Show Information
Episode Number: 69
Date: January 13, 2025
Duration: 20:11
Host Contact Information
Host: Justin Deese
Website: JustinDeese.com
Contact: Justin@JustinDeese.com
Free Gift: copy of my eBook: www.FreedomBluePrintPodcast.com/ebook
Summary
In this episode of the Freedom Blueprint podcast, Justin Deese discusses the importance of goal setting for 2025. He emphasizes the need for written goals, accountability, and a balanced approach to personal and professional aspirations. The conversation covers various types of goals, the significance of team involvement, and practical exercises like the Start, Stop, Continue method. Justin also delves into the SMART goals framework, providing insights on how to break down larger goals into manageable steps for success.
Takeaways
- Set written goals for accountability and clarity.
- Review your goals regularly to stay on track.
- Involve your team in the goal-setting process.
- Use the Start, Stop, Continue exercise for team alignment.
- SMART goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
- Break down large goals into smaller, actionable steps.
- Track your progress regularly to ensure accountability.
- Balance personal, professional, and health goals for overall success.
- Be honest with yourself about past goal failures.
- Stay motivated and keep pushing towards your goals.
Chapters
00:00 Setting the Stage for 2025 Goals
02:49 Types of Goals: Personal, Professional, and Beyond
05:45 The Importance of Intentional Goal Setting
09:21 Team Goals: Start, Stop, Continue Exercise
12:32 SMART Goals: Breaking Down Your Objectives
17:13 Tracking Progress and Staying Motivated
Keywords
goal setting, 2025 goals, SMART goals, personal development, business growth, accountability, team goals, motivation, planning, success
Transcript
Justin Deese (00:27)
Welcome to another episode of Freedom Blueprint podcast. I’m your host, Justin Deese, and I’m excited to be hanging out with you today and talking a little bit about goal setting. now that we’re into 2025, are you doing what you need to do to make sure that you are ready to crush 2025? real quick, before we jump into
In today’s episode, let’s back up into last week’s episode, which was about the year in review. Basically, we talked about reviewing your 2024 wins, losses, and lessons learned. We talked a little bit about don’t dwell on it, learn from it, fail forward, keep moving. If you haven’t checked that episode, go check it out for sure.
The next thing we talked about was having a written plan for 2025. Again, if it’s not written, it is not real. Sharing that with someone that can help you be, you know, can keep you on track and be your accountability partner. I think that’s a really important thing in success is to have someone and really in life in general is to have a good accountability partner, somebody who will.
Hold your feet to the fire. Make sure that you do what you say you’re gonna do and keep driving in order to hit your goals on a regular basis. So.
Then we talked about reviewing your plan often like review it often. If that means put it in front of your mirror on your desk in front of your coffee pot, whatever it is, review it often. Make sure that whatever your plan for 2025 is you are intentional about it and you want to go after it and you want to win it and then be honest with yourself. Be honest with yourself and take ownership. If if you’re setting these goals from last year as you’re setting your goals this year, which we’ll talk about here in a minute.
Make sure you’re honest with yourself on why you didn’t hit the goals from last year and take ownership of that. And maybe it’s, Hey, I didn’t have them written down or maybe I had them written down, but I didn’t share them with anybody. Or maybe if it was a business plan, maybe you had it written down, but you didn’t share it with anybody. So whatever that looks like, just be honest with yourself, take ownership and make sure that you’re going after 20, 25 ready to win the year. Cause listen, there’s no better time to start than right now. Right.
I mean, 2025, this is what week two, which by the way, they say that the second Friday in January is national, what are they called? National quitters day, meaning people that set their new year’s resolutions have already quit them by the second Friday of the month. I hope that’s not you. My guess is if you’re listening and you’re hanging out with me, that is not you. You’re intentional and you set your goals and you, you accomplish them. So.
Let’s talk about goals for 2025. Now that we know that you’re not part of the National Quitters Day of 2025.
Nice.
