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MDH 75 | Goal Setting

Goal Setting For Success

MDH 75 | Goal Setting

Everybody has a dream but those dreams need a set goal. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have the risk to make a mistake. It’s important that you learn how to set goals so that you succeed with very low monetary risk. Join Victoria Wieck as she talks about the goal-setting system she uses, called the SMAART System. Your goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, accountable, repeatable, and time-sensitive. Learn more in today’s episode as Victoria goes through each process so that you can start achieving your goals.

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Watch the episode here


 

Listen to the podcast here


 

Goal Setting For Success

Welcome to another episode of the show. This is a special series where I discuss my own journey to entrepreneurship or my own journey to how I started with nothing but under a few hundred dollars to build my eventual empire. Many of you have requested that I do that. You want to know how I did it and whether or not I could share my own personal journey with you. Here we are.

I try to make it very doable for everybody. I do believe that every single person reading this can achieve their dream life. Their dream life could be becoming a multimillionaire or somebody who has all that plus having an amazing family or building back the community you live in and impacting the world in a positive way. Dream big. Let’s tackle this.

This is part two. If you haven’t checked the last episode, it’s about defining the dream. This whole series is about the do-it-now system, which I broke down into seven steps. They are defining your dream, defining the biggest opportunity, igniting that big idea within you, finding your target audience, how to negotiate everything with your employees, landlord, customers, or everybody else that is in your ecosystem, and how to monetize your opportunity, and then how to win the game. It’s called the do-it-now system. This is still within that first defining your dream phase.

Setting Goals

A lot of people have a dream. They’re like, “I want to leave my horrible boss. I’m going to ditch the commute. I want to make a lot of money. I want to work half the amount of time.” All of that is great, but you got to start learning how to set goals that will cause you to achieve that. Set goals so that you have a reasonable guarantee that your goals will come true, and there is a real trick to this. I’ve walked through this myself. This episode is all about setting your goals based on the dream that you have defined in the last episode. If you have not read it, please check it out because it’s very important that you go through this in order. There are only seven steps, so it’s doable.

First of all, I want to differentiate how you’re normally taught to set goals. If you go to MBA school or do a lot of digital learning, there are all these buzzwords about how you set your goals, and I’ve done all that. What I found out was that in the MBA school system or any other marketing guru’s special system, you were taught how to plug into a corporate world, how to plug into a marketing department, or how to plug into a system that’s already in existing, and then you survive in that.

If you’re on your own and you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have a chance to make a bunch of mistakes on somebody else’s dime. You make the mistakes on your own dime. It’s important that you learn how to set goals so that you succeed with very low monetary and time risk. It’s one thing to lose the money you invest, but then also to give it your all and then not make any money. That’s a double whammy in a bad way. I didn’t have parents or colleagues who could support me. I didn’t have anybody who would give me a loan, so I had to do it on my own. It’s low risk but has a high chance of succeeding.

Learn how to set goals so that you have a reasonable guarantee that your dreams will come true.

SMAART System

Let’s get to this. This goal-setting system is called a SMART system. Some version of this is out there, but I have my own way, which is a slightly different version. The S stands for Specific. Be very specific. The M is to make sure it’s Measurable. It’s important that you find something that’s achievable or attainable. The A is to be Accountable. Somebody has to account for the goals you set. If you don’t meet those goals, you got to hold yourself accountable or have a system or somebody remind you, “You didn’t do this. You got to go back and try harder to meet that.”

The goals that you set must be repeatable. It’s not a one-off. For example, you set a goal this month and want to make $20,000. You make it but did it at the expense of last month’s income and next month’s income. You gave everybody discounts. You did everything you could, and it’s not repeatable next month. That’s not sustainable. The R is to make sure that it’s Repeatable. The last thing is to make sure it can be done in a timely manner. When you say, “I want to make $100,000 this 2022 with my side hustle,” 2022 is a time-sensitive thing. It’s not, “I want to make $100,000 some year.” That could be 10 or 20 years from now. Those things don’t count.

Specific

Let’s go back to my way of calling it a SMART system goal. Number one, what do I mean when I say be specific? Let’s say you set your goal of defining your American dream. You want to work less. You want to spend more time with your family. You want to have the financial means to take care of everybody around you, which could be your neighbor, parents, or sisters, and you want to do it in your own way by doing something that you love to do. These are your goals. If you break it down, be very specific.

In my own case, back in 1989, when I started my company, I worked for somebody else for several years before that. I realized that the lifestyle I was living was not attainable. I was commuting 90 minutes to work each day, and I was working somewhere between 10 to 15 hours a day, depending on the stress level that my boss had. That wasn’t sustainable. I was not going to be a healthy employee. I was coming to work mostly exhausted. I was sleep-deprived, so during the weekends, I slept. That was not sustainable.

