Achieving your targets is this week's I Hate Numbers podcast.  A target is a goal that has specific criteria for success.  Furthermore, reaching it means you have got where you wanted to, it’s pat on the back time.

Targets are an integral part of achieving your goals and objectives. Furthermore, they help your business progress.  Embrace the idea of targets, it is joyful,

Having a target gives you something tangible that you can strive towards, helping push the progress of your projects . As well as providing an end point, having a target also encourages ambition; by setting concrete goals, it motivates us to work harder towards reaching them.

Achieving your targets means breaking down each goal into smaller steps or milestones.  This has so many upsides,

• Firstly, planning, management and control becomes easier
• Secondly, it reinforces the fact that success is made up of small wins (and losses!)
• Thirdly, your stress and anxiety reduces, who wouldn't want that

Conclusion and good to know

The I Hate Numbers podcast isn’t just about target setting, financial storytelling, and financial performance though.  Other topics are covered, for example, cash flow management, budgeting, forecasting, tax, accounts, and more! Every episode provides actionable advice from me, Business Finance coach, accountant and educator who explains that stuff in an easy and no-nonsense way.

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It helps you stay organised so you can focus on what matters to you, the creative work and the impactful change. Take a step away from the chaos with fast setup & easy navigation – numbers just got real…for the better! Get organised & make sense of it all with Numbers Know How today!

What goes through your mind? How do you feel when you hear the word target being banded around? How do you feel about the concept of selling targets in your life? How do you feel when you set targets in your business? Does it make you go all cold and shivery, or does it fill you with elation and joy?

Hopefully it's gonna be the latter. In this week's I Hate Numbers Podcast I'm gonna be talking to you about the idea of not just having targets, but how you can achieve targets and how they can be joyful and actually they are a wonderful thing in your business toolbox. Now, there are six things I'm gonna be covering in this week's podcast, and there are as follows, is the idea about what targets represent, how we should think about them,

what our attitude should be towards targets, establishing targets in the first place, what level, what type of targets should we set ourselves, our path and how we should not think of it as a big meal to be consumed, but think of that in baby steps. Let's crack on with the podcast.

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers Podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

But firstly folks, and the whole idea of a target is a target represents a joy. It measures. It looks at a marker going walls, something we've identified that we wish to achieve. It's our Northern Star. It's something we wanna reach to and aspire. And what we need to do is to think of targets as very positive things.

So we consider, in our personal lives, perhaps post-Christmas, you thought, do you know what? I'm going to become a much fitter person. I'm gonna eat more healthily. I'm gonna be more active. You would go through that process and you establish what that represents to you. What that idea of success is, whether it's to actually feel better in yourself, not to go out of breath when you go up and down the stairs, to actually have that sense of warm feeling internally.

And what you might do is to set yourself a target and a target is a positive thing to aspire to. It gives us a focus. It reduces that anxiety, it gives us clarity, and our target may be that we wish to achieve a certain target weight. We wish to reach a certain level of fitness, and that level of fitness may be expressed in covering a certain distance at a certain time, whatever that is a target

is giving us joy. We're not setting them for anything negative. We're setting it for something that's really positive. And you've gotta think of setting a target as something that's joyful and something that's positive that says, I wish to move myself forward in this direction. When we think of our businesses, we wish to move them forward, whether it's making more profits, whether it's actually having a better mix of clients, whether it's actually having more time for ourselves, whatever that actually represents itself

as we've articulated that end goal, we've articulated that Northern Star. We use that mnemonic SMART to think of it in those terms, and then we have to set a target. Now, for many people, the very idea of a target represents to them a commitment, a binding thing that says if I don't actually achieve that, am I actually gonna be a failure as a result?

Please don't think of it in those terms. So look at it as a target, as a marker that something says to yourself, this is what I'm aspiring to do. This is what I'm going to be doing, and that's my winning line. It might be the first winning line. It may be part of many. The second thing is look at it and embrace that as a positive thing.

Now, by the very nature of a target, a target is some point into the future. And nobody can predict the future beyond the next 30 seconds. Even that is problematic. Looking at a target that might be set 12 months ahead, yes, it may fill you with dread. You may think, what happens if I don't achieve that? I'm gonna be a failure.

I've not achieved anything, and that's the wrong way to look at it. A target is a marker, it's a line in the sand. Something that we have said that we're gonna move into the direction of. Now, many, many people set targets. Those targets may not be achieved, but it's the journey as they move towards that target, they move towards that what they set themselves here.

That's where the learning takes place. That's where the discovery takes place, and if you fall short of that target, if we understand the reasons behind that, that's a great learning opportunity. It's often quoted that Edison, when he came up with the invention of a light bulb and a reporter supposedly asked him what he thought of the 10,000 failures. Well, he reframed that

and he thought that was 10,000 learning opportunities, 10,000 iterations where he was discovering something new. Anything we take for granted in the business world or our personal world, whether it's transportation, whether it's technology, whether it's a process, whether it's how we interact with people, whatever that thing is that we see as positive has been achieved because there has been learning as we go along.

So don't use the word failure. Look at it as a learning opportunity. And for me, I love the idea of targets. It gives me something to aim for. It gives me something positive and I can learn as I progress towards that target. I can learn what I'm doing well and I can learn what I need to improve on. So we've talked about the idea of a target being a positive thing.

