Effective Goal Setting – Or Setting Yourself Up For Disappointment?

Nicola says:  When I was just getting started in personal development and wealth creation, I diligently worked through every exercise in books like Colin Turner’s “Swimming With Pirahna’s Makes You Hungry” and Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People” and I ended up setting goals for myself.

I had never set goals before in my life….. oh, sure! I had some vague “wants” but I’d never set goals and when I think about it, there were two main reasons why.

1. I had no idea HOW I was going to achieve those goals – for heaven’s sake, I didn’t even know what the word strategy meant!
2. I was scared to write down a goal, fully expecting to NOT achieve it and then be disappointed with myself when I found the piece of paper later, in a drawer somewhere.

Essentially, I had no idea that you can set a goal, then make a plan to make it happen.  How funny that seems now….although I am now a great believer in setting goals with no idea of how to make them happen at first!

Judith thinks I’m a bit barking when I talk like this, because she’s set goals and achieved them, barring a few unforeseen exocets, all her life.

So all this said, when we launched our Money Gym Silver Elite programme this week as a pilot for the main launch in September, one of our main aims was to encourage the Silver Elite participants to create some goals for themselves, for the programme, and to encourage them to create a strategy (plan) for how they were going to achieve them – specifically how they were going to achieve them within the 90 days of the programme.

We hosted the first webinar and discussed the subject thoroughly (albeit with a frustrated Judith listening in, unable to contribute as much as she would have liked, due to techie issues) and we came up with the following goal setting process which I wanted to share with you.

Marian’s (Shorter Version) Goal Setting Format:

• Set your goal(s)
• Work out your compelling ‘why’
• How will you achieve your goal?  (Think, brainstorm, strategise…)
• What are the obstacles, turn ‘em around and make them challenges and blast through them
• What time will you commit to the goal (& is it more time than you spend watching TV or sitting in pub!)

Nicola’s (Longer Version) Goal Setting Format:

1. Think of between one and three goals you would like to achieve in 90 days
2. Run them through the SMART process – Judith, could you elaborate on that one?
3. Tell us WHY you want to achieve them – what difference will it make in your life?
4. Work out where you will need to be with each of them, to be a third of the way there in 30 days, two thirds of the way there in 60 days.
5. How much time per week do you have to work on your 90 day goals
6. When are you going to work on them?  Saturdays? Sunday mornings?  Tuesday evenings?
7. What steps do you think you need to take to move into action?
8. What is going to stop you?  What are your perceived obstacles?
9. What would be the outcome, if you turned those obstacles around into outcomes?
10. What are you going to do first?  This week? Before the next call (commitment in public via the Google Group to at least one action step please)

Judith’s (SMART) Goal Setting Process

A SMART goal, for what it’s worth, and it won’t suit all, is

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timed/timelined

Thus a goal like S posted yesterday “To attract 1000 Twitter followers within 30 days” is all of the above – if she has a plan to achieve it.

The point about this SMART process is… you know whether you’ve done it or not.

So tell me via the comments box here, do YOU set goals?  How do you do it?  What are your challenges around goal setting?

Love to hear what you think!

Top 5 Business Mistakes – Pt 3

This week I started to share with you the Top 5 Mistakes most self-employed people and business make, when trying to make money?

What were those Top 5 Mistakes?

1.  We are unclear about what we offer
2.  We are unclear about who we are offering it to
3.  We keep ourselves a secret!
4.  We imagine we are doing things when we are actually just thinking about it
5.  We don’t believe we are worth it (and often undercharge!)

Let me elaborate a bit…..today I’ll cover Mistake #3.

1.  We keep ourselves a secret!

Many times, when talking to Money Gym clients about why they are not achieving the ezine signups and sales they would like, whether it be their own products or affiliate sales (where you recommend other people’s stuff and earn commission), I am shocked to hear that they expect to make sales from tiny trickles of traffic.

I tell them, over and over again, something that I was taught by my first business coach Chris Barrow, it takes getting in front of 1000 people to make a sale.

This formula comes from Chris’ background in financial services sales – a tough environment – where he reckoned that you had to call 1000 people to get 100 to talk to you.

You have to talk to 100 people to get 10 appointments.

You have to get 10 appointments to make one sale.

Let me qualify this as I think the word “sale” is misleading.  It suggests that if you are a “better” or more aggressive sales person, you can convert more appointments to sales.

