Planning the Journey Ahead

Once you’ve pulled the numbers and decoded the story they’re telling. Now it’s time to turn that insight into sharp, workable goals for the year to come.

Turn Insight Into Intent

Our goal is to translate your Executive Snapshot into a focused set of priorities and goals that are ambitious, believable, and actually usable in day-to-day decision-making. You are moving from “what happened and why” to “what matters most now.”

You are not planning every tactic yet. You are defining the outcomes that will guide every plan, project, and experiment you design through this exercise and that of Upgrade Your Strategy.

Step 1: Clarify your non‑negotiables

Start by revisiting your Executive Snapshot and SOS lists. Before you set any goals, ask:

• What must stay true about this business next year (profitability, culture, client experience, workload, personal life)?

• What is absolutely non‑negotiable to change (a margin floor, a burnout pattern, a type of client you’re no longer willing to serve, a way of working that has to change)?

Write 3–5 non‑negotiables in plain language. These become guardrails for every goal you set. A goal that breaks a non‑negotiable doesn’t make the cut, no matter how shiny it looks.

Step 2: Choose your 3–5 focus areas

Next, group Your Data is Telling a Story insights into a few focus areas. Common examples:

• Revenue and profitability.

• Client acquisition and retention.

• Operations and delivery.

• Team capacity and leadership.

• Product or service development.

You are not trying to fix everything. Pick 3–5 focus areas that, if meaningfully improved, would create a step change in the business. Everything else becomes supporting detail, not headline work.

Step 3: Draft outcome‑based goals

For each focus area, draft 1–2 outcome‑based goals. Think in terms of the result you want to see, not the activity you’ll do.

Instead of “post more on LinkedIn,” aim for “generate X qualified enquiries per month from LinkedIn by Q3.” Instead of “improve delivery,” aim for “reduce average project overrun from 20% to under 5% by year end.”

A simple structure helps:

• Outcome: What will be true if this works?

• Measure: How will you know? (number, percentage, frequency, or a specific observable shift)

• Timeframe: By when?

Challenge each draft goal with two questions:

• Does this clearly connect to a strength to leverage, a gap to close, or a “stop” identified on your SOS list?

• If this were achieved, would it matter to the business, or just look good on paper?

Tidy up until each goal feels sharp and consequential.

Step 4: Right‑size your ambition

Ambition without capacity planning is just stress in disguise. Take a sober look at your list of goals and ask:

• If everything on this list were achieved, could my current team and systems realistically handle it?

• What would break first: cash, capacity, quality, or my energy?

Use a simple rating for each goal:

• Impact: Low / Medium / High

• Effort: Low / Medium / High

• Risk: Low / Medium / High

Prioritise High‑impact, Low‑ or Medium‑effort goals as early-year wins. Defer or redesign anything that is High‑impact but also High‑risk and High‑effort until you’ve freed capacity.

If you end up with more than 5–7 serious goals for the year, you likely have too many. Trim until the list feels challenging but not absurd.

Step 5: Assign ownership and success signals

Goals without ownership drift. For each goal, document:

• Owner: The person ultimately responsible for progress (which may or may not be you) and making day-to-day decisions on the goal

• Support: Key people or partners needed to make it work.

• Success signals: 3–5 early signs that you’re on the right track long before the final result shows up.

For example, if your goal is to increase retainer revenue, early success signals might be:

• Number of qualified retainer conversations held each month.

• Proposal acceptance rate.

• Reduction in one‑off, low‑margin projects.

These signals become your dashboard for the first quarter and make course‑correction easier.

Step 6: Build your one‑page Goal Sheet

Close this activity by collapsing everything into a one‑page Goal Sheet you can use as your north star for the year and as input to the planning work in Upgrade Your Strategy and Building Agility, Resilience and Habit.

Your Goal Sheet might look like this:

• Top line for the year: one sentence capturing the overall strategic intent (for example, “Shift from feast‑and‑famine projects to stable, higher‑margin retainers while protecting team wellbeing”).

• Non‑negotiables: 3–5 bullets.

• Focus areas: listed in a simple column.

• Under each focus area: 1–2 outcome‑based goals, each with an owner, a timeframe, and 1–2 key measures.

Print it, pin it, or keep it somewhere you can regularly review it. By the end of this activity, you should have moved from “interesting insights” to a concise set of decisions about what you are truly aiming for next year—clear enough that planning concrete actions becomes much easier, and disciplined enough that you can say “no” to distractions with confidence.