Whether you’re the owner of a successful health business or a beginner solo entrepreneur, having revenue goals is a crucial step many people overlook. Goals give direction to effort, keep you motivated, and help you maintain your success. They encourage the steady and consistent growth of your business.
Although goal setting is an activity most businesses do at the beginning of each year, it’s important to keep assessing and redefining goals throughout the year. Many business owners report that they’re too caught up in operations to allow time for setting and monitoring goals.
This can be a critical mistake if your aim is to grow your revenue. This article will help you develop a basic framework for setting and achieving revenue goals for your health business.
How to Define Revenue Goals as a Health Entrepreneur
Your revenue goals don’t have to be strictly financial. In fact, there are many ways to define your revenue goals. Here are a few questions and insights that can help you craft crystal clear goals for your health business:
Market Penetration
What’s your magnitude of brand recognition in your niche? One of your goals can be to boost revenue by increasing brand recognition in a segmented market.
Operational Efficiency
Another goal could be to become more efficient in your health business operations. For example, you can aim to reduce shipping times to a duration that is realistically achievable.
Diversification
Are you happy with the breadth of your product or service portfolio? You can aim to introduce a fixed number of new lines of products by the end of the year.
Premiumization
Are you offering any upsells for every purchase your customer makes? You can set a goal to offer premiumization for your health services.
Churn Rate
How many of your customers are parting ways with your business each quarter? How many subscribers are unsubscribing from your email list? An important goal is to reduce customer churn significantly.
Overhead Reduction
Is there a unit of your business that is sapping away valuable resources without offering much return? You can cut your losses significantly by aiming to reduce overheads within a set time frame.
Market Entry
If you feel that your existing market is saturated, it’s time to hunt for newer avenues of growth. Setting up a measurable goal of market entry and expansion will give you direction and clarity.
Leads
What’s your lead conversion rate? Is it enough to sustain your business? Set up a measurable goal to acquire new leads, keeping in mind your historical conversion statistics.
5 Steps to Kickstart Your Goal-Setting Process
Goal setting can be fun and motivating when done correctly. Following a process helps you get clear on your business and life goals. These basic techniques can get you started:
Step #1: Brainstorm
This is a chance for you to access the wisps of ideas floating around in your brain, even if you think they’re irrelevant. Here are a few techniques to help get you started with brainstorming:
Brain Dump – Without thinking about the quality of your ideas, just let them out. Put pen on paper and list out all the ideas you can think of, even if they don’t make sense.
Lists – Start with small, discrete ideas and jot them down as a list. Then start expanding on each bullet point until you see a clear plan of action.
Mind Mapping – Start with one central idea. Using words and pictures, draw branches around that idea. This will help you visualize your plans and manifest them.
Step #2: Categorize Your Ideas
Now that you have a repository of ideas, it’s time to sort them. You can divide them into categories, depending on the parameters most important to you.
For example, you may classify your ideas as below:
- Financial plans
- Employee recruitment
- Networking
- Business development
Step #3: Analyze
Before you start defining your goals, it’s important to know your health business inside out. You need to identify areas where your business needs to improve. Even if you think you have a fair knowledge of these areas, sometimes it helps to take a step back and review your business like a neutral observer.
Here are a few tools and strategies to help you gain a fresh perspective for this assessment.
SWOT Analysis:
SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is a system used to evaluate the competitive potential of a business. It helps you develop a strategic plan for expansion.
SWOT can help you assess internal and external forces affecting your business and help evaluate current and future potential.
Here’s a sample SWOT breakdown of a health business:
Strengths: Strong social media presence, unique technology, and low overheads
Weaknesses: High client turnover rate and a lack of specialized human resources
Opportunities: Lower taxes for start-ups and growing awareness about fitness
Threats: Increasing competition in your niche, highly priced labor, and so on
Step #4: Avoid Pitfalls
If your goals are not measurable and poorly defined, you can end up doing more harm than good to your cause. Here are some examples of poorly defined goals:
- I want more website visitors and sales.
- I want to improve my Google listing rank.
- I want to grow my email list.
- I want to provide better client communication.
- I want more leads to pitch to.
- I want to improve my fitness services.
- I want to reach out to a new market and expand.
- I want to market myself as a personal trainer.
Step #5: Set SMART Goals
SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely) goals help you evaluate your goals realistically.
Ask yourself these questions before defining your SMART goals:
- What exactly do I want to achieve?
- Which areas need improvement?
- How will I get there?
- When do I plan to achieve these goals?
- What are the limitations?
- Why do I want to reach this goal?
- What are my options?
Here’s an example of a SMART goal as a health entrepreneur:
Main Goal: Grow your health coach or personal training business.
Specific: Adding six new clients to your business.
Measurable: Tracking this number within the time frame.
Achievable: Arriving at this number because you have six free slots in your calendar.
Relevant: More clients equate to greater revenue.
Timely: Adding six new clients before the year ends.
Want to grow your business? Check out 17 Tips for A Successful Personal Trainer Business!
Goal Setting Made Easy
Now that you have a rough idea about defining goals, let’s take a look at some actionable methods to set up a solid framework:
Make Action Lists
Setting lofty goals and expecting to achieve them because you’re motivated is just wishful thinking. Let’s say your goal is to increase your yearly revenue as a health coach by $100,000.
Your action list may look something like this:
- Land one additional client a week.
- Make valuable posts on social media every day.
- Reach out to previous clients.
- Host one group session a week.
