Are you tired of setting business goals that feel more like wishes than actionable plans?Today, we're breaking down how to set financial targets that actually drive growth and keep you motivated, even when things don't go exactly as planned. Stay tuned to learn our MTO framework that's helping entrepreneurs transform their goal setting approach. In a world where chaos seems to reign supreme, where uncertainty lurks around every corner and financial markets are now more unpredictable than
ever. There's one place you can turn to to find clarity and control. Welcome to the Wealth Wisdom Financial Podcast. Hey, I'm Brandon. And I'm Amanda. Join us as we dive deep in the world of personal and business finance to assist you in navigating through the chaos and building the financial future you deserve. We believe when conventional financial thinking doesn't get you where you want to go, you need wealth wisdom. So if you're ready to take control of
your financial destiny. Tune into the Wealth Wisdom Financial Podcast because in a chaotic world, your money shouldn't be. Subscribe now and never miss an episode. 3 episodes. We've covered creating a working budget, that B word, implementing 7 figure systems and managing cash flow challenges. Today, we're tying it all together with some crucial setting financial goals that actually drive business growth. Now, again, we're doing this in January. Shouldn't we have already set
our goals?Well, let's be honest. Traditional goal setting often fails entrepreneurs. Umm Why?Well, because most financial goal setting advice treats business goals like New Year's resolutions, rigid, inflexible targets that you either hit or you don't. But we all know business doesn't work that way. If you did set business goals, you might have totally forgotten about them. You might be wondering what this what was I thinking?This seems totally impossible. You might not even
have set business goals. And here we are, end of January. Lots of us are are saying, OK, that didn't work or I didn't do something and I feel like I should have. But as we go throughout the rest of the year, markets are going to shift, opportunities are going to rise, challenges are going to emerge that you couldn't have predicted. We need a way more dynamic approach to how do we set business goals that can flex with us and as our years change. So that's what
we're gonna be talking about today. So here's a perspective shift that might change how you think about business goals. What if instead of treating them like fixed targets, we thought of them as sight points?We're aiming towards while staying aware of our changing environment, like it's a actual site, not just a fixed location. Yeah, well, or it's somewhere you're looking and as you look toward it, you see things out of the corner of your eye.
You're adjusting as you're moving toward it to get there the most effectively that you can, which. It isn't always a straight line. We're not doing geometry here. We're doing business. Very different. Think about it like this. When you're navigating a ship across the ocean, you don't just set your course from port A to port B and put it on autopilot. No, you can't do that. You have to constantly adjust based on weather conditions, currents, other
vessels. You might even find a better route as you gather new information. Business goals work the same way. You have kind of a point you're navigating toward, right, the ports you want to get to, but you're also staying aware of changing environments, emerging opportunities, and you're adjusting as you go. Or iceberg. Iceberg, yeah. You want to look out for those for sure. We're not flying. Like planes have a lot of autopilot to them, but they're still
conscious like pilots or whatever. But I think businesses are way more like taking a ship across the ocean. No autopilot, way less autopilot on those things. O Let's breakdown our MTO minimum target and outrageous framework for setting financial sites. Again, I love this minimum target and outrageous thing because it helps me. Have outrageous goals, but also make sure I can hit the minimum. And as I share this with other business owners, they're like, wow,
that's genius. Yeah, we don't remember exactly where we picked this up along the way. So if you know who created this, let us know. But here, here's where it goes. So minimum goals. These are the must achieve baseline. You got to think, what's my minimum revenue needed to cover all operating expenses and pay myself a reasonable salary?Think of this as your sleep well at night number. As long as you're hitting this minimum, your business is going to do just fine. This
isn't about settling though. It's about knowing your foundational requirements, your minimum. Yeah, this is a very helpful for us as thinking through. You know, we we get a big flow of money, but making sure that we minimally can pay our staff, pay for the office, pay for the minimum things in life. And the next is target. This is your stretch, but achievable type of mark. Usually it's 20 to 30% above your
minimum, but it could be way bigger. If you're choosing your target, you might include like where it feels slightly uncomfortable,But also doable, right?Like you're you're that growth mindset. You want to stretch, but you don't want to like make it totally outrageous because it's the next part. So this is your target you want to have, you know, maybe it's increasing your profit allocation percentages. Maybe it's adding team members, maybe it's implementing new
systems. This doesn't have to be a specific amount above revenue wise. It could be about other kinds of improvements that you want. But these goals should align with your 12 month business vision and what you want to see happen there. And so you might think if I want to add new team members, this is how what changes about my operating expenses and this what it is what it means for the other parts of my business to make sure I'm bringing in the real revenue that I need to to account for all
those things. with the the profit first framework there. Yeah. And what I love about that, I think we are going to show a spreadsheet is it's I'm able to look at all pieces of it. So now what I love about this target is it gives me at least something to shoot for and it actually gives me also an incentive to reach. So as I go to that target goal, man, I might be able to do some really cool stuff in my profit hold account.