I could not imagine how I could be a good mother to my two children, so I wanted to leave, but then, I had to figure out how I was going to make it work. Back then, I was making a lot more money than my initial goal. If everything went my way and I hit my home run that month, I wanted to be able to make $2,000 per month, which is $24,000 a year. I was making more money than that with my MBA degree, but I was not willing to work the hours that I was working or the commute. I was willing to work about 20 to 25 hours. I would grudgingly work up to 30 hours a week, but no more than that.

My ideal scenario was working for twenty hours a week and earning $2,000 every month. If you break it down to those units, you think to yourself, “How do I get the $2,000 a month?” I started a small jewelry company. I worked with the numbers that were already out there because I didn’t have a whole lot of experience with direct mailing or anything else. The industry standard at that time in 1989 was that we did a lot of direct mailing. I didn’t have money to buy the mailing list, so I borrowed lists.

MDH 75 | Goal Setting

Goal Setting: Use the SMAART System for goal setting. Your goals should be specific. They must be measurable and achievable. You have to be accountable. And, they should be repeatable and time-sensitive.

 

There used to be a whole industry called travel agencies, and those travel agencies had phone numbers to stores and places you could visit. They had the gift shop managers’ names and corporate addresses, but their contact points were dusted everywhere, so I would jot them down and mail them. I sent that mail with a postage stamp. The industry standard was that the return rate on your direct mail was something between 5%$ to 10%, depending on the quality of your mailing list and also the quality of your product, and how well they are matched.

I thought to myself, “I’m going to go on the low side. I’m going to figure out that there should be a 5% return.” When they returned it, they didn’t tell me that when they respond, you still only have a 50% chance of closing the deal. They might be interested in you, but when they find out that you’re brand-new and you don’t have an office, they don’t know who you are, they don’t know if they can trust you, meaning they don’t know if you can take care of their money or deliver the goods, you don’t have a chance to close the deal.

I would get those lists, and I would type up those little letters. It was mostly formed letters, so it was pretty easy to do. If I sent out 50 letters a day, that’s 250 letters a week. Those letters didn’t take me more than a couple of hours a day. Five days a week is not a whole lot. The research took me some time, but you can see that if I got 10%, that’s 25 people, getting back to me, or 5%, that’s 12 or 13 people, I can close five of those people. If I did that for four and a half weeks a month, I could make the $2,000 a month possible. If I couldn’t do it, I would up the number. I would do 75 letters a day, which is a little bit more challenging within that twenty-hour period.

I broke it down to specific numbers. I was like, “How many hours am I willing to work? How much money do I need to make?” I then broke it down to, “How am I going to accomplish this?” It turns out that my conversion rate was high. I got closer to 10% of the people responding, and I was able to close on more than 70% of them. I made more than $2,000 a month from the first month. That was an amazing thing. In fact, within the first eighteen months, I hit a number of $1 million. I never even thought about a number like that. I’ll go over how we did it in the next segments about how you identify your target audience, market to them, and all that other stuff, but in this episode, let’s go back and focus on setting goals.

Being very specific is important. Break down your goals to the smallest units you can possibly get. I can even get down to how many hours I could work. Also, when you are specific, you have to be specific about the non-negotiables. What are your non-negotiables? What are the things that you don’t want to negotiate at all? For me, a 40-hour workweek was a non-negotiable. I don’t care if it’s temporary or long-term. I didn’t want to work 40 hours a week.

Measurable

When my kids were younger, they didn’t get sick from Monday to Friday. They don’t need mommy 40 hours a week. You have to put your foot down and work around their schedule, and I did that. The next category is being measurable. Make sure that you can measure your progress. You can measure by thinking, “Am I making $2,000 a month? Am I sending out so many letters a month or a week that justifies a $2,000 a month?” The other thing you have to figure out is you got to measure everything, like your return rates and conversion rates.

Break down your goals to the smallest units you can possibly get.

If your conversion rate is 60% to 70%, that’s great. You’re going to make $2,000, $4,000, $5,000, or $10,000 a month, but let’s say you send out 250 letters. You get back something very small. Only 10 or 20 people are calling you back, so then you have to convert even lower. You’re measuring those yards with a certain yardstick and go, “This isn’t working.” You either have to figure out how to enhance your marketing message, or in your product category, maybe you can’t get a list that’s ideally matched for you, so you have to work harder. Whatever it is, when you measure, you know what to do.

