For years, I’ve kept a daily list, a Power List, of five critical tasks I intend to accomplish before the day is over.
I got the idea from Andy Frisella, the podcaster behind MFCEO and Real AF. The concept is that you select five critical items you will accomplish that day, write them down, and don’t let the day end until you’ve done them.
I followed the Power List concept for years, one time going over 250 days in a row successfully. Although I’ve tweaked my system since then, I’ve been doing some version of this for a long time.
What surprised me wasn’t how much I could get done in a day. It was what happened when I repeated the process, day after day, for years.
Most days, most of the five items were directly related to a larger goal. It might have been something I wanted to accomplish personally or something I was trying to build professionally. Either way, every day I was forcing myself to take another step toward it.
I’ve approached New Year’s resolutions the same way. One year, I decided I was going to run 1,000 miles. I didn’t just make the resolution in January and forget about it by March. Instead, I created a spreadsheet, tracked every run, determined my pace, and ensured I was on track to finish by the end of the year. And guess what? I did it.
The spreadsheet wasn’t what got me to 1,000 miles. It was my commitment to keeping the promise I made to myself.
Over time, I started to realize there was something much bigger happening. Setting goals and continually measuring myself against them changed what I was able to accomplish.
For most of my career, though, that focus was on goal setting and finishing at a personal level only. I set big goals for myself, but never for the company.
Sure, we’ve always had goals, but usually one-off tasks or short-term objectives. And yes, I have a long-term mission and vision for the company. But there is a lot of space between one-off tasking and working towards fulfilling your mission and vision. We set goals as we went. We found problems and fixed them. Then we found the next problem and fixed that. We identified opportunities and chased them. It worked. In fact, it worked well enough to get us to where we are today.
That’s good; you need to fix problems as they come up. But you also need to keep your eye on the bigger goal - your mission and vision. What will you do to actually work towards fulfilling them?
This quarter is the first time we’ve entered a quarter with company goals established in advance. Our leadership team discussed the different objectives we could take on, which are priorities versus nice-to-haves, and agreed on what we intend to accomplish. For the remainder of the fourth quarter, we’re working backward from those outcomes to determine what has to happen next to get them done.
Next year, we’re taking it further.
In about a week, our leadership team is getting together in person in Orlando to establish our goals for the year. Those goals will become the larger promises we’re making to ourselves as a company and to each other as members of the leadership team.
Each goal will be detailed in writing, shared with the team, and have one or more accountable owners. We’ve also designed a project manager to create a schedule, identify risks and issues, and ensure we handle these goals like any other project we would for a client.
Then we’ll break those goals down into smaller chunks. Every quarter, we’ll determine what needs to happen over the next 13 weeks to move us closer. Every week, we’ll look at where we are, how we’re measuring against the goal, what needs to change, and what needs to happen next.
It’s essentially the Power List applied to an entire company.
I wish we had done this years ago.
When you’re building a company, it’s easy to confuse activity with progress towards accomplishing a goal. There is always something to do. There is always a client issue, a hiring need, a process that needs fixing, or an opportunity worth pursuing.
You can stay incredibly busy without consistently moving toward the business you actually want to build. It’s the equivalent of working “heads down,” and rarely, if ever, picking your head up to see how you’re doing.
A definitive goal changes that. It gives you something against which to evaluate all of those decisions. More importantly, revisiting it continually prevents the urgent problems of today from replacing the important things you said you wanted a year from now.
I’ve watched this work in my own life for years. The individual steps rarely feel transformational. A run is just a few miles. One completed task is just one completed task. But little by little, you’re getting close to obtaining your goal. Stack enough of those little wins together and eventually you look backward and realize how far you’ve progressed.
For the last decade, I’ve had a goal of reaching $100 million in revenue. We’re at $8.5 million today. We’re doing well, but we’re a long way from achieving the goal. I have much larger goals for where we’re going, and I don’t want our growth to stall because we became complacent with what we’ve already achieved.
If you say you want something but never define it, measure it, or consistently work toward it, it isn’t really a goal. It’s just a hope and a dream.
What goals have you committed to in your business for next year, and how are you making sure they don’t get buried by everything else that needs your attention? Reply to me at [email protected].
~ Erik
About
Erik J. Olson is the Founder and CEO of Proxa, where he builds and operates multiple marketing agencies focused on predictable, system-driven growth. He has scaled agencies across multiple markets by replacing fragmented execution with structured systems that drive consistent revenue. Erik is the author of Million Dollar Journey and writes The Business of Agency newsletter. He is building Proxa into a $100M platform with a planned private equity exit.