Yeah. And then finally, so we get our minimum, our target, and then the O is outrageous. These are your big dream scenarios. Maybe it's double or triple your target goal. This should feel exciting, maybe even a little scary, like, oh, I have no idea how I would do that kind of thing. It can have some kind oftransformational changes like opening new locations or launching new product lines or making significant
acquisitions. This goal, the whole purpose of the outrageous is to think bigger and help you spot opportunities to help you you reach that outrageous. When you have that outrageous in mind, you can know which opportunities would help you get there or not get there. I like to think about this one asOftentimes people are like, oh, this outrageous thing happened. We got doubled our business and they think that the next year it's going to be that way again,
which is possible. But the more that we go after that outrageous goal, the more likely we're going to have. That almost becomes our baseline, right?It becomes a new minimum. Yeah. So we don't want that to happen necessarily. So we want to be able to go for that outrageous knowing it's a lot of out of our control. You know, sometimes it's just a God thing that all of a sudden this happened, but be able to put in time to be able to allow that to happen. OK, so we got minimum target outrageous,
MTO. with these MTO goals in mind, you can then also break down quarterly rocks, some monthly and weekly key performance indicators, KPIs, to help you stay on track, right? You have the goals, but you break it down. And so you know how to reach those goals. And you can say, if I'm on my minimum, here's kind of what that looks like. If I'm on my target, here's what that looks like. And if we're going outrageous, this is some of what those indicators would show us. Like, hey,
you're you're going outrageous. Get ready. Most of these though we kind of set with the target goal in mind, but some we set with the minimum or outrageous, depending on what's most helpful. You don't have to have three sets of key performance indicators for everything, right?You might think of here's, I'm going to set these with the target, but then this one with the minimum and that one with the outrageous. So stay tuned after the break for some common concerns regarding goal
setting using MTO. Again, some people, I don't know, they don't like goals or something, I don't know. Ready to take the next step towards securing your financial future?Whether you're planning for retirement, saving for your dream home, or you just want to make your money work harder for you, the team at Wealth Wisdom Financial are ready to assist you. And now it's easier than ever to see how we might give you a boost on your financial journey. Schedule a 15 minute discovery call with one of us
today. Let's discuss your questions and your financial goals together. Don't wait any longer. Your financial freedom awaits. Schedule your discovery call at www.wealthwisdomfp.com/call now. I can hear some of you thinking, isn't this just setting myself up for disappointment or what's the point of setting an outrageous goal I probably won't hit?And again, I talk to business owners all the time and they just keep doing the thing, but they don't
actually set goals. Yeah, so let's address some of these common concerns. One, multiple goals seems overwhelming. I can let alone, you know, one goal. Why? Why three?Well, this MTO framework actually reduces. pressure. You hit your minimum, it's a win, right? Everything above that is bonus territory. You're not failing if you don't hit that outrageous goal. We used to set only the outrageous goal, then we get mad at ourselves if we didn't hit it. And then we started, you know, okay, let's let's
reduce and maybe just have a target. But then we'd lose some of that growth mindset of going after the outrageous. And we'd also beat ourselves up if we didn't hit the target because it was, you know, it still was a stretch and it doesn't mean we're going to get it. But having this, this minimum actually helps us with that mindset that we keep. It's a win if we hit the minimum, right?We're not losers. We hit our minimum. We're winning and we're even better at winning,
right?We get the cherry on top if we're going toward the target or to the outrageous. But we still get the cake and we get to have the cake and icing. If we hit the minimum, we get the cherry on top or, you know, whatever analogy you want to use if we're going after target or outrageous. So it's not overwhelming. It's actually good, positive growth mindset. Yeah, without like beating
yourself up. And I would say as we've worked back and forth and going back to the previous meetings or podcasts that we did, having those conversations of saying, man, this seems a bit. high for me, it's helped me to at least look at the M and feel okay and not deflated because we didn't reach 100,000 in a month or something like that. You know, not that we do, but it is helpful to feel not a failure if we only did half of that. Right. The next common objection is preferring to focus on one
clear target. Now we're big fans of focus, right?One course of until success. Follow it. Good thing. And but single targets can be demotivating. If you fall behind MTO instead provides multiple reference points. It's like you've got your eyes on the outrageous, but you can have a reference of here's the minimum and the target along the way. And this helps maintain motivation across the different business cycles, keeps you growing even if you don't hit every
single mark. So you still have the clear target. Maybe that's your target, right?That's your clear target. But minimum helps you see, okay, here's how I'm progressing toward it. And outrageous is to help keep you seeing beyond the target. Anything to add there? I think again, some of it is as we're going for winning the game or whatever that is, to be able to see where we need to make some extra work, extra groundwork or or other things to be able to see and to be able to say,
all right, I want to be growing. I want to have a a business that is 10x in 10 years. How do we do that? And so again, sometimes it's just us doing our part,But also allowing for the unexplainable to happen. Yeah. And then the third objection we sometimes hear is that, you know, my industry is too unpredictable for this. But that's exactly why we treat these as sites and having multiple different ones makes a lot of sense. Our income is also up and down and all over
the place, right?It has been for, oh gosh, 13 years now, 14 almost. And that's part of why this is so good, is because we can have that regular review, we can have some adjustment, it's part of the process. And this framework also helps us navigate uncertainty. When those high, high months, that helps us see like, okay, like here we are, when we have the low loan months, we can say like, put on average, we're still on minimum or we're still toward the target.
