Ep. 240: How I Determine My Yearly Business Goals

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6 Steps for More Intentional Yearly Business Goals

When it comes to setting yearly business goals, it can often feel like you’re pulling ideas out of thin air. Like you’re trying on goals for size to see how they fit. Maybe this year I’ll focus on building a course. Or, I’ll try and hit six figures in revenue. Or, I could potentially even possibly create a podcast!

Or, maybe you have a ton of really intentional ideas, but you struggle with putting too many goals onto your plate each year. Your goals list is so long that you have no idea where to focus your time and energy, and then you end up all over the place with your daily plans and your content.

If either of those scenarios feels familiar, you’re going to love this episode. I’m sharing my 6 steps for setting my yearly goals in my business. These steps will not only help you create intentional goals, but they will also help you created focused goals.

This is actually an episode I aired back in 2021, but it’s one that stands the test of time and frankly, one that you aren’t likely to scroll back nearly 200 episodes to find.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Join me on Monday evenings at 4:00 pm Pacific time/7:00 pm Eastern time for my weekly YouTube Lives!
Snag the 2025 Chasing Simple Marketing Planner!
Check out my book for a crash course in content marketing
This week’s action step: Reflect on where you are in business now, what you accomplished this year and how those things served you and your clientele. Then think about what you would like to improve on and where you would like to be next year. Follow the advice in the episode and sit down and create realistic goals. You got this!!!!
This week’s book recommendation: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Find me on Instagram and tell me you completed this week’s action step: @mrsamandawarfield

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Have a comment about today’s episode, or a topic you’d like to suggest for a future episode? Shoot me an email over at hello@amandawarfield.com!

Rather Read? – Here’s the Transcript!

*Just a heads up – the provided transcript is likely to not be 100% accurate

When it comes to setting yearly business goals, it can often feel like you’re pulling ideas out of thin air. Like you’re trying on goals for size to see how they fit. Maybe this year I’ll focus on building a course. Or I’ll try and hit six figures in revenue. Or I could potentially even possibly create a podcast.

Or maybe you have a ton of really intentional ideas, but you struggle with putting too many goals onto your plate each year. Your goals list is so long You have no idea where to focus your time and energy and then you end up all over the place with your daily plans and your content. If either of those scenarios feel familiar, you’re going to love this episode.

I’m sharing my six steps for setting my yearly goals in my business. These steps will not only help you create intentional goals, but they’ll also help you create focused goals. Now, this is just the beginning. Actually an episode that I aired back in 2021, but it’s one that stands the test of time and frankly, one that you aren’t likely to scroll back nearly 200 episodes to find.

If you’re ready for 2025 to be your best year yet, let’s go ahead and dive in. You’re listening to episode 240 of The Chasing Symbol Podcast, and I’m your host, Amanda Warfield. This episode was brought to you by my book, chasing Simple Marketing, and you can grab your own@amandawarfield.com slash book.

How do I find time to create content without overwhelming myself? Where should I even be showing up in my marketing? How do I come up with fresh content ideas? Where should I be focusing my marketing efforts? What is lead generation anyways, and how do I do it? Are launches still a thing? And most importantly, How do I put it all together to market my business strategically?

Can I really grow my business without spending all of my time marketing? These are some of the questions that float around in your head. When you think of marketing welcome friend, this is chasing simple or practical marketing strategy meets simplicity. I’m your host, Amanda Warfield, simplicity focused content, marketing and launch strategist, speaker, educator, and author of chasing simple marketing.

I traded in my classroom lesson plans for helping creative entrepreneurs sustainably fit marketing into their business without it taking over their business, so that they have time to grow their business, take time off, and live the life they dreamed about when they first decided to go out on their own.

When I’m working, you can find me working with one on one clients, such as The Contract Shop and Rebecca Rice Photography on their marketing strategy and copywriting, or helping my students simplify their marketing and launches. And when I’m not, you can find me spending time outside with my husband, Russell, reading in our hammock, watching Gamecock Sports, traveling, or forcing our cats to snuggle me.

If you feel overwhelmed by marketing, you aren’t alone. Many entrepreneurs find marketing frustrating, overwhelming, and simply an obligation. They know they need it, but they don’t enjoy how easily it can suck up their time when what they really want to be doing isn’t is the thing that they started their business to do.

Which is why I’m here. To help make marketing simple and less time consuming, so that you can spend less time on your marketing, and more time growing your business and doing what you love. Each week, I’ll bring you transparent conversations about Actionable steps and judgment free community to encourage and equip you.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee or whatever your drink of choice is and meet me here each week for love, support, practical tips, and advice on uncomplicating your marketing and business. Let’s do this entrepreneurship thing together, shall we?

