When I set out to open my first gym, I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted.
But I knew I wanted to do something that I enjoyed – that made a difference to people’s lives. I also wanted to have the financial freedom to support my family, travel, and live a life of comfort – to live a ‘grown up’ lifestyle.
I knew I wanted to be at the helm of something, making my own mistakes and paying for them – and owning my success and reaping the rewards.
In short, I wanted my work to be a decent amount of fun, and only involve a limited amount of shit-shovelling.
So I broke these down into some tangible aspects of my future reality: specific moments that I’d be able to earmark as ‘success’.
A certain amount of money in the bank. Being present at certain times of my kids’ lives. The ability to complete certain physical challenges. And then, I worked my way backwards from there.
In this blog post, we’ll work through a step-by-step process to define exactly what you’re hoping to achieve, by when, with whose help, and how you’re going to hold yourself accountable for it.
Envisioning success
We all have a vague idea of what we want: more money, more freedom, more time, more fun, more ‘stuff’…but this general notion of ‘success’ won’t cut it.
We need to pin down what we really want to have a chance of getting it.
And although defining our desires seems an easy thing to do at first glance, it can be a lot trickier once you start to dial down on the details.
Here’s a simple step-by-step process to help you define an endpoint for your efforts.
1. Articulate your dreams
We all have dreams. Maybe they’re tucked away in some private part of our heads, and rarely see the light of day. Maybe they’re out there in the open for everyone to see. The first step in understanding what you’re working towards is to give those dreams some airtime.
If you had no fear of failure, what would you be aiming for?
What’s your crazy, out-of-the-box aspiration?
What would you love to achieve but have never told anybody about?
Spend a couple of minutes sinking into that dream. Visualise it being real. Where are you? How do you feel? What are you doing with your time?
Another way of getting to the heart of these big dreams and aspirations is to do the ‘epitaph exercise’. If you’re not a fan of thinking about your own mortality, you might want to skip this one.
The Epitaph Exercise
Imagine it’s your funeral. Your family and loved ones are standing around your grave. The people closest to you have composed an epitaph to remember you by – a sort of highlight reel of your contribution to the world.
What would you like them to say? What do you want to be known for having done? What do you want your contribution to be – to your nearest and dearest, and in terms of a wider impact on your surroundings?
2. Plan your day-to-day
With a big-picture aspiration in your mind, now you need to define how this translates to a day-to-day existence. Shake off the morbid thoughts!
Fine, you’ve earned enough money to buy a five-bed detached house outright; you’re the owner of four profitable facilities; you’ve bought a fancy car (and solved world hunger?) But what does your daily routine look like? How do you want to spend your time?
In my case, for example, one of my goals is to be able to make eggs with my youngest son a few times a week. I want to be able to wake up early, clear my inbox, and have the time to make and eat breakfast. I want to be able to walk my dogs. Then I’m happy to get stuck in with some focused work time.
I also want to have the freedom to be able to decide when I’m going to work. If I’m tired and need a few hours to think or relax, I want to be able to cut down on my workload for the day, and make the time up later in the week.
These daily objectives will tell you a lot about what you need to achieve in the bigger picture. I know, for example, that I would never choose to become a full-time coach on the gym floor again.
No one could ever accuse me of being a stranger to hard work, but I’m over the fixed hours, early mornings in the gym, and not being there for breakfast or the kids’ bedtime.
Some people find it helpful to envision an ‘ideal day’, running through an hour-by-hour schedule to really pin down how they’d like to spend their time. However you approach it, the idea here is to take an amorphous idea and stress test it against the reality of your daily existence.
3. Define your ‘exit’
Steps one and two should have given you a solid sense of where you want to be. Now it’s time to dive into the ‘how’ of making that happen. This is where you think through your ‘exit’. OK, so you want to scale to four sites, and then franchise. But what will you be doing at that point?
Do you still want to be an owner/operator, coaching a few hours a week?
Do you want a ‘job’?
Do you want to sell and retire on the profits?
Do you want to raise money for another project?
Do you want to become the MD for your own chain of gyms, overseeing a senior management team?
Do you want to up sticks and open a bar in the south of France? (I’ve been contemplating this last one myself recently.)
Without a clear plan for your own exit, you’ll find yourself floundering, unfocused on your own role within the business.
4. Get specific
Once you have these broad strokes in place, you need to pin down the nuts and bolts of your objectives. For example, if your exit is to scale to four sites and sell, what are the practical requirements for this to become a reality?
What do your financials need to look like?
What brand characteristics and operational systems might potential buyers be looking for?
Do your research and make a list of conditions that need to be achieved in order for your business to be an attractive prospect.
In my case, we always knew that franchising the business was one of our ultimate goals. So we knew that we’d need a compelling brand, a scalable product, financials that gave a decent profit margin for the franchisee after we’d collected our royalty, and so on. These requirements guided our efforts in our day-to-day, keeping our eyes fixed on the horizon, not just on the ground beneath our feet.