Let’s say you’re getting 10% of the people responding, but you’re only converting 1% of the 10% of the people. It means that when they give you a chance, you are not converting somehow. You got to figure out, “What am I doing wrong where I’m getting people interested in me but not converting?” It gets you back to where you can track your progress, where you need to tweak, where you need to work harder, and where you can work less. Your conversion rate is 10%. Maybe you don’t need to write that many letters because you only need 5%, but maybe you need to work on your conversion method.

Being measurable is very important. For me, I always track how many hours I’m working. It’s easy to think, “I’m working for myself. I’m my own boss. I can do this later or tomorrow.” If I look at my calendar and I’ve already worked for six hours, I can be like, “I can work another fourteen hours sometime on Friday.” You got to be disciplined and figure out which days you’re going to work and how you can continue to measure. We’re going to talk about accountability a little bit later, but it’s important that you measure your progress every day so that you can hone in on your technique for setting your goals and making sure that you give yourself the best chance of succeeding.

Achievable

Also, make sure that your goals are achievable. When I say that, you have to have a short-term goal, a midterm goal, and then a long-term goal. If your long-term goal is to make a whole boatload of money, or you want to be known in your industry, or you want to help out everybody that’s poor or all the pets that are suffering, whatever your goal is, that’s 10 or 15 years from now. You might work your whole life on that, but you may not mind it.

For me, the journey is the most beautiful thing. What can you achieve in the next measurable time? A monthly goal of $2,000 a month was very achievable. Instead of saying, “I want to make $10,000 a month,” right from the get-go, I wanted to have a great foundation for my company so that every customer is real and I can continue to build on it. I want the customers to test me to make sure that I like them and that they like me. I didn’t want a huge order. I wanted them to test me with a small order so that there was not a whole lot of risk for them and for me either.

Make sure that your goals are achievable. I overachieved, so the next year, I increased my goal a little bit, and then the following year, I increased even more. I increased my goal for my monetary income, but I also reduced the number of hours I was willing to work. I became a lot more efficient over the years. Make sure that your goals are achievable and have a way to measure what you’ve achieved against your goal.

MDH 75 | Goal Setting

Goal Setting: You have to have a short-term goal, a mid-term goal, and then a long-term goal. Make sure that they are all achievable and that you have a way to measure what you’ve achieved against your goal.

 

Accountable

The next category is being accountable. This is a huge thing. It’s true with weight loss, bodybuilding, fitness, and making money. Everything has to do with accountability. You got to hold yourself accountable, especially when you work for yourself. Every day, for 24 hours, you can sleep or go to the beach and come back. It’s hard to be disciplined and say, “I want to give my company the best chance to succeed.” Some people overwork. Some people work from 6:00 AM until 12:00 AM every day. They don’t know when to stop and take a breather. Some people are procrastinators, and they don’t do what they said they were going to do. They check the boxes or think there’s a tomorrow.

Make sure that you have a support system. I know that for me, in the first few weeks, things were rough. Back in those days, I gave them 30 to 45-day terms, so even when I did sell things, when I invoice people, they didn’t pay me back for the first 30 days or more. If we’re manufacturing this stuff, I’ve already paid my vendors. When I receive it, I have to send it to my customer, and they have 30 to 45 days to pay me. There was a gap between what I paid my vendor to what I was going to get paid, so there were times when I was short of money.

I would never explain that to my parents, but my mom would always ask me, “How did you do? How many letters did you send out? It’s amazing that you’re able to like send out these letters every single day. It has to get boring.” She didn’t realize she was holding me accountable because sometimes, I would be having lunch with her, and I think to myself, “I forgot I took Monday off. I should have made up for Monday by sending out 100 letters today. I’m now having lunch with her, so today’s already shot. That means that I should cancel the time that I have with my husband this weekend. We’re supposed to watch a movie. I’m going to use those 3 hours and pump out 150 letters that I didn’t do the last 2 or 3 days.”

Sometimes, when you send out a letter with a postage stamp, which was all I had because we didn’t have an email back then, it goes over 3 or 4 days. Some people would write back to you. Some people would call you back on the telephone. It may be a week before you see any results from anybody. Even the people that are responding to you could take a week. That whole week is very excruciating for you to wait. You could get discouraged to say, “I don’t want to do it. Why bother? I haven’t heard from the last 1,000 people I sent a letter to.” All those things could happen, but if somebody is being accountable and asking you what you have done, what’s working for you, and what’s not working for you, it is a trigger.

We didn’t have a whole lot of money. My parents always would tell me, “I’ve heard it’s hard to start a business in America. I’ve heard that most businesses fail, but if anyone can do it, it’s you because you’re persistent and don’t take no for an answer.” My parents would always tell me these things, but I’m sitting there knowing that I blew it off. I used to watch Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible way back when they were a weekly series. Sometimes, I go from episode to episode because I have nobody to talk to during the day. Everybody I knew was at work. I wasn’t helping out my family and my company at that point, so being accountable or having somebody hold you accountable is important.

