Align and Thrive: Unleashing the Power to Achieve Your Goals

Rob Brown  0:05  

Taking action is critical. And when you’re working on 12-month goals, when you think about what is the most important thing for me to do today to get towards 12 months.

Phil Calandra  0:19  

All success in life comes from acting. All failure in life comes from reacting. And if you’ve gotten behind after a simple 30 days of passing of time, what are you going to do?

Rob Brown  0:38  

Welcome to The Truest Fan Blueprint, a podcast for financial advisors, and other professionals looking to get the most out of yourself and your business. I’m Rob Brown, and my partner, Phil Calandra and I promise to walk you through a journey that will allow you to take action in your business and your life, so that you can be the best that you can possibly be. Thanks for listening. 

Welcome back to The Truest Fan Blueprint, I’m your host, Rob Brown, and Phil Calandra here. Phil, it’s the end of January. And as I talked to folks, one of the things that’s already happening is people are feeling like they’re falling behind on their goals, that January went by like a blur. And they’re feeling behind, like the year is almost shot, maybe not that desperate. But I think you get the point. Are you seeing the same thing and not just this year, in other years?

Phil Calandra  1:46  

Well, I think it’s something that repeats itself over and over again. That’s why we chose it as a topic. And I’m excited to get into it. Because there’s some very specific reasons that you and I agree as to why this happens. So I would say yes to that question. 

Rob Brown  2:03  

Yeah. Oh, good. Then we chose something that we can talk about for a few minutes. Yeah, let’s dig into this. I was doing some research, just trying to better understand the planning process. I’m a bit of a process nerd, at least a couple of my friends suggest that to me, and I love reading about time management and goal setting. And a phrase that came out of the research was that 12-month planning doesn’t work. And on one hand, I thought, well, you know, we in our process, The Truest Fan Blueprints, have our clients set 12-month goals. But on the other hand, we also know that if they don’t break those goals down into more manageable pieces, and we like to do that in 90-day sprints, that the goals are less likely to get done, that if you think about your goals only in 12-month timeframes, you tend to overestimate how much you’re going to be able to get done. And that’s where that, maybe that feeling of falling behind already to being a January starts to enter into the equation. 

Phil Calandra  3:13  

Yeah, I agree. Because if you think about measuring your progress, the reason that people fall behind is because they haven’t formulated the action plan, the action steps, which we call TFAP, Truest Fan Action Plan. If you don’t build the action steps around the goal, it stands to reason that the 12-month goal is going to fall flat. Because all success in life comes from acting. All failure in life comes from reacting. And if you’ve gotten behind, after a simple 30 days of passing of time, what are you going to do? You’re either going to take some action, and hopefully you listen to us. You go on to the roundtable and see this for yourself, you’ve taken the action to create that plan, or to your point, you’re 30 days in or it’s going to turn out that you’re 60 days in or 90 days into the year and then you’re going to what, react and then this thing spills out of control, spins out of control. I’ve seen this happen time and time in my own life, whether it’s in my business, whether it was in personal athletic pursuits, you get behind and you react as opposed to acting continuously on a plan. And that’s my encouragement to people to think about if they’re behind.

Rob Brown  4:32  

Yeah, you make a couple of great points there, Phil. If I expand on that, just a little bit. First of all, taking action is critical. And when you’re working on 12-month goals, when you think about what is the most important thing for me to do today to get towards 12 months, you got 12 months worth of things, of goals, to think about. So coming up with your daily pattern is harder but when you create your 90-day plan, what we call, as you said, The Truest Fan Action Plan, you know exactly what the most important things are for you to be working on. So there’s no procrastination, which is the other thing that happens. There’s no procrastination about what to do, because you know what it is, you know what your drivers are. And the other thing that we’ve found out in this process is that I said earlier, those 12-months goals tend to overestimate how much you’re able to accomplish. But what happens with our clients who do the 90-day planning, they actually exceed whatever they said they were going to do in their 12 months, because there’s a compounding effect to those actions that are broken down into those shorter periods of time.

Phil Calandra  5:49  

Yeah, right. And I think as I was listening to you, I was just thinking, you know, when you have the 12-month goal, if you don’t break it down, then you get trapped, right. If, for example, if you and your business wanted to add X number of new clients in the 12-month period, you would next want to break that down into quarters, and then likely into months, and or weeks. So if that was the goal, X number of new clients or X dollars of net new assets, then back away from that goal, and that’s where people stop and say, well, how many referral conversations do I need to have in the 90-day sprint or in the month, or in the week, or in the what, in the day, and we don’t do that. And then we wonder why we’re not garnering the referrals. I could go on and on like this, but that’s the way breaking down the, you know, the action items. And then the other thing I was thinking is we get into our comfort zone, and then we give up, right? It’s like the New Year’s resolution to lose 10 pounds. And then you go out to the first dinner with friends. And you have too many cocktails, you have the extra helping of mashed potatoes and you have dessert, and then you move diet, and then you say wow, you just give up at that point. Have a little more resilience, have a little more pride in yourself to stick to the action that’s going to take you where you want to go.

