Step 2: Define Your Growth Milestone

Now that you’ve done some self-reflection on your metrics, it’s time to use that information to set a growth milestone goal for yourself.

In this step we want you to answer this question:

Based on where your business is today, what is the number one growth milestone you would like to hit in your business over the next 12 months?

For example, if you’ve made $50,000 in the past year, perhaps you might like to hit $100,000 in revenue. Or perhaps your motivation is something else entirely: if you’ve sold 1,000 books this year, perhaps you want to sell 10,000 next year to increase your influence.

Regardless, focus on a 12-month growth goal related to the most important core metric in your business. We’ll use this to fuel the next step in the process.

Solidifying your growth milestone

We’ve put together a little exercise to help you solidify your growth milestone.

Exercise:

• To the best of your ability right now, write down the growth milestone you want to get to in the next 12 months.
• Run that growth milestone through the questions below to see if you need to change it.

Questions:

1. Is your goal specific? “Make a full time income” is not specific, while “Make $60,000 this year” is.

2. Is your goal measurable? “Make my customers happier” is not as measurable as “Improve my net promoter score.”

3. Is your goal attainable? Based on the metrics analysis you did in the last step of this stage, does it seem feasible that you’ll be able to reach your milestone within the given timeframe? If you would have to hire people to make that happen, do you have the resources?

4. Is your goal relevant to the business and life you want to create? This is mostly a personal question getting at the kind of business YOU want to build. Some people want to take on investment and grow really fast. Others want to retain more ownership, do things their own way which means they’re ok with slower growth. Is this growth milestone relevant to the way you want to build your business? If you reach your growth milestone, will you be one step closer to the vision you have for your life?

5. Is your goal time-bound? Have you added a timeframe to your goal? When thinking about timeframes, it’s better to set a shorter term growth milestone than long term because things change so quickly when you’re running a growing business. If you want to increase your revenue by 100% over the next year, why not focus on increasing your revenue 25% in the next quarter first?

6. If you reach your growth milestone, will your business be one step closer to the vision you have for the company?

7. Will you need to hire people to meet your milestone? How many? Where will the money come from?

8. Will you need to raise money to meet your milestone? How much? What will it be used on?

9. Do you want your business to grow at a comfortable rate, or do you want to scale your business and grow much faster?

Define your growth milestone

If you can run your growth milestone goal through those 9 questions then you’ve defined your growth milestone. Write that sucker down and put it on the wall somewhere you are going to see it often!

When you’re ready, mark this step as complete and we’ll move on to the next.