Define Your North Star Metric
The North Star Metric (NSM) is a critical metric that encapsulates the core value your health service delivers to customers. Airbnb’s NSM is the number of nights booked. Netflix’s NSM is the number of subscriptions.
To define your North Star Metric, analyze the value your customers get from the health product or service. Then try to quantify this numerical value in a single metric. Being focused on your NSM can help you avoid unnecessary distractions.
For example, your goal could be to launch your own personal training business and cater to a certain number of clients within a year.
Prioritize
Not all goals are equal. Some revenue goals help you achieve greater profitability when they’re achieved.
For example, let’s say your goal is to sell 10 new client sessions within a quarter because they bring in the highest profit. Prioritizing new client sales over less important, non-revenue generating tasks can help you reach your goals faster. Track your sales each week and improve on them.
This ensures that even if you don’t meet all your revenue goals, you’ll meet the ones that matter.
Monitor Progression
Goals that aren’t monitored are goals that are less likely to reach fruition. Use tracking software or even a simple Excel spreadsheet. If you feel that you’re lagging behind in some areas, focus on these micro-goals until you get the desired outcome.
Set Activity Goals
Revenue goals need certain actions to be completed within time. Reverse-engineering this process is a great idea. Using historical data, figure out how many emails, calls, and client meetings you must hit to reach your revenue goals.
Let’s say you manage to convert 20 percent of your client interactions, and you need five client conversions per month. Aim for 25 face-to-face client sessions a month as your activity goal.
Strengthen Your Support System
A support system consisting of friends, family, and employees can make your journey much smoother. It can help you in a number of tangible ways:
- The knowledge of having a solid team behind you can be very comforting.
- You’ll get a perspective that’s different from your own.
- Your team will cheer you on when you face challenges.
- You can learn a lot from individuals with diverse experiences.
- Your team will celebrate your successes with you and motivate you further.
Set Waterfall Goals
Account for ramp-up time when you’re implementing aggressive goals. If you’re generating 50 leads per month and want to generate 100, take time into consideration.
Allow time for progression by pushing up the target each month until you reach 100. This “waterfall” technique helps maintain quality and allows your business to grow in a focused manner.
Learn to Accept Mistakes
Fear of failure, unrealistic expectations, and a pursuit of perfection can hold you back. Remember that mistakes are part and parcel of life and business. Learn from them and stop dwelling on them.
A critical mistake can potentially open your eyes up to new perspectives and strategies you may not otherwise have visualized.
Get Your Free Guide
Learn How to Start a Fulfilling, Impactful Career as a Holistic Health Coach
You’ll learn:
- Why holistic health matters
- If holistic health coaching is right for you
- What career opportunities exist for health coaches
- And more!
Celebrate Small Victories
While you shouldn’t lose focus and stray away from your ultimate goal, remember to pause along the way and celebrate small successes. Doing this helps you achieve closure and move on with a refreshed mind.
By celebrating, you recognize the time and effort that has gone into the achievement of each micro-goal. It triggers a pattern of positive reinforcement and self-motivation.
Redefine Customer Experience
How do you communicate with your end customers? How often? The satisfaction and happiness of your customers matter as much as profitability.
Set goals to improve your customer communication effectively. Set parameters for handling complaints. Aim to get feedback from your customers to identify drawbacks in your business.
Improve Networking
What’s visible is saleable. Try to network actively and expand your business footprint. Maintain an active presence on Linkedin. Aim to write a specific number of content-marketing posts to draw attention toward your business and position yourself as an authority.
Aim for Employee Satisfaction
Unless you’re a solo entrepreneur, your employees can potentially have a huge impact on your revenue growth. Employee health and wellness can help maintain steady growth of your health business.
Setting fair compensation and benefits for your employees will help them become more productive.
The Most Common Goal-Setting Mistakes
Often times, setting revenue goals can feel daunting, especially when you don’t know where to begin. Here are some of the most common pitfalls business owners make during the goal-setting process:
Waiting for the “right” time
Many business owners fall into the trap of seeking perfection and then procrastinating because they can’t achieve it. Sometimes, you might feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the task.
The problem with this approach is that the wait for the “perfect” time to start can consume months or even years. Start today with a small baby step. Two percent progress is much better than no progress at all.
Failing to be regular
Small business owners are notoriously busy with many different things, every single day. So while we may take the time to set goals, many of us set them and forget them. Goal setting and achievement is an organic process that requires constant attention and frequent adjustments.
Setting a goal at the start of a New Year and not looking at it again until July is not likely to result in success. Instead, create a goal, then drill down into daily, weekly, and monthly actions you can take to achieve your goals.
Being rigid
Structure and consistency are extremely important, but that doesn’t mean you can’t leave any room for flexibility. It’s fine to mess up once in a while. Forgive yourself and move on.
Remain open to any changes that may actually help you reach your goals more efficiently.
Crystal Clear Goals Can Help You Stay On Track No Matter How Big Your Business Becomes
With these frameworks, getting started with your goal-setting process will no longer feel like a daunting task. Instead, they’ll help you feel inspired and motivated when times are tough.
Revisiting your goals periodically and adjusting them as you see fit will help you stay on track as your business grows. These techniques are also universal enough to be used for personal fitness goals!
Ultimately, you’ll start building enough momentum and confidence to achieve your revenue goals. Goal setting is a great way to maintain steady, focused progress to help you take the right steps each day toward your business destination!
The Essential Business Course for Health and Wellness Entrepreneurs
Gain the skills needed to build and run a thriving, lucrative health and wellness business.