I prefer to say that, if you can get 10 appointments to discuss whether your product or service is a fit, for that potential client or customers problem or pain, then one person will BUY.

See the subtle difference?  They will buy, rather than you will sell.  Takes all the pressure off you actually.

So, following this through, assuming that you get in front of enough of the right kind of people, with a great solution for their problem, then they will buy your solution.

He went on to say that you need to build a reservoir of potential future customers who know who you are and what you do, and more importantly what you can DO FOR THEM.

Filling the reservoir in the early days is hard work.  Imagine a little stream running along the ground till it meets a big hole, and starts, very slowly to fill that hole up with water.  Eventually it will, and then, for every new drop that goes in, a drop will spill out and those are your customers.

That reservoir is filled up out of the 100 people you talk to, out of the 1000 calls.  The 10 people are the ones that express at interest in your product or service.  The one person out of the 10 is the one that buys.

Tranlating that for a second to the online world, we say that you need 1000 unique visitors coming to your website, to be able to attract 100 potential future customers into your reservoir of people who know who you are and what you do, and how your solution can help them.

You need to ask yourself this burning question!

If I need to get in front of 1000 people to make a sale, how many sales do I want, and how quickly can I get in front of the required number

But what do we do, when we are new in business?

We keep ourselves a secret!

We take tiny marketing actions rather than huge marketing actions.

We put notices on boards in supermarkets and health clubs.  We give a few cards to our hairdressers, our garage, our friends.

In short, we do everything we can to avoid exposing ourselves to the large numbers of people that we need to expose ourselves to, in order to build our reservoir and make the sales.

So now you know that, what can you do differently?

Think about the billion people online, on broadband, right now.

Think about the huge overseas markets coming online and getting access to Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and the other big search engines.

Think about the easiest, fastest, cheapest ways to get in front of thousands, hundreds of thousands if not millions of potential future customers.

Start with a blog, even if you haven’t thought of a product or service yet.

Tell your story, your story of discovery, your tale of venturing out into the big wide online world.

I’d love to read it!

YOUR 3 ACTION STEPS:

1.  Read the rest of my emails this week

2.  Listen to Richard White and Daniel Wagner’s webinars on www.MoneyGymRadio.com – they were great!

3.  Join Money Gym Silver or come along to one of our “Money Gym Presents…..” workshops in Central London.

THEN WE CAN HELP YOU TO:

1.  Start a blog right now even if you don’t know what to sell – tell your story of discovery.  The search engines will come and then so will the visitors.

2.  Look for good products or services, sign up to their affiliate schemes and recommend them to your visitors.

3.  Think about your expertise, skills, knowledge, experiences and wonder if any of the billion people online could learn anything from you.  Create ebooks, how to manuals, camtasia videos, memberships sites.  Then go out there and find the people who need you and want to buy from you.

Sound good?

Great!

See you there!

Nicola

Misconceptions: Is Disappointment Holding You Back?

Forgive me if this article is a bit “me,me,me”. It grew out of my Note From Nicola” and actually outgrew it, so bear with me and see if it sparks anything off in your thoughts. If so, I would love you to make a comment below there…tell me your story.

A bit of background….there is a right old furore going on in the coaching world at the moment with an internet based reality tv show happening, called “Britian’s Next Top Coach”.

It’s turning the coaching world upside down with two main camps developing, for and against.

Those who are “against” are largely anti-competition and anti-marketing, and those who are “for”, are thinking that this is going to raise the benefits of coaching and personal development – something Joe Public is woefully ignorant of – and this can only be “a good thing”.

The “for” camp are also eyeing the winners packages, which include a lot of very nice prizes including a promotion and management deal, a potential book deal with a mainstream publisher, and much much more.

I’ve largely ignored it all until Judith emailed me a link saying that I should go for it. In her words “you’ve got the balls” and it would be great for the Money Gym.

Not to mention my Star/Creator profile. I am drawn to telly and while this is internet video, it’s nearly the same thing and may lead to telly.

But I found myself finding lots of different reasons – misconceptions – not to enter, from “oh, they will insist on us giving up the ebook rights and that will kill our marketing” to “oh, the whole coaching world will despise me for the self-promoting limelight seeker I am” and loads of other rubbish gubbins as well.

Then it struck me, I didn’t want to enter because I didn’t want to compete with other coaches, and especially not so publically!

Read more..

Is A Property Boom The Death Of Entrepreneurialism?