So as we talk about goal setting for 2025, right? There’s a lot of different types of goals. And I think it’s important to separate them and think of them as different types of goals. So you do have business goals. know that’s typically the majority of what we talk about is gonna be personal or professional goals and business goals. And I think it’s always important to remember there’s personal goals, there’s health and wellness goals, there’s…
Spiritual goals like there’s a lot of goals and just make sure that you’re you’re being balanced with what you’ve got going on so that you’re so that your 2025 is not on one side or the other. It’s it’s a well balanced out plan because you know without what’s the saying healthy healthy you healthy healthy. I don’t know whatever it is, but you gotta be you gotta be good mind body and spirit in order to hit your goals so.
So one of the big things is you’re gonna have to set, like as you set your goals, it’s really important that you set goals for yourself and that you set them for your team. Now, I wanna explain on that just a little bit because you can make your own goals, that’s fine. Your team has to have goals, but they’ve gotta be a part of the process, right? Like you can’t just wield.
your goals onto them. It has to be something that resonates for them. There’s gotta be a win. What does the win look like for them if they hit these goals? What is the reward at the end? And listen, if it’s team members, it’s not always money. It’s just not. But whatever it is, you gotta figure out what their why is and match it with the why of your business. Again, I’m talking about if this is a business goal.
but you got to match the two together in order to have them buy in because if it’s not their goal, it’s going to be just a chore and nobody wants to chore. So first question is, have you set any of your goals yet for 2025? Like have you sat down and written out?
Any goals I know I said this earlier and I said this in the last episode as well, but if it’s not written, it’s not real. So if you have some goals, make sure you get them written down. Also last week a little bit of what I talked about was the difference between being passive and being aggressive. Now that I’ve thought about it a little bit, I’m going to say instead of aggressive, I’m going to say intentional.
You can pick which adjective you want to use. But you know, the passive person is the person that’s like, well, life happens, it just happened to me and whatever. And the aggressive and the intentional person is going to be the one that is that knows what’s happening. So when they get up each day, they have a plan, which, again, that’s why I’m saying put put whatever your goals for 2025 are somewhere where you can see them on a regular basis, preferably every single day, so that you can look at them and remind yourself what the goal is.
Now, it’s not to say that this goal can’t change throughout the year, but it does create like the self accountability to where if you have a goal written down and like, let’s say it’s lose weight, like I’m gonna lose weight or not, no, let’s take that back. Let’s say it’s, I’m gonna run on the treadmill every day for 20 minutes, right? If that’s your goal, if you stop doing it, you have to be intentional about taking it off. You have to be honest with yourself like, ooh, I’m about to take this off. So.
there is just like this thing that happens if you have to like cross that off and then keep, you know, there’s there’s a thing behind it. So
Yeah, just like last week aggressive, which again I’m going to say intentional, right? So be intentional about your time, your day. Be intentional.
One of the other advantages to setting goals is that it really keeps you motivated, right? It does create a little bit of internal humility as well. If you create a goal and you’re off track, off track, off track every week, you’re going to have to do some self evaluation on, you know, was that goal too big or what do I need to do in order to hit that goal? So when goal setting, especially with your team, here’s an exercise that I like to do.
This is one of my favorite exercises to do. If anytime I’m in a, in a shop with, with especially a new team, love doing this because you really get to what’s going on in the business pretty quickly. I call it start, stop, continue. And I say, I didn’t create this exercise and it’s got several different names that I’ve heard, but I I’ve always called it start, stop and continue exercise. And I do it because it’s super simple. It’s start, stop and continue. There’s nothing confusing about it. Right.
And basically the exercise works like this. If you’re doing this with your team, pull out, you can do this for your own goals as well, but I’m just going to talk about it from a team perspective, break out your whiteboard, put two lines, you know, a third, a third and a third on a whiteboard and put start on one side, stop on one side and continue doing. And as an exercise, as a team, you just go through it you go, okay, great. So we’re, we’re leaning into 2025. What is it that we need to start doing?
What is it we need to start doing? What do we need to start doing in 2025 to hit whatever goal we got going on?
