The entrepreneur’s guide to achieving your business goals

Most people have no idea when to start a business or how to accomplish their goals. 

They don’t have clarity on what they want or how to get it… and this kills most businesses.

Defining a clear business goal and deconstructing how to get there using data creates a roadmap that guides you to making the right decisions.

So, what’s the first step? 

1/ Figure out your income goal. 

Is it to reach $100M? To make $10k/month? To make more than at your current job? 

This number needs to be clear so you can minimize your risk and work toward a goal. 

Most businesses should start as side hustles until they grow big enough to become the full-time thing.

So figure out your income goal. Then calculate the revenue, expenses, and profit needed to achieve your income goal.

Know your goal? Cool, here’s the next step…

2/ Divide your income goal by the customer lifetime value

Divide your income goal by the customer lifetime value (average amount a customer spends with you).

This helps you determine how many customers you need to reach your goal. 

By knowing this, you can work backwards to figure out how to market to them.

And if you want to be more specific, you can divide the minimum number of customers by your conversion rate to find how many leads you need to hit your income goal. 

From this data, you can look at the best ways to reach your income goal. 

The data you get is essential for choosing the best strategy.

Deconstructed: Business Deconstructed newsletter 

Let’s say my goal for this newsletter is to make $1,000/month. 

I talked about lifetime customer value earlier, but for monthly, I can split the customer value by month.

My revenue sources are sponsorships, digital products, and referrals. From my sponsorships, I make $0.02 per subscriber per month. 

For digital products, I make $0.05 per sub. And from referrals, I make $0.10 per sub. 

That adds up to $0.17 per subscriber per month.

If I want to make $1,000/mo, I would need $1,000 ÷ $0.17 ≈ 5,882 subscribers to meet my goal. 

So, I could market more and try to grow to 5,882 subscribers. But there are also other strategies I could use. 

By understanding the numbers behind your business, you can choose the best strategy to improve your business. 

- Warren

PS: If you wanna go deeper on how to identify the best strategy for your business, check out this article on The Theory of Constraints.