This week I posted a blog posting picked up from another site, about whether the property boom had meant the death of entrepreneurialis

Read it here >>

The author seemed to be putting forward the view that entrepreneurs had been getting lazy and flocking to the property market – they put their premise forward thusly…

“The net effect of this (property) boom has been one where the incentive to become truly entrepreneurial was significantly reduced – why try and create a new product or service if there was a guaranteed high return from property development? Similarly, from an investment point of view, why consider any other investment opportunity if there was a perceived guaranteed high return from property development?”

Interesting how they slipped that “perceived” in the second sentance eh?  Do they mean that the return being gurarnetted

Let me give you a bit of context for my fascination for this….

In 2003 I bought my hotel The Acacia.  Property investment and business in one I thought.  A big TICK x 2 on the Lanes of The Wealth Highway.

I created an E-Myth’d business, one which would run without me, whereas I could market the place from anywhere in the world. Which was based in a building that would appreciate in value.

Then I met Andy Shaw and Greg Ballard, no strangers to business or property themselves.  They started to come to a lot of our Money Gym events at The Acacia and we used to spend time in the breaks in the back garden, because some of their team smoked in those days, and we could talk to Steve (the Manager / Chef at the time) through the kitchen window while he prepared his latest sumptuious feast for the clients.

I’ll never forget the day, when one of them uttered the following immortal words ….

“Of course, this place will never make you a good enough return in terms of profit, to make up for how much effort, worry and risk you have put into this place”.

They were not being unkind, just honest, and they knew what they were talking about, because they had had a big business;  two factories, over 100 staff who got up in the morning to cause them grief, over 100 pieces of equipment and a fleet of vans that did likewise.  They realised that, in their first property deal, they had made more profit than they had made in half a year in their business.

So they sold the business and went into property.

They suggested I sell the hotel business and concentrated on the virtually virtual coaching company The Money Gym, my internet marketing activities and property investing – but focusing on simple little one bedroom flats.

I was in a hurry to get out now, becuase the scales had fallen from my eyes in terms of the best use of my time and efforts.

Then I discovered the other problem – that Andy and Greg had also experienced – nobody wanted to buy my business when I wanted to sell it.  Or perhaps I didn’t know how to go about selling a hotel business properly.

And there were other people’s jobs depending on me – you can’t just walk away from a business if there are othere people working in it – your employees.  You have a responsibility.

Grim.

Anyway, with time it all resolved itself – not easy but we got there.

Because at the end of the day, as I never tire of saying, wealth creation is a simple matter of deciding where your best return on investment is, and putting your money, time (which is money) and efforts there. If you don’t know how to work out your return on investment (ROI) here’s one of my previous articles on the subject, which tells you how to work it out, and how to compare different opportunities, and make chalk like cheese for the purpose of comparing different opportunities.

Aye, but, here’s the rub.

We all have our personalities and emotions to deal with and that can muddy the waters.

We find that our Money Gym Gold clients

have distinct preferences about which one or two Lanes of the Wealth Highway they want to work with first.

Analytical people like the idea of the Stockmarket, women are always keen on property and often have a business idea (or existing business / self employed venture going already) while techie and marketing types are drawn towards the internet Lane.

The skill in the early days, as their coach, is in finding out if that is, indeed, their fastest route to the money, as Judith would say.

Because our main goal in The Money Gym is that we want them to recoup their investment as quickly as possible, then go on to create oodles of cash so that they can re-invest it and create more cash, and re-invest it………..you get the idea.

And here is where I get back to the point – hurrah!

We want them to do it as quickly and easily, and effortlessly as possible.

Because why would you want to flog your guts out creating something new, and trying to bring it to market, when you can make pots of cash from following a tried and tested system, a step by step process, one that is proven to work, with colleagues alongside you, and mentors who have gone before, to hold your hand and stop you making painful and costly mistakes?

Why would you go it alone?

I suspect the article was written by a “Creator” in Roger Hamilton’s “Wealth Dynamics” and as one myself (Creator / Star profile moi!) I can almost sympathise.

Almost, because I wasted 38 painful, poor years, trying to create a new business, and bring it to market.

I now harness my creativity into making money out of thin air, created great win/win deals, helping others to create wealth, and finding new ways to make our marketing better.

Who said wealth creation had to be hard work?

And unless your business can create a better return than the property market, why would you go there?  Current blips notwithstanding, the property market appreciates at an average of 10% per annum and the more sophisticated investors create an infinity return on their investment.

Most businesses don’t even break even.