Next question is what do we need to stop doing? What is it we need to stop doing to hit our goals in 2025? And then last you’re going to end with what do I need to continue doing in 2025? That’s great. Like what are we doing really well? It’s it’s pretty awesome what happens doing this exercise because it really gives this. Openness to where your team you know sometimes they try to speak in.
kind of terms, but this is really a good opportunity to break through some things and go, OK, great. Tell me more. So if you’re doing this exercise with your team, make sure you have your coaching hat on and great. We need to start doing this. Tell me more. What needs to be done? How do we need to do that? Just a fun exercise. I love doing it and you can also do this internally, right? So as you’re thinking of your goals for 2025, you can sit down and do this yourself. Go what I need to stop doing.
or start doing, stop doing and continue doing to hit my goals. Again, one of my favorite exercises. I love, love doing it. And honestly, if you’re setting team goals, they’ll love it too. Cause it really gives them the opportunity to be open and honest as long as you have that culture. And in order to really dial in what it is that they feel like they’re empowered at that point to decide what the business needs, which is so much fun.
So once you get done with this exercise, you’ll have a pretty good list of items that you have from either, whether you do it just you or you do it with your team, you have a pretty good item list on here in order to, know, what does it need to look like? Now, when you have this, you need to go through and pick the top three to five. And I would say probably three if you have each one. And then I would probably put them in order of importance of what you need to do. And from there, you can kind of run it through the smart goal.
And I talked about this in last episode from a very high level. I’ve also done an episode about kind of going deep into smart goals. But I think since we’re doing this now, this is probably a really good time to kind of talk about this a little bit. But smart goals are specific. It’s an acronym. So what it stands for is specific, measurable, attainable or achievable, whichever you choose, relevant or time bound. Right? And so anytime you have
a goal that you want to hit, you really want to kind of run it through this exercise really quick to make sure that it aligns with what you got going on. So let’s do an example, right? this time a year, a lot of people, one of their goals is grow their business. They’re like, I want to grow my business. So we’ll do that as an example of grow my business. right, so the first thing in Smart Goal is specific. So we have to be specific.
and grow your business is not specific. So we’re to say grow my business by 20%. Right. That is a smart goal. You know, 20%. is it measurable? Well, do you know what you did last year? Cause if you don’t know what you did last year, you didn’t know what 20 % is. Right. But let’s say last year you did a million dollars in revenue. And so if you put 20 % on that, anybody got a calculator, just kidding. So $1.2 million is what you want your revenue to be. are you able to measure that?
meaning are you able to measure that? For most of you listening, you’re gonna have a software, whether it be Service Titan or one of the others, or even your QuickBooks or something like that will allow you to be able to measure, which gosh, I hope you can measure your revenue, but if you can’t, that’s a totally different, you need to make that your, that needs to be your smart goal for this year. But for this example, we can measure it with our smart goal. Is it attainable or achievable? I mean, I think yes, it is.
If you had 150 % growth, this exercise would change a little bit. Doesn’t mean that’s not attainable. Doesn’t mean it’s not achievable, but how you go about it obviously is going to be a little bit different. And is it relevant? Yeah, I think it’s relevant, right? Meaning, let’s say your overall big goal for the year is to open a coffee shop. Well, okay, this goal is not relevant to opening a coffee shop. But you’re not going to open a coffee shop. You’re going to grow your business this year. That’s what you’re going to do. So…
The answer is yes, it is relevant and is it time bound? And the answer is yes, the time bound it is December 31st 2025 is your timeline in order to hit this goal, right? So now we know that our goal is it checks all the boxes for smart goal. Which is great. So now that you have this smart goal, now what do you do?
Well, biggest thing is you’re going to break it into chunks, right? So you’re going to take this high level and you’re going to break it down into chunks.
How do you need an elephant? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, War Eagle. Love that saying. And if you’re an Alabama fan, you get it. And if you’re an Auburn fan, you definitely get it War Eagle. So back to what I’m talking about. So you’re gonna take this and you’re gonna break it into chunks, right? And so now that you have this goal of growth by 20%, what do you need to do? Like what needs to happen? Well, the first thing you need to figure out
is what do you even need in order to hit this goal? Right? Do you have what you need? Meaning, do you have the technology? Do you have the tools? Do you have the funding? Do you have the staffing? Right? There’s all kinds of examples, but that’s the first thing you need to figure out is do you have what you need to accomplish the goal? Right? So for instance, if instead of 20%, it was 200 %
then there’s probably a lot of funding that you’re gonna have to be thinking about, because you can’t grow by 200 % without a whole lot of funding behind you. You’re gonna need way more staff, I’m assuming. Although gosh, if you could grow by 200 % and not add any staff, that would be amazing, but it’s probably not realistic, right? So do you have, what of these do you need? So this example, if you had a software that you can measure it, do you have the technology? Yes. Do you have the tools?