When it comes to creating your monthly content calendar and sitting down to create your content because you’re batching it, right? The first step is not writing in the monthly calendar. It’s not even writing your categories and important dates on the calendar. If that’s where you’re starting with your content planning, well, all you’re creating is a plan.

But what you need is a strategy. What’s the difference? A strategy is like the inner structure of a building, while the plan is the decor. A strategy is what helps you achieve your goals, and your plan is how you achieve them. Your strategy is where you’re leading your audience, and your plan is what you’re talking about and when.

Without having a strategy first, putting together a plan will simply mean pulling ideas out of thin air. So, how do you start with a strategy? By starting with your goals and working backwards to ensure that you’re moving your audience toward them. What are your yearly goals, quarterly goals, monthly goals, and weekly goals?

And how can you translate them into content your audience wants to ingest? You’ve got to consider those questions before you even begin deciding what it is that you’ll post about. And if you want a simple way to create both your strategy and your plan, grab your Chasing Simple content planner. The planner is my number one bestseller, and for good reason too, because this massive, more than 130 page planner was designed with strategy in mind.

It’s not merely a place to write down what you’re going to post and when. Yes, that’s part of it, but first, you’ll walk through intentional pages full of strategic questions to get your brain moving in the right direction before you even start writing down your topic ideas. In addition to the traditional calendar pages, you’ll find yearly planning pages, monthly prep work, monthly reflection questions, repurposing worksheets, and so much more.

If taking your content to the next level is a goal of yours, the Chasing Simple Content Planner was created for you. Grab yours for just 27 at amandawarfield. com slash planner.

Can I tell you a little secret? These last few months have been some of the hardest for me as a business owner. I thought that getting past the days of spending my weekends in front of my laptop in our guest room and desperately trying to figure out some way to make money, well, I thought that would be rock bottom.

But as we all know, since March, 2020. Everything has been unprecedented, and these last few months have just felt really heavy for me, and I know from talking to a lot of my friends that it’s not just me, but you add on working entirely too much on a big project, not a lot of downtime, and a social calendar that’s starting to get back to semi normal, and, well, it’s not a surprise that I, and many of us, are reaching burnout.

But amidst all of those hard things, do you know what I’m really thankful for? That I’ve intentionally created a business that supports the life I want, right from the start. Because you and I, we started our businesses from more freedom. For me, that freedom looks like getting to go to Disney multiple times a year.

But whether that’s monetary freedom, time freedom, location freedom, or some other kind of freedom for you. The root cause always comes back to freedom. Only, all too often, I see other business owners that are searching for that freedom, but they didn’t craft a business that would support the life they wanted.

Which is why I created my A Year in Preview Workshop. This workshop walks you through my signature planning process for planning out your year in business. A process that will help you plan out a business that supports your life, Instead of the other way around at the end of this two hour workshop, you’ll walk away with a strategically crafted content marketing plan that will help you fill seats in your programs.

But the real kicker is that you’ll be walking away with a plan for running a business that supports those freedom dreams you’ve had for yourself. And this time of year is the perfect time to get started. You can head over to amandawarfield. com forward slash AYP to grab the workshop for yourself.

That’s amandawarfield. com forward slash AYP and you can get started planning out your best year in business yet. The very first thing that I do when it comes to determining my yearly business goals is the right. I actually keep an ongoing goals list throughout the current year. So I’ve shared this before in the past, but I’m not a huge journaler.

So whatever journal I have, I like to keep a journal handy so I can get all my thoughts out anytime I feel like I need to just brain dump and I’ve got a lot of thoughts spinning, but I’m not a consistent every day I journal two or three pages. I’m just not that person. But I do always have a journal.

And on the very last page of every journal that I use, I tend really to not use more than one a year. So at the very last page at my journal for whatever year it is, I always have a running goals list that I am constantly adding to. Now this list doesn’t mean that I’m gonna try to achieve all of these things or that they’re even goals that I’ll actually try for this next year.

But I like to write down any ideas that I have so that when it comes time to figure out what my goals are for the next year, I have all kinds of things that I’ve already thought of that I can sift through so that I’m not starting from scratch because I want to make sure that whatever goals I have for the year, I want to make sure they’re really, really intentional.

And if I sit down to a blank power sheets or whatever it is that you’re using, uh, to determine your goals, if I sit down to something blank and have to pull things out of thin air, it’s unlikely that my goals are actually going to be intentional. But by having that space set aside specifically to write down potential ideas for the next year, I’m able to write down things that Come to me that solve a problem.

I’m able to be in the middle of something and say, Oh, well, this is going to be the next step after I finished this. And I really love to do this. And this would help solve whatever this problem is. Those are the kinds of things that I write down so that I know whatever I’ve got written on that spot, I know that it’s something that’s really, really intentional and will move my business forward, whether or not I choose it for the next year.

