TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up Internet? My name is Ian Bloom. Welcome to Nerd Finance! I’m your resident financial life planner and huge nerd. In today’s episode we are going to be talking a little bit about goal-setting and my firm’s goals for 2020. I have a pretty big belief that if you don’t put your goals out there you probably won’t achieve them, so here we go.
Let’s start off with a simple question: Why does goal-setting matter? Goal-setting matters because you should know whether you’ve achieved the thing that you want. Most people will know a little bit about what achieving their goal looks like, they may have visualized it in their head, but writing it down or putting it into some form of content memorializes that for you and then you can look back and go “Hahaha, that goal turned out way differently!” or you can say “Wow, I really did it!”
The next part of this topic is the elements of a good goal. A good goal has a description – some texture around it – it has a cost – what is it going to take to achieve that – and it has a time frame that you’re going to achieve that in. That way you know exactly what achieving that goal looks like. A good goal also probably provokes some feelings or thoughts around the goal. “What would achieving the goal feel like for you?” and “How would that change your life?”
So my firm’s goals for 2020 are fairly straightforward. The first is I would like to pick up two new clients a month in 2020. I’ve recognized that I can increase my capacity a little bit which is wonderful and thankfully clients are coming in, so I would like to continue to move the needle on that and grow pretty quickly in 2020. Two clients a month may not seem like a lot, but a new firm bringing on 24 clients a year – that’s a lot of clients! So, I think that will be pretty comfortable if that’s what I average. Now, I would like to accomplish that average so, 24 new clients by the end of next year. The cost of that goal is mostly going to be my time, effort, and energy.
My second goal for my firm in 2020 is going to be to put out the next version of A Gamer’s Guide to Money. We put out level 1 last year and it was really fun to do it. I’m really happy to have that out in the world, but I want to write some follow-up books. Obviously, level 1 only got a little bit of the financial foundation laid for the people reading it, it was a short book, and I think that that made it more digestible. It also meant that there’s a lot of stuff that I still want to talk about, so writing that next book and getting it published before August will be my goal again. Like last year I’d love to have the book and the audiobook ready on my firm’s anniversary.
Finally for my third goal, I would love to see this YouTube channel hit 200 subscribers. So, if you’re watching this video on Facebook, or on Twitter or something like that head on over to YouTube and just click the subscribe button. Even if you don’t use YouTube very often getting to 100 subscribers will enable me to have a custom URL, which will mean more people will watch it. Also having more subscribers means your channel gets promoted to more people. Frankly, I think that CFP®s should have a little bit more presence in the online community. We really don’t, so as a result I would love to see that happen by the end of next year. 200 subscribers isn’t that many, but it will enable me to to feel like I’ve achieved something so that’ll be nice.
In summary, goal-setting is important because it enables you to benchmark your achievements. It also means that the texture of a goal has a deadline, a cost, and a description to it. Finally, my firm’s goals for next year are to pick up 2 new clients a month, publish the new book, and get to 200 YouTube subscribers to increase the CFPs online presence in the financial community. I hope you have a wonderful day and thank you so much for watching!