You know one of the things could be let’s say you are in plumbing and you want to start doing repiping. Okay, well now you need to get the tools and you need the funding and you need the staffing and the training and all those things right. So do you have the support you need to accomplish your goal? Again our example is grow by 20 % and then and then once you’ve got that then you kind of break this down into smaller even smaller chunks right which is what are some smaller things that are needed?
for you to hit this goal? Well, you could have a higher close rate, that would certainly get you there. You could have a higher average ticket. You could have more techs. You could have a higher call percentage, call rate, right? So I know that a lot of companies, when I talk to them, if I ask them if they know what their…
what their booking rate is, they don’t know the answer to that, which in order to grow by 20%, I almost guarantee you if you start measuring that, you will hit your 20%, just saying. But booking rate, right? What is your booking rate now and what should it be and will that help you obtain that goal? So, and it doesn’t have to be one thing, it can be all these different things. The other thing is, do you need more calls? No. I will say,
I think the majority of people, when they do this exercise and they think about growth and growing 20 % or 30%, I think a lot of times they just automatically go to more calls. Now there, there can be some truth to that, right? Like you, you gotta have calls in order to do the things. But beyond that, you also have to know what is your booking rate? What is your close rate for your texts? What is your average ticket in order to even know how many more calls you need? Like if you have those things dialed in,
Right? If you have all your close rate and your average ticket and you know those things, then you can work the math backwards to go, okay, well, I need to add 20%. Okay, great. 20%. Now I need to either add four calls a month or three calls a month. Right? So you can start to really break this down. And when you’re doing these types of exercises, it’s really incredible what happens when you start looking at like a big goal and you start breaking it down by the day. They become really small. It’s really a, it’s a really cool.
It’s a really cool way to goal set right and then and then once you kind of have these goals broken into smaller pieces. Now you have to figure out not only tracking from a technology standpoint, but tracking from a team member or from a personal standpoint. Now again, this is a business goal. So how often are you going to track whatever the goal is? Are you going to do it daily? Are you going to do it weekly, monthly, annually, quarterly, whatever it is? Are you going to do that and?
I think depending on what the goal is, it should be daily. It should be weekly. It should be monthly. It should be annually. mean, think it’s depending on what the goal is, it should be all those things. Because again, even if it’s, let’s say it’s personal and it’s I’m gonna lose weight, there’s things you have to do daily, weekly, monthly and annually in order to hit whatever that goal is. So figure out what a tracking is gonna look like for that. So.
you know, again, as we go through smart goals and as you go through your goal for 2025, just use that little bit of an exercise. Like kind of go through that and figure out like, is it a smart goal? And then once it is, figure out from that, what do you need to accomplish it? Like what support, what technology, tools, funding, staff, and then break it into smaller goals, right? And you can do this no matter what the goal is, but that’s really the way to take what seems like
really big goals and really break them down into real small bite-sized pieces. It’s pretty crazy when you start breaking it down, if your goal is to grow by 20%, depending on what your average ticket is, man, that may only be one call a day, one extra call a day. And what would an extra 20 % do to your business? I can tell you this, I don’t know anything about your business, but what I do know is it wouldn’t hurt it. Fair statement? Like it’s not gonna hurt.
If anything, it’s gonna, it’s gonna be amazing and it’s gonna be great. so, so I want to say this as you go through this exercise and you get all these things dialed in a little bit of words of encouragement. You got this man. You got 2025 and you can make this the best year yet. And I’m here to walk this journey with you and I’m excited to be able to do that. And thank you so much for coming and hanging out with me today and listen until next time.
keep setting those smart goals and watching your business and leadership transform. This is Justin Deese signing off from Freedom Blueprint podcast. Stay motivated, keep goal setting, and as always, keep crushing it.