Best Of - Goal Setting VI: Reverse Engineer Your Dreams

These initial episodes were done before the 2020 pandemic. They were important then and I believe they are even more important now.  We need to have  purpose in what we do or we'll never have the passion and commitment to see it through. In this replay episode, I help you identify the Why in your life so you can jump onboard the goals train! Have fun!

This was a breakthrough week for the Big Picture of what I'm doing. I have business SMART goals that I set for my solo cleaning business on 1/1/20. I share this mindset in my goal-setting series (What is Your Why, Why Set Goals, Make Your Goals SMART, The Accountability Roadmap, and Kill Parkinson). The lessons and reminders from this week in business forced my hand to create a 6th installment to this series.
As many of my podcast listeners know, I have other streams of income. I run the SMART Cleaning Tribe for team cleaners. I host this podcast and the connected Solo Cleaning School Elite Membership for my students to learn my ISO Model to hit their goals.  I am also at the beginner stage to consulting large cleaning companies with employees that would like to scale with optimized solo cleaners or Solo Teams. I'm also a published author of an interactive book for fathers to read to their kids called "Arctic Land".  In past years, I have struggled with holding it all together and being productive with multiple irons in the fire. This year is different. I have figured out a way to prioritize and follow through. I call it reverse engineering your dreams and I hope this podcast will help you find a similar system that works for you! 

I knew (prior to COVID) that this year needed to be our breakthrough year. We needed to build a new solo cleaning business to become an optimized part-time 6-figure income. There were multiple reasons for this:

1. To teach our kids the "family trade" by working with dad, earning income, saving, giving, spending, and investing.
2. To show YOU (the listeners) that my ISO Model works by building and optimizing a second solo cleaning business to the same level as my first in a fraction of the time.
3. To earn a main income source in the schedule I was willing to clean that would provide everything our family needed too thrive in 2020 & beyond, not relying on any online income.

Thus, I set the SMART goals on 1/1/20 to add $10,000 of new annual & recurring cleaning revenue every 60 days. This seemed like a tall order, but I believed it was A-chievable (the "A" in SMART Goal). I added 3 new houses in January & February to hit my first SMART goal for 2/29/20. March and April were very difficult with COVID-19, but I plugged away at my #1 goal for 2020 and upgraded a veterinary hospital by doubling the monthly service fee to hit my 4/30/20 SMART goal. We added 2 offices and a house to not only hit our 6/30/20 SMART goal, but we doubled the goal! The year is halfway over and we've hit 3 out of 3 goals. We have accomplished this through COVID, the loss of my Nana, near loss of my mom from COVID, and the emotional toll of helping my autistic uncle. How is this possible? We've been focused and having a #1 priority all year has allowed me to tend to other things. I have NOT been distracted. This level of FOCUS is necessary. And FOCUS stands for Follow One Course Until Success.

I've explained the WHY and the HOW. Now, I'll share the main lesson in this episode. It's the WHAT.... What did I do? Remember, I'm an engineer. This method is how to "reverse engineer" to your dreams.

1. Build a Support Team - I do weekly dates with my wife along with walks for us to discuss all that we do. Business is a big part of this. I'm a man in a female dominated industry. She helps me so much with discerning how to act and what to do next. Second, I have my mastermind (TLF) with weekly Monday 2-hour calls where I can lay out my business questions and get relevant and sage advice going forward. Those interested can invest into the Solo Cleaning School Elite Membership.
2. Create a Task-Completion System - I'll share mine, but realize that you need to find what works for your unique personality.
   • I start with our family dream. In many situations, this is intangible and hard to specify. That's why I create a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) for the year, which is specific and measurable and provides the path to hit the family dream in the following or upcoming years with successive annual BHAGs.
   • Now that I had a BHAG for 2020, I can divide and conquer by creating milestones with monthly SMART goals. This is where the $10,000 of new annual & recurring revenue came from. I could grab onto that!
   • In my world, I have multiple revenue streams. I divide them into 5 lanes of my super highway. My solo cleaning SMART goals (for me) were always the most important lane to drive in or spend my time & attention. I ranked each lane and assigned less time to the less important. I have a large whiteboard in my office and made 5 columns where I would list the name of the lane at the top. From week to week, I would change the lane order (erase board & re-write). In each column, I would list all of the tasks that I'd like to complete for that lane to move faster!
   • Once I had my white board set up with the tasks for the week, I'd circle the ones in each lane that were priorities and double circle the most important & urgent. This literally gave me a map of where to work for the week. I just needed to start in lane one and complete the double circled tasks. Then, I'd move down the lanes and complete all other double circled tasks and come back to lane 1's single circled items and so on. During the course of a given week, I'd cross off each task as I finished, add in new ones that inevitable emerge during the week, reprioritize the new ones, and change my order of task completion. I would get as much done in a week as I could and never look back to what I didn't get done.
3. Accountability was Critical - At the start of each week, I'd report to my TLF mastermind my progress from the past week and my priorities for the upcoming week. At the end of every day, I would exchange accountability texts with my TLF buddy John VanderMuelen to encourage & support each other as each of us were on the same path in 2020! If I hit any income goals from week to week with new income, Teresa and I would celebrate with a Friday night date night & take-out food and a movie. Then at the end of the week, I'd erase my board and re-write it in the correct prioritized order. Thus, I had accountability with my wife, my TLF mastermind, and accountability partner John.

Can you see how I was set up for success in 2020? I encourage you to do the same. The year is still new. Let's make the most of 2020 and blast into 2021!

Do you enjoy the free content of the Solo Cleaning School Podcast, but would like to go deeper in your education?

I have created tools, templates, and the ISO Model Course that are all a part of the SCS Elite Membership. Also included in this $50/mo investment is access to our community to bounce ideas and access to me directly through biweekly FB Live Q&A's. In this week's FB Live, I shared the evolution in detail of where each one of my 17 clients came from in my new solo cleaning business. This paid content and access will be the fuel for you to truly implement the ISO Model and optimize your solo cleaning business. I hope to see you there!