En Route to Saenthood:
#7 Screw Goal Setting
This series is about what I’m learning, observing and experiencing while building my startup Saent (pronounce “Saint”). The good, the bad and especially the ugly, each time in under 500 words.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.”
- Yogi Berra
Have no goals; you’re driving blind.
Have goals; you might become enslaved to them.
It takes time to keep track of them. And in what format? Forecasts? A simple list? Piece of paper? On the wall? Digitally?
Over the years I’ve tried them all. 12-month forecasts are the worst.
Since you’re usually in uncharted territory, putting an exact $-value on what will happen 12 months from now, is like trying to schedule a meeting at 3 pm, September 12th 2019.
Perhaps, but something might come up, you know?
Until recently, the closest I’ve gotten to a functioning, low-maintenance goal system, involved Evernote. One note with weekly goals and one with monthly ones. My task manager would remind me to review them at frequent intervals.
This worked reasonably well, though still felt a bit artificial. Sometimes I would skip looking at them for a few days and then miss the targets completely.
A better and easier way
In the past weeks, I’ve stumbled upon a new approach. It involves two activities which are on my todo list anyway:
- Our bimonthly shareholder update (approximately 1 page).
- Our next funding round deck.
What do these documents have to do with goal setting?
At Saent, if you look where the real results will be reported, it’s in these two documents.
Our bimonthly shareholder update is brief, but clearly highlights the good and the bad of the past two months. The true objectives for the company are whatever I hope to see in that report.
On a grander scale, our main goal for 2015, is to bring the company in a good position for receiving funding from a large investor in the USA or China. What is the tangible manifestation of this goal? Our next pitch deck.
So here’s what I’m doing: I already drafted the 1st of April shareholder update two months ago, the way I’d like it to be. Similarly, I’ve started working on our next pitch deck, even though I don’t expect we’ll need this until much later this year.
Taking a cue from Amazon
It’s the Founder equivalent of Amazon’s result-oriented approach for Product Managers. They draft a press release for a new product, at the start of the product design process. This way they have to imagine what the eventual outcome should look like for the consumer.
My trick is no different: by envisioning what I want to be reporting to our shareholders and future investors, it becomes crystal clear what we need to work on right now. The draft document itself becomes our set of goals.
Additional benefits?
- I already have my shareholder update and pitch deck more or less ready.
- I’m tapping into the powerful technique of visualisation, to envision the future as I want it to be.
- I can see how we actually performed, simply by comparing my first draft (make a copy!) to the final version that goes out.
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