your business in the new year!
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