Now, I can hear howls of protest from Judith in the distance (takes a while for sound to travel from Streatham to Shoreham) so I will finish up by saying that we are not anti-business in The Money Gym.

But we are anti-hard work.

So bring us your business idea and we will help you shape it into something that will run happily alongside your property empire building.  We will help you harness the power of the internet to market your business automatically, and then, only when you have nothing to do, will we let you look at the stockmarket.

Unless you want to start there, of course!

Client led coaching, with laser like focus, with a right old boot up the bum, that’s The Money Gym.

Come join us!

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/Gold

PROMOTION:

Talking of whom, one of the supermodels of the property investing world, Greg Ballard, will be joining us tomorrow to tell us how to get an infinity return on your investment.

Then I will be sharing how to make money from property without buying any.

Then Maria Davies, another star of the property world, will be showing us what she’s buying, and sharing how to buy a luxury holiday home in the Caribbean AND create a monthly income, for just £1000.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/MGPresents/property2.htm

Property: Top 3 Ways?

When I first started the Money Gym, and wrote the “Financial Intelligence 101″ tips, that grew into The Money Gym ebook, one of the most popular sections was the Property Investing Section.  Everyone wanted to know about investing in, and making money from property.

In the early days, when we used to host the Money Gym workshops at The Acacia, my much loved boutique hotel and my latest venture into property investing, we used to cover “The Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” and we used to simply tell people about them, they used to go off and investigate the one they liked the sound of, then we would coach them from there.

However, one day, a couple of guys came along who blew most of our “Top 10″ out of the water. 

Out of “Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” only three of them remain.  Which ones?  Aha, you will have to wait for the next few days to find out that!

After we heard about how these guys invested in property, we simply couldn’t, in all good conscience, just tell folks how they COULD invest in property, but we felt we then had to share how we felt people SHOULD invest in property.

Now this went right against all accepted coaching law and wisdom, I can tell you!

But hey ho!  Wealth coaching has always been different – a mix of training, mentoring and coaching, rather than pure coaching itself.

At The Money Gym, we aim to save you time, money, and stop you making expensive mistakes.

Mistakes like I made with buying that hotel in the first place.  If these two guys, my mates Greg and Andy, had been around in 2003, there is NO WAY they would have let me buy it.  They would have stopped me making THAT half million pound mistake.

Side note:  You will see in this week’s ezine, I talk about the difference between “failure” and a “mistake” and it’s an important distinction to make if you are an entrepreneur.  Essentially, a failure is something that can bury you but you can learn from your mistakes.

That hotel was a mistake – some would definately see it as a failure – but I choose now to see it as a mistake.  A very large one true….. 

One that taught me a VERY LARGE LESSON!  In fact, SEVERAL very large lessons.

I will never forget the moment in the garden of The Acacia, when Greg or Andy uttered the immortal words that made me realise that buying it had been a mistake and told me why.

1.  This hotel will never make you the amount of profit that would make all the work you put into it, worth it.
2.  You have a lot of your own money in this business and you will struggle to ever get it out.
3.  When you have had enough and you do want to sell it, nobody will buy it, unless you find someone as daft as you were, to buy it in the first place.

Hmmmmm…..

They like straight talking, those two.  And that is one of the things I most value about Greg & Andy. So many people won’t tell you what you need to hear.  Nobody around me in those days did, that’s for sure.  Hence the mistakes.

So, five years on, here we are, still making mistakes but not so many, and certainly not failing, and together with Steve and Judith, two more straight talkers, they are still two of my closest friends and mentors.  Whenever I want some advice about business and life, I go straight to Greg, and to Andy for property market / business marketing / creative / internet input.

So you can imagine how thrilled I am that Greg still comes to London, to present for The Money Gym on property investing.

I can’t imagine how much longer he will do that, as we are pretty much the only presenting he does outside their own Open Days.

He’s coming to the Southwark Rose on 14th June and really, you should be there. 

* If you have questions about the current property market, you should be there.

* If you have questions about your business proposition, you should be there.

* If you just want to see a down to earth, authentic, funny, FANTASTIC speaker, you should be there.

* If you want to recharge your wealth creation batteries, and hang out with some like minded people, you should be there.

That’s five “shoulds” in five lines, I’m about to get struck off the Eurocoach List!

Book your place here – still some Early Birds left as I’m late promoting this due to half term.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/MGPresents/property2.htm

See you there!

Nicola

p.s.  Greg always sells out fast so get your space booked now.