So that’s the very first thing that I do every single year is the back of my journal. I just keep an ongoing list of potential ideas. Now, when it comes time to actually sit down and say, okay, what are my goals for next year gonna be? After I’ve got that list, the next thing that I do is I look at where I am now.

What are my current offers? What did I do in the back end of my business this year? What was my annual revenue and what was my goal? I have to know where I am in order to know how best to move forward. So I would this year sit down and say, okay, my current offers. I’ve got one on one consultation. I’ve got club content batching.

I’ve got my a year in preview workshop, so on and so forth. I would write down all those things and how much each one of those made. I would look at what was my goal for revenue and what did I make? What did I do? What kind of big projects did I actually accomplish this year? And also what were my goals this year and did I accomplish them?

Then once I’ve written that all down in one place, I evaluate. What worked and what didn’t. So which of these goals did I actually meet? How did I meet them? What worked to help me meet those goals? Which ones did I not meet? And why not? What was missing? And sometimes this can be I’d kind of brain dump journal that out, right?

What worked? What did not work? What do I feel really proud of this year? And what do I feel like is missing? And then I look at all of that that I’ve already set aside. And then I’ll also see what is on my heart. What is something that maybe isn’t already written down or that I haven’t been working towards yet, but it’s something that I think I would really love to do this year.

And I read all of that down and I gather it all together. And then I see. Where is there overlap? What might be possible for this year? What might I actually be able to accomplish? This way, I’ve narrowed down that giant list that I’ve kept throughout the year. And I said, what strategically can I actually get done?

What strategically makes the most sense, right? So I’ve, I’ve narrowed that list down further. And then I narrowed my goals down one more time. By choosing four goals for the year, I choose a revenue goal. I choose a big dream, something that I really want to work towards and that I would love to see happen in my business.

Even if it’s something that this year may just be the first step for, I’ll come back to that in a second. And then I also will set a goal around my main offer and I’ll set a behind the scenes goal. So the revenue goal, I feel like is pretty self explanatory. What revenue goal would you like to hit this year?

Then the big dream goal. So for example, for my big dream goal for 2021 was to get an in person speaking gig. I just wanted to book one. That was my goal. And that may sound like something that’s not really a stretch goal, but I knew that in order to actually achieve that goal of booking an in person speaking gig, I knew that.

There was a lot of buildup that I needed to do. I needed to really practice and hone my speaking skills. I needed to craft a really amazing presentation and I needed to build up my credibility in this industry. And I knew that that was not going to be a quick and easy thing, that I needed time. And so my goal for that, my, it’s a big goal.

It’s a big dream. I would love to move more into speaking in the future. But this year, my goal was just to get one, and that was my big dream. So I highly encourage you to think, what is my big dream? Maybe it’s hosting and planning your own retreat. Maybe it won’t happen this year. Maybe that’s not a possibility.

Maybe it’s not super realistic. But what steps do you need to take to work towards it and keep that goal in mind? Now, my goal around my main offer tends to be things like how many clients I want or how many new signups for club content batching or whatever your main offer is. Give that a number goal, whether that’s a specific revenue amount, a specific number of signups or a specific number of clients, whatever the case may be, what is your main offer goal?

Now, if you don’t have a main offer just yet, that’s okay. Maybe your goal for that isn’t a number goal. It’s just simply getting it set up this year, or maybe Your main offer right now is just a freebie and that’s okay. Maybe you want a certain number of downloads on your freebie and that’s your main offer right now.

Play around with that. Whatever makes the most sense for your business, but your main offer goal would be number three. And then finally, a behind the scenes goal, something that you’re doing on the back end of your business, that You know, is a big project that, you know, is going to take some time, for example, my big behind the scenes goal this year was to set up funnels.

And I am still, as I’m recording this at the end of October, I am still working on setting up these funnels. I have not knocked this goal out yet this year. But I’ve been chipping away at it all year long. Maybe your big behind the scenes goal is a brand new website, new copy, new brain photos, new design, new everything.

And you know, that’s going to take you a lot of time. Maybe it is setting up your First set of freebies. Your behind the scenes goal will really depend on your business, of course. But I would love for us to normalize that big projects take time and not see us all continue to push through these things.

Because this, in years past, I would have said, okay, this is a goal for the quarter and I’m gonna get all my funnels set up in one quarter. But that’s just not realistic between marketing and admin and Clients and all the other stuff that happens in a business. These, these behind the scenes projects, they do take time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be working towards them.

Quick recap, the four goals that I set in my business each year, a revenue goal, a big dream goal, a goal around my main offer. So I make sure to keep that in mind because so often we can lose focus. And then a behind the scenes goal. Those are the four. After I’ve set those four, then I have to gut check myself.