We've talked about embracing the notion of targets. Don't look at these as sticks to beat yourself over the head. Look at these as positive things. Now, thirdly, at the risk of stating the obvious, make sure you actually have got a target. And targets must be smart if you merely say that I wish to make more profit in my business.

That's a wonderful ambition, but it's a rubbish target. You need to make them smart, so make sure that they are ones that you can actually measure. You can identify whether that's a number, whether that's a, an observation, but make sure you can articulate what that target actually looks like. Make sure it's acceptable to you.

So it's not somebody else's target. You're not looking at somebody else's business, you're looking at your own business. So make sure that target is specific, it's measurable, it's acceptable to you, and it's realistic in the context of the resources that you have, the time and space, that you have, the expertise, and where you are in your business cycle.

Make sure it's relevant and make sure it's time bound. So is it achievable within the time that you set yourself? What you can achieve in 12 months is gonna be different to what you can achieve in three months or a couple of years. Now, fourthly, ambition. I'm all one for ambition. I love ambitious people, and that ambitious is what is ambitious for you. What that means is

don't just stick your finger in the air and thinking, right, my profit for this year is 20,000 pounds. Next year I'm gonna be making half a million pounds. Now, that might be realistic. That might not be too ambitious subject to what's supporting you. If you've got a team of personnel, somebody who's just invested a huge amount of money in your business, you've suddenly got a huge amount of resources at your disposal.

You've got a captive marketplace. You bought another business, that's fine. That's probably not too ambitious. If it's you with a small team or a bigger team that's growing, no point looking at a number, say a profit target of a hundred thousand, if that represents 10 times what you're generating at the moment.

Now, that could be okay, but it's subject to what is it you're going to do to get to that end point. We're gonna talk more about activities in a few moments. So when you set yourself a target, remember, business is a journey. You will have setbacks, you will have side crashes, you'll have obstacles in the way.

There will many things that will be put in front of you to challenge your resilience, your fortitude, and your ability to progress forward. I've been in business myself for 28 years, and along that 28 years, I've had many successes, but I've also had many shall we say in retrospect, things that I wish I'd done differently.

I've made mistakes. People have let me down. I've made bad decisions. I've had my fingers burnt, overinvesting, underinvesting. It's the nature of the beast. I embrace that. I don't necessarily want to have losses or lose money, but for me is part and parcel of your business progress. Now, the last couple of things I want us to think about is make sure you've figured out what is the path, what are the activities that you need to undertake in order to get to that finishing line?

In order to get to that target. If I use our key fit analogy from earlier, if you've decided that your target is that you wish to run a 5K race in under 30 minutes, and that is the target you set yourself in the context of how fit you are at the moment, or if you've done any running well, then you might want to say, okay, what I need to do is I need to perhaps change my diet.

I perhaps need to obviously exercise more. I need to perhaps do some weight training in the gym to build up my core muscles. What I'm going to be doing is in the first month, I'm gonna be getting up and I'm just gonna go for a slow, brisk walk. I'm gonna make sure that I can achieve that walk and I'm gonna walk from perhaps 20 minutes uninterrupted.

I then might convert that into a brisker walk, a small jog. I might set myself a, a target of doing a mile in a certain level of time. And by the way, folks, if you are going to take up any activity when you've been sedentary beforehand, make sure you check it out with the doctor. I don't want any injury befalling you.

So make sure you've got a clear path as to how you're gonna get your own goal. If I think of a business context, if I set myself a profit target, I'm gonna ask myself the question, what's the marketing activities I need to do? What's the connections I need to make? What are the products I need to focus on?

Which ones are making me money? Do I need to invest in any additional outreach work? Do I need to invest in any additional infrastructure? Do I need to get hold of a VA, an extra freelancer, a member of the staff? Member of the team? What is it I need to do to make this come alive to actually get to my end point. If you don't have an idea what the those activities are,

then I would say you're gonna find it very problematic and challenging to get to the end point. Think of the path you have to progress, think of the activities you have to undertake, and that in itself helps you set the targets for the last point that I'm talking about. Now for me, the last thing is we are, as human beings, all for instant gratification.

Long-term targets, we're like a year away. In the context of businesses is not a lot of time, but it's far away for us to be disillusioned if we're not getting there. So break that long-term target of say, twelve months and break it down into micro steps. What does that look like after month one? What should you have achieved by month one?

And work backwards from the end target to break it down into those micro steps. And with those micro steps every time we achieve something, that's great. That reinforces the fact that we're going along the right path. It also means that we're doing things as we should do. If you don't quite get to that first staging post, then figure out why that hasn't happened, and then you can do something to change it.

If you imagine that idea of being invited to somebody's house for a major meal, you're sitting down and a plate is heaving with food, you might look at that and think, how on earth am I gonna consume that? Break it down into small bite sized pieces, and before you know you consume the meal. Achieving your targets is very much in that same pattern.

Break down your 12 month journey into those small micro steps. Set the flags, set those targets for each of those stating posts, and when you achieve them, reward yourself. If you don't achieve them, understand, reflect, consider, and put right whatever hasn't happened. So folks, those are the six things I would highly recommend that you fact read, that you think about, you reflect in order for you not only to achieve your targets, but to enjoy achieving those targets and to smash them as well.

What do you think? Would you add anything extra? Let me know. Until next week folks have a go thinking about your targets and how you're gonna smash them for the year ahead. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode.

We look forward to you joining us next week for another, I Hate Numbers episode.