5. Reverse engineer your goals
With the ‘what’ and ‘why’ in place, it’s time to get stuck with the ‘how’ and ‘when’.
I find it helpful to break your goals into ‘buckets’ at this point, for example:
- Personal goals
- Professional goals
- Financial goals
How you categorise them is up to you; you could group financial goals under personal, for example, and add ‘physical goals’ as your third bucket. Do whatever makes sense for you.
For each of these three ‘buckets’, create a timeline, defining your:
- Ten-year goals
- Five-year goals
- One-year goals
Starting from the end and working your way back like this allows you to ‘reverse engineer’ your success.
Instead of having a massive, seemingly impossible-to-achieve master goal, you have a timeline of bite-size objectives giving you a pathway to where you want to be.
Setting SMART goals
When goal setting, it’s always a good idea to come back to the old but solid SMART acronym.
The best goals are:
- Specific
Your goals need to be clearly defined with no room for misinterpretation. For example, ‘grow my membership base to 200 clients’ is a more specific goal than ‘increase membership numbers’. Think simple and straightforward: don’t leave room for ambiguity that could cause you to lose focus.
- Measurable
If you don’t know how you’ll measure your goal, you won’t know if you’ve achieved it or not. Giving yourself a personal goal of ‘get in better shape’ is too vague. In contrast, ‘be able to do 20 chin ups, squat 160kg for five reps, and run a five-minute mile’ is a measurable, concrete objective.
- Achievable
The idea here isn’t to set yourself impossible goals and then flog yourself trying (and failing) to reach them. Give yourself the right amount of ‘stretch’ when setting your objectives. For example, a goal of selling 50 franchises in a year simply won’t be achievable for a small business; try for one or two in your first year, and leave the big numbers for later down the line. The key is to set yourself up for success, while still challenging yourself.
- Relevant.
Sometimes swapped for ‘results-based’ this is about creating goals that actually mean something. If your ten-year professional goal is to retire, make sure that your five-year goal is actually moving you towards that final destination (not away from it).
- Time-bound.
You should always be giving yourself a specific deadline. Without this, you can’t get into the details of project planning, and your goal will keep slipping further away.
Creating an accountability framework
Going through this exercise on paper is one thing; actually getting out of bed and pounding the pavements to make your dream a reality is something quite different. The gap between them is huge. In one scenario, you’re that PT who was always full of big ideas, but never followed through. In the other, you’re a thriving business owner who’s weathered some tough times and persevered to make their dreams a reality.
The bridge between these two potential endings: accountability.
OK, so there are a host of other things that you’ve all have to overcome, actions you’ll have to take, even circumstances outside your control that will impact on if, how, and when you hit your objectives. But without a way of making sure that you do what you say you’re going to do, change won’t happen.
Accountability is a funny one. In my years as a fitness business coach, probably the one thing I get more frustrated with than anything else is people’s unwillingness to take accountability for their own actions (and ultimately, their results). In short, they want someone else to wipe their arse for them.
Here’s the thing about accountability: only you can do it for yourself.
The only bit you can get support on, or outsource if you’re willing to pay, is for someone to hold you accountable for your own accountability.
Goal setting: a caveat
Laid out like this, it looks like goal setting should be easy. But no matter how many perky staged models we put around the problem, the fact remains: knowing what you want to do in life isn’t always easy. Most of us actually have no clue.
Many entrepreneurs are driven, focused people with lots of ambition; but these often only last as long as our current project. Having a long-term passion and purpose in life that exists outside this need for what society calls ‘success’ is (in my opinion) a rare thing.
With this in mind, the whole goal setting process can feel a bit empty at times.
Plenty of my coaching clients, when challenged on what they’re really trying to achieve, come up blank. How could they possible decide, right here and now, what they ultimately want to achieve in life?
If you’re feeling the same, I’ll say to you what I say to them: you’re heading somewhere right now.
Your current trajectory is taking you somewhere.
Being paralysed by the potential for screwing it up doesn’t change that. All it means is that you’re going to end up somewhere by accident, instead of intentionally. And with this sort of haphazard destination, you may find that where you end up isn’t where you wanted to be.
I know plenty of gym owners that had grand ideas of being their own boss, raking in the cash, coaching part time, nice house, decent car…but what they actually end up with is getting paid peanuts for working 60-70 hour weeks, doing everything in the business and getting none of the rewards.
This happens because these people weren’t specific enough about what they wanted to achieve. They gave themselves a vague destination and started working in that general direction, without taking the time to sharpen up the details of their vision. This meant that they couldn’t effectively put in place the steps they needed to take to get where they wanted to go.
The moral of the story: even if you have no clue what you really want for your life, you need to get started with your best guess. Even if you have to scotch some of the specifics, they still need to be in place.
On the flip side, keep in mind that when you set a goal, you’re creating a moving target. Just because you write something down in your plan today, doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. You can change it next month, next year, or in a few years’ time.
But without this clearly defined end point, all the time and effort you put in will be dispersed in many different directions, hindering any forward progress and leaving you in a no-man’s land where you’re running fast but standing still.