And you can also, one of the big debates about goals is whether you should edit them or not. you know set it and and go after it and don't make any changes. But oftentimes like things need to change and having a minimum, a target and outrageous, you can adjust without losing direction. You're like, actually my minimum went up because I added this extra expense, but you don't have to adjust your target or you're outrageous,
right?Or you know those kind of things that help you deal with the unpredictability that way. Yeah, I think again, a lot of times people are like, yes, but and and we didn't actually set the right goals or the right framework. So by having the three things, it helps us to adjust a little bit if we need to, but not too much. And we can still have a, hey, we're going to grow to $2,000,000 this year and see what happens. So remember, the purpose of the MTO framework is not to
create rigid expectations. It's to give you multiple reference points for growth while maintaining flexibility. You set minimum goals that ensure stability, target goals that drive growth, and outreach goals that expand the possibilities. It's all about creating a framework that keeps you motivated and moving forward, regardless of where you end up landing. You'll probably land somewhere along that, you know, minimum target, outrageous trajectory. And it's
about progress, not perfection. And you either hit the goal or you don't hit the goal. It's like, no, here's my spectrum. I'm going to hit somewhere along that goal, hopefully above the minimum and maybe closer to the outrageous. That would be fantastic. So think of these goals as different zoom levels on a map. Your minimum goal is your current location, your target goal is the next major city, and your outrageous goal is
crossing the country. You might not make it across the country this year, but you'll certainly go farther than if you'd plan to drive to the next town. Yeah, that's actually probably one of the only things I like about that great Cardone book, 10X. Is, you know, the whole idea you shoot for the stars, you end up hitting the moon. But if you shoot for the moon, you probably don't even
leave the planet. Yeah, right. And that's part of why these kind of work is it gives you that 10X, that big outrageous thing, but without the guilt of if you only hit your minimum. Yeah. YeahSo I know hearing this, you're ready to implement this MTO framework in your
business. And you might be, if you're a Profit First fan like us, you might be curious about how MTO drives with Profit First when it comes to revenue goals and how you then, you know, set your profit and your owner's comp and your tax and your operating expense budgets. Well, you're in luck. Every premium member in the Wealth Wisdom Financial community gets access to this mini quest that we set up called Build Your Success Dashboard. It's very profit friendly and we have what we call an MTO
chart based on real revenue. You're going to see an image of this pop up on your screen. You can get a copy of this and the entire quest by joining today at wealthwisdomfp.com/community. Join today, get instant access to this powerful tool. It's actually a Google spreadsheet that you can play around with, put in different numbers into the yellow field and see how that adjusts all the other parts of the profit first framework. Do not let another month go by without clear financial sights to
guide your business growth. And as I go through this all the time, I share this with clients and other people and they're like, wow, this is amazing to be able to see that Excel spreadsheet, to be able to change the numbers a little bit, just to play around with it, have a thought exercise is huge and then be able to. Look and say, hey, if we did this, this is how much goes into the various buckets. That helps me as a visual person and I know it
will help you too. So don't forget, go download that, go join the community and don't use. Don't just say, Oh yeah, I'm going to be a part of this community, but not engage in the stuff. But actually engage and download the tools and use it for your business. That's why we created it. Yeah. So we use it every year to set our goals and then I use it every 10th and 25th for my allocations. It's a great tool to be
using all throughout the year. So thanks for joining us for this four-part series on building strong financial foundations
for your business. From rewriting the rules of budgeting to creating systems and, you know, scheduled check-ins with your finances that will help you scale into the seven figure and beyond range to dealing with the things that are going to pop up because business is so unpredictable and how you make sure you're able to manage cash flow with all that unpredictability, both good and bad. And then today for how you set goals that actually work for you. Until next time, live long and profit.
Remember, the topics presented in this podcast are for general information only, and not for the purpose of providing legal, accounting, or investment advice. On such matters, please consult a professional who knows your specific situation. And don't forget to download that MTO report.