I think the dust has settled enough for me to pipe my voice into your inbox about all of those “1) Set big goals. 2) WIN” emails that we’ve all been pounded by the last few days…
Because here’s the thing about all of that goal-setting pabulum: In real life, it usually doesn’t work.
The semi-apocryphal story of the Harvard study of 1979 grads tells all of us: Write down your goals. So, like good students, we do so. We get our team together (or just sit down with our own bad self), we look at busy season projections, and we set some S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Great … now what?
And this is where we all so often fail – We do a great job of setting business goals, but then don’t create the environment in which those goals can be accomplished.
Here’s how you let that happen…
… you don’t execute the marketing tasks that HAVE to be done to hit those growth numbers. (We can help with that, btw.)
… you let yourself get buried by client work that all you can do is what’s right in front of you.
… you don’t take the time to build a recruitment system (even if it’s merely great personal networking) that enables you to have a steady pipeline of entry-level people that you can train up over months and years so you don’t face the staffing shortage so many of your tax and accounting colleagues are now facing.
… you focus so intensely on the purely “bottom line” concerns that you allow the internal culture of your firm to drift into dysfunction and toxicity — which means you’re even more up a creek if you don’t have a recruitment strategy.
I could go on.
Here’s the bottom line:
Our businesses and lives are much more formed by our habits than they are by our hopes.
Try setting all the business goals you want.
But until you make the decision to do the little things, finding those small points of leverage that swing big doors … well, then you’re simply gonna fail with those big goals.
If I can be purely mercenary for a moment, this is actually a big reason why so many of our clients have been so successful this past year.
They worked on setting business goals, and then they let us be their automatic habit-makers for their practice.
That is to say, we just get the stuff DONE for them that needs doing — because bringing in new clients requires WAY more than merely building a great website or a sweet ad campaign.
If you want some help to actually get the stuff done that you KNOW needs doing … let’s talk.
Also…
Speaking of VERY successful clients, we have heard from many of them that they are looking to offload a flood of new client work to other pros.
And we also know that some who might read this are looking to find new sources of work.
So we thought we’d try a little experiment and see if we can create a little informal “network effect” among the 26,223 (and growing) tax and accounting pros who have opted in to receive these notes.
Do you want to offload work? Do you want to add more clients?
Serve the world unselfishly, and profit…
