I am often astonished by people that get caught up in minutia in their personal and business lives. These people search for answers everywhere when the basic answer at how to succeed in almost everything is something they learned in grade school.

Math.

Basic mathematics are the key to achieving all of your largest and smallest goals.

Let’s run through an example of this theory:

Entrepreneur A decides that he wants to follow his life long dream of opening a restaurant. He has worked in the industry for years and decides what he needs is a unique gimmick and lots of space to capitalize on volume. He decides to focus his menu on your standard Pub foods, and invests about $30,000 in television for the establishment. Based on his theme he also invests quite a bit on the bar. By month 6 of this restaurants existence the owner is $100,000 in the hole and decides what is needed is a revamped menu to attract more customers.

His restaurant is doomed.

Entrepreneur B decides to open a restaurant to follow her lifelong dream as well. She plans the menu, and creates a business plan based on a fixed price model. She knows her market so she can gauge that based on her style of cuisine she will attract an average of 3.5 people per table. She estimates her revenue per table at $75 and profit per table at $35. She wants to maintain profit of 20%. This leaves her $20 per seating to pay for utilities, rentals space, vendors, and marketing. She decides based on this that she will start her dream in a small 10 table bistro and focus on remaining profitable. She leaves the decor simple to maintain low maintenance costs, and uses foursquare, Groupon, and word of mouth to grow the foot traffic because she can get a CPA of $5 per table through these routes.

If you think Entrepreneur A doesn’t exist you are incredibly wrong. People who bank on their ideas more than the value those ideas will bring to consumers, and more importantly how profitable that value can become, are jumping into business ownership everyday. A good idea is just that, a good idea. It is nothing without basic math based planning that makes them tangible concepts.

A word of advice to people going into business relationships with people like Entrepreneur A, these are the types, that once they fail from the lack of planning begin playing the blame game. It is best to stay clear and brush up on your math for your next big opportunity.

We all create goals.

Few of us reach goals.

I made a personal goal in 2008 to create an industry leading online marketing company. It took several years, and some AMAZING partners and clients, but we are there. I have also accomplished some strong personal goals in the last few years, but I have failed in reaching more goals then I have succeeded.

Recently I began dissecting what I did right and what I did wrong.

What I have come up with, with the help of a few recent books I have read (The 80/20 Principle and The Power of Less) is that my success came from large goals that I supported with micro-goals.

The “goal” of becoming the best online marketing company is as broad as it is vague. To shoot only for that is almost impossible. In order to do it I had to create micro-goals:

1) Create the original Search & Social with Jordan Kasteler. We wanted to offer companies a firm based on youthful, fresh ideas in online marketing. We worked hard to differentiate ourselves from the older, more established firms. It worked to get us in the game.

2) When we merged with Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal, Inc. the goal was to make a real run at being the best linkbuilding company in the space. We wanted to do this through differentiated linkbuilding, i.e. blogger outreach, social media, content aggregation, and linkbait. We built commodities in a white hat fashion, in a way that had only been previously been accomplished in scale by less legitimate lini brokering
firms.

3) Second Step Search, which began in 2009, had the goal of creating scalable workflow solutions and reporting for SEOs and marketers. This included CopyPress.

4) The last step, the merger of BlueGlass, brought together all of the pieces into the final product that would allow us to achieve our original goal.

Breaking the micro-goals down further:

1) We entered the game and created a differentiation
2) We set out to become experts in one channel of a multi-channel market
3) We figured out how to scale other channels of that market
4) We merged with awesome marketers in those other channels to pull of the goal

By looking hard at these areas where I have succeeded I now know that in order to be successful I have to:

1) Create an overarching but tangible goal. Think big. $1 million in monthly widget sales recurring
2) Setup Micro-goals for this with deadlines. Lets say you want to achieve the $1million in monthly sales, first you should plan on a. creating a sales strategy b. hitting $250,000 a month in sales c. increasing sales force by 50%
3) Create daily tasks to help you reach the micro-goals. In the example above in order to hit my first micro-goal I need to a. do competitive analysis of the competitions sales strategy b. create a pricing structure based on this analysis c. create a sales funnel that meets or beats competitors.

By making this a daily activity, you work daily on achieving your dreams. The upside as well is that by dissecting items like this you know that you can get minor achievements accomplished without burning out chasing the big prize.

1. Get Ready to be Broke

Tough lesson to learn. It gets even tougher when your company is actually generating revenue, but you need to reinvest it rather than take it off the table. Starting a company is about the long term investment, not the short term payoff. If you are focused in the short term, affiliate marketing or consulting is likely a better fit. These types of ventures allow you to run lucrative solo enterprises. If your goal is to build a company with a product or service that you are passionate about, then prepared for the early days of scraping.
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