Episode 13 Tips for Small Business Owners: Consistently Set and Achieve Your Business Goals Using Levers
The first half of the year is already done and we’re halfway through with July, how are you achieving your goals? In this short podcast episode with Fiona, she shares one useful tip she discovered to help you achieve your goals after you set them. Listen now as she sets an example on how you can set levers that will help you and your business. Fiona also has an exciting news about her new book to be released this September - the Passion, Purpose, Profit: Sidestep the Hustle and Build a Business You Love.
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction: [0:55]
Getting Published [1:36]
Passion, Purpose, Profit: Sidestep the Hustle and Build a Business You Love [2:32]
Setting Goals [3:52]
What are Levers? [5:53]
Example No. 1 - conversion rate optimisation [6:26]
Example No. 2 - average transactional value [7:11]
Two Levers per Goal [9:12]
Conclusion [10:39]
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Henrietta Thompson, Wallpaper* Magazine, Harth [3:19]
Transcript:
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the My Daily Business Coach podcast.
I hope wherever you are listening to this in the world, you are safe, that your family and friends are safe and that you're doing whatever you can to help your community. I am in Melbourne. We are in lockdown number two for the year. And yeah, it's tough. But I think this whole year is about the world coming together, people coming together for the greater good, rather than just focusing always on me, me, me and the individual. But yeah, despite being in lockdown, I am super excited this week because, yes, I'm doing this podcast and I know that this episode will be really useful for many of you.
But I'm also really excited because this week I will finally get a physical copy of my book. So I wrote a business book. It has been on my goal list for many, many, many years. And yeah, it's finally coming out. It's being published by Hardie Grant Books and it will be available in physical format in the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand in bookshops and all of that from the 2nd of September. But it's actually available to pre-order now anywhere in the world from online booksellers and retailers. Yeah, this week I get to see the physical copy. I was talking to somebody the other night and I was just almost crying because I was like, this is so exciting to see something that you've basically had on your list. You know, for my whole life, I've wanted a book published. I've been a writer. I am a writer. And yeah, I didn't realise that it would be a business book when I was growing up, but I'm so excited.
The book is called Passion, Purpose, Profit: Sidestep the Hustle and Build a Business You Love, and it is absolutely packed with loads of proven business tools and tips and frameworks, all things that I've uncovered and discovered and utilised and created in the last two decades, working in content and marketing and branding roles. And it also features alongside my tips and tactics and frameworks. It also features twelve creative Q&As, as we call them. So interviews with creative small business owners across the globe, including people like Lucy Fagan's who started the design files. Josh Rubin from Cool Hunting, who you can cheque out more of in episode two of this podcast, as well as people like the beautiful sisters, Laurinda and Fatuma, who run the fashion brand collective closets. Henrietta Thompson, who is not only the editor at large at Wallpaper magazine, but also the co-founder of Harth, which is an incredible, incredible small business out of the UK and a whole bunch more. So if you can and you've got a little bit of money to spend at the moment, make sure you go and check out Passion, Purpose, Profit, and you can pre-order it online wherever you buy books or you can find it via the link that will be in the show notes. Now, speaking of tips and business advice, let's get stuck into today's episode.
So today, I thought I would talk about goals. It's July.
I'm recording this in July 2020. And July signals a new financial year here in Australia. But if you're not in Australia, July is also, you know, midway through 2020. And despite this year being, you know, one hell of a rollercoaster. Like I said, I'm currently in lockdown number two, and home schooling is about to start again. It is possible to still achieve some of the things that you wanted to for this year in the next five to six months. And what I'm going to talk about today, because it's just a tip episode. It's a short episode. I'm not going to be talking about how to set goals or how to know which goals you want to achieve. That is going to be a later, longer coaching episode. Today, I wanted to give you just a quick tip that can really help you achieve your goals. So let's get stuck into it.
Now, you might be like me. I love setting goals and I know a lot of people love setting goals. My husband is not one of those people, but I am trying to, you know, turn him to the dark side. No. Turn him to somebody who likes setting goals as well. It's something we talk about a lot. I am often very up like, "hey, let's think about what we want to do in the next few years." But suffice to say, I know that a lot of people love setting goals and they enjoy the process. They have the sharpies and the vision boards and the beautiful diaries and the lovely stationery. And it's exciting to set a goal.
It's this idea of what's possible. It's it's there's opportunities in front of us and the world is our oyster. But what happens is that people then failed to make any kind of change to their habits or actions to take that will actually ensure that those goals, you know, happen rather than things that we just put together. And then it comes to October, November in the year, and we're like, "oh, yeah, we were gonna do that thing. How come that didn't happen?".
So one tactic that I found really useful, and I should point out, I first discovered this concept in the book, Four Disciplines of Execution - link to that is in the show notes. But it's the idea of levers. Now, the definition of a lever is to move or to pressurise something. So, for example, you know, you lever the lid off a painting with a screwdriver. It's really about action happening because of the lever. So when it comes to goals, when it comes to business goals, levers are things that can help you achieve the goal and sort of actions that you're taking along the way consistently. And, you know, some sort of frequency to make it more likely that the goal you have set, you will actually get as well.