Repeatable

There is this idea that whatever goals you set should be sustainable so that they can be repeatable on demand. If you say, “$2,000 a month is something I could do with my eyes closed. That’s something that I could be paid every single month. I can count on it. That’s my safety net,” then you can up your goals. It’s something that’s doable, sustainable, and repeatable every month and every year so that you can work with what’s working. It’s important that you continue to build on that.

Your goals should be sustainable so that they can be repeatable on demand.

Time-sensitive

Lastly, make sure that every goal you set is time-sensitive. For me, I started with monthly goals. Once a month, I would check how many letters I sent and how much money I got. When I broke it out to weekly, it added the urgency. I needed to make $400 to $500 a week. In my memory, what I did last week was a lot closer than what I did last month. I thought, “I had a zero week last week. Nobody bought anything. I better get on the stick here. I need to at least find three customers even if they buy very few things so that I have a little bit of a cushion for next week in case I have two bad weeks in a row.” Make sure that it’s time-sensitive and not someday in the future. You should think of a time that’s tied into action.

Even back then, a lot of people didn’t make money. I made more money, but what’s important to me is that I was able to make the $2,000 a month by working twenty hours a week by myself with no outside help. I didn’t have any help. I didn’t have an assistant. I did buy a 1-800 number, which was $200 a month. That added to my expenses, but I was able to do more every single month.

I hope this lesson about goal setting has been very helpful to you. In the next episode, we’re going to go into what’s the biggest opportunity you have to monetize in a big way with the least amount of effort and the lowest risk factor financially, time-wise, and career-wise possible. I hope you enjoyed this. In the upcoming episodes, we’re going to pick up the pace and go down to the whole seven-week program. Then, I have three weeks of bonus. After you reach all that, I’ll give you a little bit of extra information on how to scale your business and a lot of the basic stuff about building websites. That’s one of the few things you do need that I didn’t need back in 1989.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. This whole series of episodes was created based on the audience’s requests. Many of you have written to me wanting to know how I did it personally and if I would ever share it. I would share it. That’s why I started this show. It’s so that I can help other people succeed. In my family, it has always been a family belief that successful people don’t have to talk about how successful they are. Successful people go out and help other people succeed. That’s what I want to do. I want to be successful and create a lot of successful people. I will share everything.

I would appreciate any feedback you have. I would also greatly appreciate you sharing this episode with at least one friend so that they can benefit from it and our voices can be elevated and amplified. Until next time. Remember to stay healthy and happy. Also, remember that happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Thank you.

 

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MDH 67 | Exponential Growth

Grab Your Business Goals: Achieving Exponential Growth With Bimal Shah

MDH 67 | Exponential Growth

 

Exponential growth is something all entrepreneurs want for their business. So how can you achieve it? Victoria Wieck and her guest Bimal Shah, the CEO of Rajparth Achievers, LLC, dive into scaling your business and achieving growth. Bimal is passionate about helping entrepreneurs, and he shares his insights and resources on how to hurry the scaling of your business. Tune in for more great lessons in growing your business.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here


 

Grab Your Business Goals: Achieving Exponential Growth With Bimal Shah

I love sharing with you some amazing stories of great entrepreneurs who are now in a position to help other people collapse time and get funding, and all those things that small business people want. The top two reasons why people go out of business are lack of money and lack of customers. There are a bunch of other reasons too, which we are not going to get into. We have someone who can help us with both of those fronts. His name is Bimal Shah. He is an expert in helping you scale your business. He scaled his own business, which is in the financial sector. Now, he helps entrepreneurs achieve their three-year goal and collapse it into one year. I want to welcome Bimal and have him introduce himself and tell a little bit about his journey and what drives his passion. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. My passion has been to make a million entrepreneurs and convert and transform them into pioneers. My goal is to make a million pioneers in the world before I die by helping them scale to the next level. I’m taking their 25-year vision, converting it into a five-year moonshot, and then taking their 3 to 5-year goal in one year. I built a lot of resources. I have written a full thirteen-book series, Becoming A Pioneer. The first one was launched on Amazon. It was the number one new release.

Thank you for sharing that. I have written two books. I have to tell you that unless you’re crazy or you don’t understand how money works, writing a book is a low ROI proposition. You and I can all go out and make a lot more money doing other things if you have skills than writing a book and getting $9 or whatever a copy. If you’re publishing it through a publisher, you get $1 a copy. Those of you who are writing books or authors like Bimal, you do it because you love it. You do it because you want to help other people. You got to give your heart and soul. Every word has to mean something. Thank you for sharing that.

