Turn your goals into reality through planning and action.
THE BIG VISION
What is your mission?
Where are you going? A measurable, quantifiable result.
Become the defacto marketing automation and CRM solution for the WordPress ecosystem.
What is your purpose?
Why are you doing it? Who are you helping? How are you helping?
Help small businesses launch their funnel, grow their list, scale their business with proven digital marketing tools and strategies.
How are you going to do it?
List of ideals that will help you accomplish your mission and fulfill your purpose.
All in one solution to market, sell, and deliver your product.
Unrivaled product experience and quality.
Stellar education and documentation.
What are your core values?
List of values that you uphold yourself and your team to. This will be useful for making hiring decisions or client decisions. Choosing how you want to work and with who.
Add value to people’s lives
Obsess about customer experience
Sweat the details & make no excuses
Honour our commitments
Elevate others
Take responsibility
The big ideas…
What are your big goals for 2021?
The big list of things you’d like to accomplish by the end of 2021. You can stretch here, take all your ideas, and make them real by writing them down.
Launch Groundhogg 3.0
5X the certified partner program
Hire a full time customer success manager
What strengths can you leverage?
These are strengths your team possesses and can help you achieve some of the goals you listed above. Maybe there is something you are underutilizing?
Unrivaled support expertise
Entertaining and inspiring story and background
Strategic & marketing knowledge
What skills will you need to develop?
These are skills or strengths your team is going to need to learn or acquire in some other way (like hiring new staff) to accomplish some of the goals you listed.
Mergers & acquisitions
Project management & deployment
Delegation and team communication
What opportunities exist?
What opportunities in the market exist that you can take advantage of to move your business ahead?
WordPress ecosystem is growing quickly, massive opportunity
SaaS is introducing more content moderation
What are some potential threats?
What can pose a threat to your business and growth that you may have to overcome?
Anti WordPress bias from larger organisations
New competitors in the WordPress space
The big key performance indicators…
Key performance indicators are metrics in your business that quantify success, viability, and sustainability.
Some examples are:
Revenue, MRR
Site Traffic Volume
Number of employees
Size of your email list
Number of students
Where are you now?
Once you have identified the key performance indicators that are crucial to your business you can fill out the below table with your END OF 2020 performance.
Once we have identified our starting position we can then measure growth in the KPIs as we move forward through the year.
Starting from zero?
If you’re just starting and you have no active KPIs, don’t worry! A lot of early-stage business is just guessing (no one really knows what they’re doing). Look at other similar businesses and see what KPIs matter to them.
Where would you like to be?
To get where you’re going it’s important to know where that is. So based on your EOY performance, pick what you think is reasonable KPI growth over a whole year. I like to choose a good, better, and best result so that you have a target range because life happens.
Now that we know where we want to be, we can then break up growth into quarterly targets to make it more manageable over the course of the year.
Why quarterly targets?
We break up year-long goals into quarterly targets to make them more manageable. Because let’s face it, life happens and the year will not pan out exactly as you expect it will.
Quarterly targets leave enough time to have flexibility so you can react to the unexpected, but not so much time that pre-planned goals and targets seem too far away that they are unattainable.
It also allows you to break up big goals into smaller chunks that are much more doable.
First Quarter
Let’s plan out what you will work on and achieve in the first quarter. January => March.
What big goals will you take action on?
From your list of big goals we made earlier, choose a few to accomplish in the first quarter. Maybe there are some goals that are dependent on others, choose those first.
Launch Groundhogg 3.0
Hire a customer success manager
What will your KPIs be?
We know where we are, we know where we are going, let’s break it up and plan for an incremental step in that direction. We will use the same chart and fill it out with good, better, and best goals for the first quarter.
We’ve added the ACTUAL column here so that you can keep track of your actual performance over time so you can see if you’re within the range you predicted.
Second Quarter
Let’s plan out what you will work on and achieve in the second quarter. April => June.
What big goals will you take action on?
From your list of big goals we made earlier, choose a few to accomplish in the second quarter. We accomplished a lot in the first quarter, so let’s ramp it up!
Hire a partner manager
Launch a new course
Implement new features
What will your KPIs be?
We’ve made progress in the first quarter, now we get to build on that progress and bring us closer to our year-end targets!
Third Quarter
Let’s plan out what you will work on and achieve in the third quarter. July => September.
What big goals will you take action on?
Third-quarter is peak productivity, you’ve been building up skills, talents, and resources to help you make some of the biggest moves yet.
What will your KPIs be?
Same as before, make your best guess as to where you’ll be on the journey to hitting your year-end targets.
Fourth Quarter
Let’s plan out what you will work on and achieve in the last quarter. October => December.
What big goals will you take action on?
Keep in mind that there is a lot that happens in the last quarter. Many families celebrate the holidays, you must handle Black Friday, Thanksgiving, etc… So depending on your market and your team, you may have to tailor your expectations to meet the realities of work and the market.
I would bite off a bit less in the last quarter than in other quarters to allow for some breathing room for you and your team.
What will your KPIs be?
This table will match the table we created earlier for our year-end goals because we’ve reached the end of the year, congrats!
There may be a big jump here if Black Friday is important to your business, so you may experience smaller growth in the previous 3 quarters and then big growth here.