So, for example, let's say one of your goals is about getting more money from your website or your e-commerce store. So from an online place and you might have a lever that's all about conversion rate optimisation or C.R.O. as it's known. You might decide that every single month, you know, we as a business are going to experiment with various elements on the product detail page or the checkout process to increase the conversion. So that's one lever. If you can increase the conversion on a website, as in how many times people take an action of purchasing something on a website that is going through in turn hit that goal of more money being made on your website or your e-commerce store. So that is one lever - looking at C.R.O. or conversion rate optimisation.
Another lever might be that you decide to look at increasing the ATV or the average transactional value. So instead of looking at getting more people to buy from you, you might use this lever to look at how you might increase the amount of money that the people who are already shopping with you are spending per transaction. So, for example, getting them to go from an average spend of $100 to $120 per transaction. Now, there are various many, many, many ways that you could do this, that you can increase your ATV.
But the point here is to know that the ATV increase and focusing in on that is a lever to the goal, the greater, bigger goal of this website making more money. So if you concentrate and again, you will be like, "We're going to run experiments" that really focus on trying to increase the ATV either with bundling products or add ons or things like and see this all the time, free shipping if you spend X, which is trying to push people up to the next stage of spending above the average transactional value. So you see that all the time. Or it's like maybe people spend $35 and they'll say free shipping at $50. So that is one way of increasing the ATV. Like I said, bundling add ons.
But whatever those things are, those tactics will help you achieve the goal of getting more money out of your e-commerce store or website. So I hope that that makes sense.
Your goal is to get more money out of your e-commerce store website. The levers are to experiment with C.R.O. or conversion rate optimisation and to experiment with ATV, your average transactional value optimisation. So by doing those things, if you were like every single month, we are going to test. We're going to do an experiment to test these things. Then it's more likely that at the end of 12 months or six months, you are closer to hitting the goal of making more money because you have action those levers on a consistent basis.
So you want to consider for your business goals - do you have at least two levers per goal? Two things that you can action, your team can action or work towards that will help the chances of you actually achieving the goal that you have set. So the next step, once you have your levers, would be to map out when the levers will happen. So are the levers things you work on daily, weekly, monthly. You know, you really wouldn't want to leave it longer than monthly. You wouldn't really want to be quarterly, would work on this because it's just not enough enough action really being taken. You want to think about how we're going to schedule the time in to make sure that these levers, these ideas come up with, such as, you know, doing experiments to increase our ATV are actually getting done. How will you share these levers with your team if you have a team? Will you all work on them or will somebody ultimately own them?
Also thinking about when are you going to check in and analyse how you're going with the levers. So this could just look like a monthly deep dive. So an hour out of the office or an hour at a cafe or somewhere else to really go deep into "Looking at these levers, look at these experiments, what's worked, what's not worked. Why do we have to tweak for the month coming in order to hit this greater goal?" Also thinking things like a really quick ten minute stand up at the end of the start of each week to assess are we actioning these levers? And if so, how are they contributing towards our main goal?
Look, I totally get it. Goals are something that are very fun and exciting and energising to plan out. That is until we get to the end of the year and you realise you didn't achieve any of them because you absolutely fail to plan things like levers or consistent action to help you. So like I said, this is just a quick tip episode. But I do hope that this episode has shifted your thinking when it comes to your goals and ultimately that it helps you set levers that will in turn make it more likely that you get, not just set these goals. This is for the rest of 2020, but also for beyond.
As always, the show notes, including a full transcription of this episode and all the links for things mentioned can be found at mydailybusinesscoachcom/podcast/13 as this is episode 13. Like I said in the beginning, I have my very first business book coming out the second of September 2020. It's called Passion, Purpose, Profit: Sidestep the Hustle and Build a Business You Love. You'll find out in the book what I think of the word hustle and hustle culture and all of that stuff. So you can find that book available for pre-order on many bookseller websites. If you run a bookshop or you run a shop that sells books anywhere in the world, please get in touch. I would love to talk to you about stocking the book. And you can do that. You can send us an email. hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com. Or you can hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach. Please don't forget to hit subscribe and I'll see you on a future episode.
Thanks for listening to My Daily Business Coach podcast. If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram - @mydailybusinesscoach.
The show notes, including a full transcription of this episode and all the links for things mentioned can be found at mydailybusinesscoachcom/podcast/13
So you can find that book available for pre-order on many bookseller websites.
If you run a bookshop or you run a shop that sells books anywhere in the world, please get in touch. You can send us an email. hello@mydailybusinesscoach.com.
Or you can hit me up on Instagram at @mydailybusinesscoach.
Please don't forget to hit subscribe and I'll see you on a future episode.
If you want to get in touch, you can do that at mydailybusinesscoach.com or hit me up on Instagram - @mydailybusinesscoach.