The first book is Becoming A Pioneer and that’s on Amazon. You’ve got thirteen other books. Before we get to scaling, I want to talk about small business people. Do you think they don’t have the expertise or don’t know about setting goals? If you ask a lot of people, “What are your goals?” They will tell you, “My goal is to make $1 million.” Some of them might say, “My goal is to get 300 new customers this year,” but they don’t have a clear picture of their 25-year goal versus what you can achieve in the next five years versus how you can achieve the next measurable goal. Let’s talk about goal setting in the first place. How should they start? A lot of people I meet don’t even have goals because they don’t think their goals will come true.

One of the biggest things that I see in entrepreneurs is setting goals. That’s one of the reasons. 99.7% of the businesses are small businesses. It’s sad to hear that even 80% of them fail after fifteen years in the business. Goal setting is so important. The very first thing in setting a 25-year goal. I always say, “Don’t set a goal of I want to make $1 million or $1 billion.” Think about the impact and transformation that you want to bring. Think about the problem that you want to solve. When I said that my passion is about making pioneers, I want to do this. I’m committed to making a million pioneers however long it takes. That is my passion.

Similarly, in your business, think about the passion that you have and what transformation you want to bring to the table and make that your vision. I’ll tell you a quick story about a $1 billion company that was built on that. That is from Naveen Jain. His passion was making chronic illness a choice. He founded the Viome, the testing that we do. That is where we start. We start with a 25-year goal on what is your character vision and bring it down to moonshot. I have a very specific question, and the first book on Amazon is about that.

MDH 67 | Exponential Growth

Exponential Growth: Goal-setting is one of the reasons why 99.7% of businesses are small businesses. It’s sad to hear that 80% of them fail after 15 years.

 

Let me go back to the word scaling. I don’t want to offend and be insulting to anybody, but I’m going to define the word scaling. There was so much confusion in the business coaching or business world about what the word scaling means. Scaling doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re growing exponentially. You can grow exponentially if you’re willing to put in $5 million a year into your business, but properly scaling in a small business environment means that you are not having to spend an exorbitant amount of resources to grow.

If you’re putting in everything you’ve got, you’re banking every single penny you make back into the business, and you’re facing a diminished rate of return but you’re still growing, that is not scaling. Scaling means you’re putting in fewer resources and less amount of time because you’ve got all the right systems in place. You’re taking something that’s working and scaling this up.

I want to make sure that we understand that when you follow Bimal’s system, you can see a lot of things that he’s got. He’s got a whole platform, dashboard, monthly workshops, and all these things are going on. It’s Bit.Ly/ThePioneersClub. You can go and follow more about this. In terms of scaling, I say this because a lot of people who are coaching scaling, you go into a mastermind program, workshops or whatever, and their whole goal is to sell you more services so that you can get more business. What that means is you’re spending more money in all the wrong places to grow a little bit more than what you had before. That is not what we’re talking about here.

You specifically said that you’re going to take their three-year goal. If you said, “This year, I’m going to hit the $1 million mark. Next year, I want to do $1.2 million. In the following year, I’m going to do $1.5 million.” You were saying that you can take that three-year goal and have it accomplished in one year. Tell me how you help people do that.

I will tell you a quick story so you can get the idea. One company wanted to scale ten times. They are a $5 million company and says, “We want to grow it into $50 million company, but we don’t want to grow ten times the number of our staff. We don’t want to grow ten times our expenses as we grow. How do we build a lean company and grow that big?”

What we did is we started with a dream come true profit and loss statement. We build their financial for the future. That’s where I start. Even with the company that says, “I want to take this $1 million to $3 million,” we’ll build that $3 million P&L statement. I can tell you another company that’s a home healthcare company. All we needed to do was add 2 more people to grow 3 more times. That is structuring their responsibilities, building the organization chart for the future, building clear responsibilities and outcomes, and building the right target.

 

Think about your passion and what transformation you want to bring to the table and make that your vision.

 

As you said in the beginning, it’s the lack of customers and lack of money. If you’re after the right customers, it will take less time and fewer resources on your part. You make 3 to 5 times for the same effort or even 10 times more. That’s chasing and going after the right people. That’s what we did. We built the right relationship and strategic alliances. We did that even with the law firm and built them a whole list of public adjusters that they would make more than $500,000. That’s one of the things you start with.

