What you need to know to kickstart your startup goals
It’s shocking to me how many times a week I’ll meet a startup founder that hasn’t set goals for their business. (I’m not even talking S.M.A.R.T. goals, just goals.) It’s like saying that you want to go on a trip but haven’t decided on a destination. How do you expect your Google maps to find you a route to drive if you haven’t given it a destination?
This is essentially what founders are doing when they don’t set clear growth goals and back those goals up with the appropriate resources.
Get started by taking out the map
The first step is deciding what you want and choosing the destination that provides it. (No, we’re not actually talking mountains or beaches here.) This is the “big picture” conversation you need to have with yourself and/or your team as a founder to set up your roadmap.
Are you trying to get funding? Well, then you need to focus on customer acquisition and MMR to prove business viability and attract investors. Are you trying to get cash flow positive? You’ve got to focus on building your community and nurturing them into sales. Are you trying to scale up? Your business is going to need some serious resources for that.
More people on your email list won’t necessarily lead to sales. A 30% open rate, however, might.
Increasing your business’ Instagram following isn’t equivalent to increasing your business’ leads. Increasing your sales calls is increasing your business’ leads.
I won’t lie to you, it’s hard not to get stuck on setting goals based on vanity metrics, because we all want the love, right? But at the end of the day, we need to pick goals to work for that are actually driving growth in the business. (Not just growth in our egos.)
So what’s your big picture? The goals each founder picks to work towards are going to be completely different based on what their startup journey looks like.
Breakdown your route into milestones
So now you’ve picked a strong goal that’s going to support your long-term business plan. Yay you! (Insert virtual high fives here.) Now you need to figure out how you’ll achieve it. Looking at your big growth goal can be terrifying, so let’s break it down.
A startup founder I work with was planning on building a virtual female entrepreneurship conference packed with all sorts of value as a way to engage potential leads for her app in a meaningful way. Awesome.
When we talked about her goals for attendance, she said 600 attendees. Not so crazy, right? Well, she had 4 weeks until the conference so hit that goal with a small email list and minimal advertising budget. That’s not a lot of time or resources to get 600 paying attendees.
So we broke it down. To hit her big goal, this founder needed to sell 150 tickets per week. That still sounds like a big scary number, but now that we had broken the goal down into more manageable chunks, we were able to identify some key organic strategies to drive awareness and interest in the event.
For example, using a small ad budget to retarget the business’ email subscribers and social media followers. Or booking amazing speakers who, in turn, would bring their own followings with them. Reaching out to businesses that have synergy like co-working spaces or networking groups for women to offer sponsorship and special sessions at the event.
Not every big goal you set for your business is going to be achievable, that’s just the hard truth of it. Start with your desired milestone and divide that number by the time you’ve allotted for yourself and your team to achieve it. The first thing you need to do in determining if that goal you set is actually realistic is to audit your resources.
Understanding resources is a key part of the journey
There’s a reason that some startups with stellar products or services never get off the ground: lack of resources. The whole “build it and they will come” mentality kills even the strongest of businesses. You need to market your business — there’s no getting around it — and the three things you need to do that is skill, time, and money.
First, let’s talk about skill. It could be web design skill, or social media skill, or PR skill, or email campaign skill, or strategy skill. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. Marketing has a lot of roads you could go down, and once you determine which route to take, you need the skills necessary to drive the car. What if you don’t have the skill or the time/energy/desire to learn the skill? Well, then you need to contract out to get it done.
That leads us to our next potential roadblock in achieving growth goals: money. No, you don’t have to have boatloads of money to successfully grow and scale a startup — but it helps. At the very least, a healthy budget will accelerate your progress. Having money to invest in advertising to amplify your message and reach is huge if you want to reach your goals faster. Having money to invest into a team, into support, is also essential. (Ugly truth: you can’t do it all by yourself. Sorry.)
And so let’s chat about the third piece of the growth puzzle here: time. Although you may not attribute a dollar per hour amount to your work, your time has value. While you’re trying to figure out all the marketing stuff, that’s time you’re not being the visionary you set out to be. When you’re spending time doing sales calls, that’s time you’re focus is not on leading the company.
When you take a long time to grow your brand, you’re doing more than just leaving money on the table; you’re putting your ideas out in the world for others who might be better equipped to adapt your work and scoop up valuable market share.
Now let me be clear here: there’s nothing wrong with slow, steady growth versus getting pumped up with capital and exploding your company growth. I know many founders who are bootstrapping badasses and are building strong, lasting businesses. (All while they maintain control of their companies, btw.) However, those founders set and achieve strong growth goals and consistently take their brands to new heights because they’ve invested their time, money, and skillsets in the smartest ways possible.
Some journeys are only the beginning
Here’s the thing about marketing: it’s not an instant “easy button”. You’ll get out of it what you put into it, and that isn’t always equivalent to a dollar amount. I’m going to get old school and cliche here for a second and actually define marketing for you (according to Google).
Do you see anything in there about sales or revenue? Nope, you don’t. That’s because marketing is actually about building the “know, like, and trust factor” because without it, you can’t make sales. Ever heard of it? Dale Carnegie coined the term in his 1937 book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, which was a manual for salespeople at the time, but his core lessons still ring true for us today.
To Carnegie, building relationships was essential to making sales — I feel this in my bones. The best part is that even with online strategies dominating our marketing practices today, building relationships is still necessary for selling and growing a brand. More than that, it’s essential. (Hint: It all starts by investing in marketing.)
So listen, I hear you. We all need to see a return on investment from the time and money we put into our business growth. But always keep in mind that marketing is a long game, and the goal of marketing is to build a foundation that your brand can stand on so you can scale it.
Picking your destination by setting goals based on your long-term plans and current resources is the first step. Once you get to that destination, pick another one.
And that’s how brands successfully scale.
To learn more about marketing for your startup, visit shaunaarmitage.com