Are they realistic? Do I have a plan to support them, and are they vanity metrics? So are they realistic? At the beginning of 2021, I set a goal of 100, 000 in revenue, and within a month, I very quickly realized that, um, This probably isn’t truly a realistic goal, and I didn’t have a plan in place that would actually support them, so I actually scaled back my revenue goal significantly for this year, for 2021.

So ask yourself, are they realistic? It’s okay to not reach the big shiny number goal, or the big shiny whatever goal. As long as you have a realistic goal, because the next year you can move forward more and more and more, but business isn’t a straight line and things are going to go up and down. So make sure that you’re setting things that are realistic.

Then the next part of that, do you have a plan to support them? So I realized that my big revenue goal that I originally set for this year wasn’t realistic because I did not have a plan in place to support them. I didn’t have a true realistic. Plan that I knew that I could actually achieve as far as how many sales that I was going to reach to get there or how much time I had, or so on and so forth.

You have to have a realistic plan in place to actually support those goals. And then are they vanity metrics here again? I found that the revenue goal that I set for myself was very much a vanity metric. I didn’t actually. Need to hit 100, 000 to do what I wanted to do this year, but I wanted it because it felt like this big shiny number, right?

But it wasn’t actually what I needed until it was just a vanity metric. Maybe when you set a goal around a big dream of yours or a goal around your main offer, maybe you say, okay, I want this many people on my email list, or I want this many people on social media, or I want a reel to go viral. Um, there’s all kinds of different things that we can set, but make sure that whatever goals you’re setting are actually going to do something for your business.

You’ve only got four chances at these goals, right? If you’re, you’re setting really intentional, simplified goals and you follow this method that I’m doing, you’ve got four goals. If any of them are vanity metrics, they’re not actually moving your business forward. So you want to make sure that every single goal is super, super intentional and it’s not something where you are saying, okay, well.

So, I want to get 500 new people on my email list this year, but I want that many people on my email list. Instead, it’s, okay, I need to get this many people on my email list through this specific opt in, because this opt in has been intentionally created to lead them into this next thing. There’s got to be a lot more to it than just, I want this many people on my email list.

I want this many people on my social media. So, real quick to recap before I give you your action step. First, have a place where you have an ongoing goals list so that you already have ideas and plans and thoughts in place when it comes time to sit down and actually create your goals for the next year.

Then look at where are you right now? What are your current offers? What did you do in the back end of your business this past year? What was your annual revenue? After that, evaluate what worked and what didn’t and also write down anything that may be on your heart and then look at all of this and see where the overlap is.

Where do you see common themes? Where do you see common problems that you need to fix? Once you’ve got all that down and you’ve done some, some brain dumping, some flow of conscious, some journaling, whatever that looks like for you and whatever works best for you, choose four goals. A revenue goal, a big dream goal, A goal around your main offer and a behind the scenes goal.

And after you’ve done that, go back and gut check yourself. Are those goals realistic? Do you have a plan in place to support them? And are any of them vanity metrics versus truly goals to move your business forward? Now your action step for this week is to put a date on your calendar and block off a couple of hours to work on setting your goals.

A lot of times. This is something we forget to do as CEOs in our business. We forget that we have to actually intentionally plan time to step back and look at where are we and where do we want to go? We have to step back and set goals because that’s how we guide our business to where we want it to go.

If we just. Keep working constantly and we never take that time to sit back. You’re not steering the ship. You’re not steering your business It’s just floating along wherever it happens to go. So I want you to put a date on your calendar Block off at least a couple hours If not a whole day or two To work on setting your goals for the new year and this week’s book recommendation is the new Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander now this book It was so eye opening because I knew that our, our justice system and a lot of our systems period in America, I knew that it was set up to suppress African Americans.

But I did not fully understand all of the different dynamics in place. I didn’t understand the full extent of how oppressive our system was and how that all worked. And this book was such an eye opener, so I highly recommend that everyone go check that out because I understand so much better about not how to fix it, of course, but why the oppression is so real.

And how seemingly innocuous things make a big difference. So I would highly recommend that everyone goes check that out. It is a very, very, very informative read and also not a hard read. So The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. I will put a link to that in the show notes. And until next time, my friend, I hope that you will go out and uncomplicate your life in biz.

So much for joining me here today, friend. You can find this episode show notes as well as all the resources you need to simplify your marketing over at amandawarfield. com. If you liked what you heard here today, be sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. And if you could take a moment to leave a rating and review, it would truly mean the world to me.

Ratings and reviews are the number one way that you can support a podcast. And ensure that it sticks around for many more episodes to come. I’ll see you next time. Now go out and uncomplicate your marketing and business.