When you said you could grow three times as much by hiring two people, I want to qualify that as two right people, not just anybody. That takes skill. The other thing is small business people can use a lot of help in finding the right people. A lot of small business people think that since they were doing everything and they’re wearing all these hats. They’re the CEO, CPA, lawyer. They’re meeting customers or vendors. They’re shipping and doing everything. They’re going to need to hire somebody who is more like themselves. No, you don’t want that because no one is going to work that hard for you for little money. You’re probably better off hiring some people to do things you are not good at.

Let’s say I don’t like to sell. I’m not a pushy person. If I send them a nice polite email, I think people should send a nice polite email back to you rather than me having to keep nudging them. I’m not good at that. What do you do? If you have somebody like you, the two of you are waiting for the email to show up. It’s not going to happen.

You need to hire somebody whose expertise is that. You may not like people that are pushy, but you need a pushy person for your business. I’m using that as an example. A lot of people don’t know how to hire people, and when they hire them, they don’t know how to manage them because they haven’t set out a clear vision. They haven’t set up clearly what their responsibilities, boundaries and expectations are. Do you have help on your site on all of those?

I will share three steps structure on how to hire right. One of the things we do is we divide your hiring into three different units, before unit, during unit, and after unit. Before unit is how you attract your dream come true employee to come to you. My company website is TheOneYearBreakthrough.com. On that, there is how to build talents and how to attract talent. There is a link there. That’s Bit.Ly/MyDreamEmployee.

One of the things I always tell every company is to ditch the title. Whenever you want to hire someone, get rid of the title because the title boxes or limits the employee’s capability that you want to hire. I have a whole system that I’ve built that many entrepreneurs can utilize for free. They can go on Bit.Ly/MyDreamEmployee. There’s a six-stage questionnaire that allows you to build your dream come true employee profile. Even if you don’t work with me or utilize me, going through that profile and getting the information back to you, you know exactly who you want.

MDH 67 | Exponential Growth

Exponential Growth: Whenever you want to hire someone, get rid of the title because the title boxes limit the employee’s capability that you want to hire.

 

It’s interesting because what you’re saying is to hire the person and not the tasks. When people ask me about my own journey, I have the same issue. When it comes to hiring people and growing employees, it’s a whole art by itself. A lot of people tell me, “When you started it back in 1989, things were so much simpler. It’s so much harder these days.” I’m like, “No, things were a lot harder back those days because, in 1989, we didn’t have internet.” When I started my business, I didn’t have internet. I didn’t have free access to information as we have now in Google or YouTube.

You can learn how to build a rocket ship now on YouTube by yourself if you have the time. We don’t have podcasts and people like you sharing information. I always say, “Only a stupid person will only learn from their own experience. Smart people learn from other people’s experiences, other people’s failure, as well as their successes.”

Now, things are so much simpler. You have everything you want. Running a business is free. Your Google calendar is either free or $10 a month. A lot of information you have, you might have to run through or sift through information. A lot of crazy information is out there on the internet. If you’re listening to a podcast like mine, I bring amazing guests every single week. Believe it or not, I only have 26 guests a year because it’s a weekly show, and then every other episode is me to them.

You can imagine I don’t put on everybody. I only put on people relevant to my audience who focused on transformation. I believe that information is free. Why should I have another podcast talking to them about information? People are willing to pay for transformation. They’re not willing to pay for free information. That’s why I’m focused on transformation.

When you go and check out Bimal’s site, it is full of the tools you need. They involve simple tools and big tools. You can utilize all the freebies as you do on my site on how to scale your business, and how to work fewer hours with fewer resources and make more. You’re going to be more efficient and more effective to your target audience. If you want to work with them, I’m sure you have a bunch of different programs you can plug into. You have a community of people, do you or do you not?

We have the pioneers community, and you can connect with other pioneers. My whole mission of making a million pioneers is that I want to build a community of people that connect with each other and help them scale. When you ask about managing people, I have a whole system of building culture structure, building an optimal day for everyone, and accountability, which is big in many companies because they don’t have these systems. I have already had these all set up. It’s all plug-and-play for many companies because I built all of these things. As I work with companies, one of the things I do is if it’s a problem for one, it’s a problem for many.

 

Always dream big. Don’t cut yourself short. Think about your dreams and have them clearly spelled out.

 

The other thing too is a lot of the things that a bigger company with a bunch of employees, office politics and all of that stuff happens to you. When you’re a small business and got four people, you can have management problems unless you know how to manage. That’s a huge thing. In terms of community, I’m a huge believer in collaboration.

Even if you’re in the same business and you see your competitor as somebody evil or somebody you need to get rid of, try to find ways to collaborate with anybody you can. When you have a community of people, you can find somebody you can collaborate with, learn from, lift, impact, and help you transform your business. I’m glad that you started the interview with the fact that instead of looking for money or anything, look for what impact you have on other people’s lives.

The only way an entrepreneur makes money is if you add value to somebody else’s life. In the long term, that’s the only way you’re going to make money. That word impact is huge. I happen to be Asian. In Asian countries, we look at more than money or anything when you die. The thing you want to look at is what legacy you leave behind. While you’re building your career or dream business, if you have a chance to leave that impact, even if it’s in front of the 50 people that you know, that’s huge. Learn everything you can.

We’ve talked about scaling and growing your business, and this is something that we all dream of. Bimal came to us with a lot of experience on how to do it himself. He shared it with thousands of other people as well. As we close this interview, if you can give one piece of advice that you have not shared so far here to a young entrepreneur starting now, what would it be?

I have a saying, “A journey of a billion miles begins with three steps.” You’ve heard that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one, so I’ll give three. Number one, always dream big. Don’t cut yourself short. Think about your dreams and have them clearly spelled out. It’s a vivid vision where you’re detailing everything. That’s what the first book is all about. Building a very detailed vivid vision, including what visual you see of your building, office, people, the team, everything is very thoroughly detailed.

Number two, you need to hire right. You cannot do everything yourself. You don’t need to necessarily mean that you have to put employees on the payroll. We live in a world where we can collaborate and work with people. All kinds of stuff are possible. You don’t have to necessarily take the word hire means, “I have to have employees.” It means that you look for resources that you can get done elsewhere.

MDH 67 | Exponential Growth

Exponential Growth: You’re probably better off hiring some people to do the things you are not good at.

 

Number three is you need to have proper messaging and marketing. People need to know who you are and what you do. You need to hire right and market right. You need to be in the right market with the right message. You need to have at least seven touchpoints with any ideal customer that you’re chasing at a minimum. Ideally, it would be 25.

How can they get ahold of you, find your books, and everything?

On Amazon, they can search Becoming A Pioneer. If they buy the book and join can join the club, it’s Bit.Ly/ThePioneersClub, or they can go to my website, TheOneYearBreakthrough.com. I also have a website called BimalShahAuthor.com. In any of these places, you’ll be able to access many of the resources.

I have built a whole system. These thirteen books were there for a reason. It’s not to write many books, but my mission is to leave behind the system that people can use 10, 20, 50 years from now to keep using that over and over again to scale themselves. These thirteen books are a whole system, step-by-step, week-by-week to help them achieve the three-year goal in one year.

Thank you so much for coming to this show. Thank you so much for those of you in the audience. Please stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is a choice. I wish you a great week where you’re making great choices. Until next time.

 

Important Links

 

About Bimal Shah

MDH 67 | Exponential GrowthBimal is the Founder of Rajparth Group of Companies that provide unique and customized consulting to executives and teams of companies to positively impact their bottom line. Bimal is on a mission to make pioneers out of entrepreneurs by helping them achieve their three-year goal in one-year and have the government pay for it through Grants. Bimal Shah is well-known in South Florida and in business community for the last 21 years. He is a recognized speaker with presentations at several professional business associations, conferences, and meetings like Goldman Sachs Cohorts, Miami Beach Chamber, FCPA chamber, Boca Raton Chamber, ABWA, BNI, NPI, BRIC, Vistage, SFHHA, SFHNG, Lab Miami, AANGFL, SFTA, and Religious organizations like JAINA and SFHT.
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MDH 57 | New Year Goals

Make 2022 Your Best Year Yet: A Quick Guide To Goal-Setting And Accountability

MDH 57 | New Year Goals

 

It’s the new year, and that means one thing: New Year’s Resolutions! Setting goals can be a great way to ensure you are able to accomplish what you set out to do. Join Victoria Wieck as she dives into setting goals for yourself. Victoria gives tips on setting goals and how to create accountability for yourself to help you reach these goals. Tune in and learn more and be on your way to accomplishing your own resolutions!

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Watch the episode here


 

Listen to the podcast here

Make 2022 Your Best Year Yet: A Quick Guide To Goal-Setting And Accountability

Happy New Year to you and your families. I hope you have had a wonderful Christmas holiday season. I wanted to have a quick conversation about what your goals might be for the new year and specifically how you can have your goals or dreams come true for the new year and beyond. Also, if you are the type to make New Year’s resolutions, how do you make them and stick to them because a lot of experts say that 75% of Americans give up on their New Year resolution by February of each year.

I’m going to go over what’s in my mind and not in any particular order. The first thing I would say is I am a huge believer in setting goals and making sure that those goals do come true. How do you make that happen? I have this little system called SAGA. It’s about setting Small Attainable Goals that you can hold yourself Accountable for. For example, if you say, “I’m going to make a boatload of money in 2022,” it’s hard to figure out what money is but if you said something like, “I’m going to make $1,000 more a month with my business in 2022,” then you can break it down to $250 a week more than what you did in 2021.

You can say, “What do I have to do every day to attain that?” It’s a lot easier to have smaller goals that are attainable, and then having those short goals every month allows you to know be more accountable. You can even have other people hold you accountable if you have close friends that could do that for you. Think about the word saga, and then you can set two goals. One is a bigger picture goal for the year, and then you can have those short attainable goals every month or every week.

For example, every year I say to myself, “I’ve got to lose 10 pounds this year.” What I do is I’m going to lose 1/2 pound every 15 days. It comes down to cutting out 200 calories a day, every 15 days or something like that. It works out fine. It’s not a huge goal of mine, so I can maintain my weight up and down. Think about that. The other thing I would say in the new year is, how you can be more sane in this crazy world that we are living in now?

Your finest day is still unknown, and you need to go find it and let this year be the year when you can be the best version of yourself and create the maximum happiness for yourself and everybody around you.

I’m not saying that other people are driving you crazy but every time we turn a corner or I feel like, “We are finally getting back to some sense of normalcy in terms of travel or how we dine, play, do our business,” there was a whole new variant or something happening. We are in perpetual limbo. It’s rough. If we have learned anything in the last couple of years, it is about being authentic and being yourself. If you don’t feel this way, I hope you will embrace that. Be authentic and be who you are because who you are is more than enough to attain happiness, success, and everything else that you have ever wanted.

Be authentic means, just being honest with yourself first but also with other people around you. I’m not saying anybody is not honest but a lot of times, we are so focused on, “What other people might think of me or that I meant? How my family would look?” All these other things. You don’t have to do all of that anymore. If you come from a pure heart, your intentions were pure and good, and you are a compassionate person, don’t be afraid to say whatever you want to say.

For example, if you said, “I wish that I could go to the beach and do whatever,” and somebody says, “We’ve got a mask. We’ve got to do this and that.” the point I’m trying to make is you can disagree with a lot of people and a lot of people may disagree with you but you can still love and respect them. You can still have them in your circle. I have a lot of friends who are very divided on a lot of the different things that come down now but we are still all great friends.

I play golf, tennis and communicate with them. It’s great. Be authentic, be honest and let your true self show in everything you do because you are a good person. You are a kindhearted person. Don’t worry about what other people think. Worry about yourself and how you are going to move forward. The next point I want to make is to be vulnerable. I’m not saying go out and try to be vulnerable but all of us, no matter how successful or happy you are, there are things that you are vulnerable about. If we have learned anything, everybody is on the edge and vulnerable to some point. There has never been a better year than being accepted with your vulnerability.

MDH 57 | New Year Goals

New Year Goals: If you come from a pure heart and your intentions are good, then don’t be afraid to say whatever you want to say, as long as you deliver it with the right tone.

 

In fact, in marketing, vulnerability comes in very handy because a lot of people associate themselves. They feel like you are relatable if you show your vulnerability. Share that because what’s going to happen is you are going to find a lot of people who support you, encourage you, inspire you and it will be inspired by you for having that courage to be vulnerable and still show up. Don’t be afraid.

The other thing I want to say is to share your gift. Share your vulnerability with other people because a lot of times, people appreciate that and they can see your vulnerability. When you show up and still share it or you want to help other people, they appreciate what you do, why you do what you do, and they want to support you. They want to help you and will amplify your voice, mission, and whatever it is that you want to do. I love that. Go out and help other people because there’s beauty in that.

The last thing I want to say is to find something, anything that you feel in your life that you need improvement in, whether that’s quality of your personal relationships, business, education for some of you who are younger readers, culinary skills or anything. Find time to invest in yourself and your future. I don’t want to do the, “New year new you,” kind of episode. What I would prefer to do is let this year be the best version of yourself.

I love this line in a song sung by Whitney Houston. It says something like, “My finest day is yet unknown.” I love that because no matter where you are at in life, whether you are a beginner or somebody super successful and advanced, or somebody who’s struggling through a lot of issues, your finest day is still yet unknown. You need to go find it. Let this year be the year when you are on the road to creating the best version of yourself, the best life for yourself, the maximum happiness you create for yourself and everybody around you.

That’s my long-winded short, Happy New Year message. I want to wish all of you health and happiness in the new year. Let this year be the year when you discover how you find the finest moment in your life. Thank you so much. Please share this episode with other people in your circle. If you can, please subscribe. Until next time. Stay healthy and be happy.

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