Rob Brown  7:14  

Right. But the, yes, it actually does. No, there is no but there. Well, I totally agree with what you’re saying. But I think about having that pride, that resilience in yourself and what it is you’re going about, what it is, your, the bad habit you’re trying to stop, or the good routines you’re trying to get into, you have to have, in some way, have to have a way of looking at them where it feels like it’s achievable. It’s in sight, right, because you know, another great example, we work with a lot of financial advisors who will set revenue goals for their businesses. Maybe they want to take their business from, I don’t know, generating a million dollars in revenues, which is the number that they hit last year. In this next year, they want to hit $1.2 million in revenues. But when you look at their monthly operating revenues, their recurring revenues, that’s, you know, $83,000 a month, when you’re going after a million dollars, I think that numbers right, are at 330 3 billion. So anyway, but to get to 1.2 million, it’s 100,000, right? But you’re probably not, if you’re operating at 83,000, not going to jump immediately to 100,000 in the next month. So as you are thinking about your goal for the year, you’ve got to break it back into those quarters saying there’s going to be this incremental change. So we’re going to see some increase, you know, to this level over the next 90 days. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. And over the next 90 days, when you do your planning, you’re going to get to a higher level so that you get to the point where you’re actually operating at a level that probably exceeds that $100,000 a month, but it takes you well past the goal for the year. And so that’s another way to think about why it’s important to pull it back, not to be so focused on 12 months, but what am I going to do this quarter, this sprint, which breaks it back down to today that I know that I’m working on the most important things that will help me achieve my most cherished goals. 

Phil Calandra  9:20  

Yeah, I think about your point there. If you’ve got to do, go from 83,000 of revenue a month to $100,000 a month. That’s like thinking that you’re gonna get on the scale and go from 200 pounds to a, you know, 180 pound. Just because you stepped back on the scale. You gotta look at it from the standpoint of your progress. And that’s a tough thing to do in human nature, in the way that we’re all wired. We want it to come fast. We want to step on the scale one month or one week or one day and then magically see it appear. It doesn’t happen that way. But if you’re tracking yourself, and you’re getting incrementally better. What was the, there was an old story kind of adage about, you know, one degree, if you boil water, and you’re one degree below the boiling point, all you have is hot water. But as soon as you get that temperature to boiling, and I’ve forgotten what the number is, off the top my head, once you have boiling water, you can move a steam engine, you can do a lot of things with that boiling point. But if you’re just shy of the boiling point, not boiling, all you have is hot water. But it’s incremental. It’s the, that’s one degree. So how do you get one degree better and one degree better? And then what you’ll find is the one becomes five becomes 10. And that’s when you think about, you know, I’m going 2 x my business or 5x my business or 10x my business. Doesn’t happen immediately. It’s a progression of action that gets you there.

Rob Brown  10:51  

Yeah. So as we come to the end of our podcast, we always want to leave our audience with something they can take action on. And since we’re talking about taking action, in a large part, during this full podcast, I think there’s a lot that we can leave folks with today. First of all, I would say if you feel like your year is off to a bad start, don’t give up, right? Because the sooner you give up, the sooner you start failing and feeling lousy about yourself. Just, you know, admit it, hey, I had a rough month, my year didn’t start the way I thought it would. And that’s okay. So I think that’s really an important thing to think about. The other thing that I would say is if you haven’t broken your year and you’re planning towards your goals into sprints, into a 90-day period of time, this is a great time to do it. There’s no magic to starting 90 days on the first of the year, or the first of the next quarter. You can start it today. Whatever day you’re listening to this podcast, you can say, you know, I’m going to look at the things that I really want to get done. And I’m going to start working on them and focus on this next 90-day period of time, right. And if you want some help with that, there are two things that you can do. You can actually get a free copy of our Truest Fan Action Plan. There’ll be a link to it in the notes below this podcast. So just look on the podcast page and you’ll see a link, they’ll take you to the page to get the free copy of The Truest Fan Action Plan. But the other thing that you can do is you can sign up for The Truest Fan Roundtable. This is a new initiative that Phil and I are about where we’re really trying to help our audience build more purposeful businesses by doing good planning. And so the first course that you go into if you join, the Truest Fan Roundtable will actually help you with this planning cycle. So that’s, just go to truestfancoaching.com. You can sign up there for free for the first two weeks. Like I said, you can start your first 90-day sprint right now, right after you finish listening to this podcast.

Phil Calandra  13:12  

Yeah, I’d encourage you to take action. That’s what this whole conversation has been about. If you’re crushing your goals, out of the gates in the month of January, keep going. We’re rooting for your success, keep digging, keep looking for those new ways that we can get better, that we can improve and, and have 2024. A year from now I’d like it Rob, if everybody listening to us just can say to themselves in the mirror, I blew out this year, I had an amazing year. I’m ready to go again. I’m supercharged. So like we say, we’re rooting for your success. 

Rob Brown  13:47  

Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I’m glad you made that point about people crushing it because face it, there are probably people in three camps right now. One, the one that I described where you’re feeling defeated, and we said, don’t let that get you down, keep going. Or as Phil said, the one where you’re crushing it, you want to keep going, or there’s some ways that you can improve your processes, you might be able to benefit from reviewing the way that you’re doing your planning. But there are also people in the middle. They’re feeling, okay, they feel like they’re on target. And, you know, we’re all about helping our audience, helping our clients continuously improve, because, there’s, all of us can get better at lots of things every day. That’s how you achieve peak performance. You don’t go from non-peak performance today, to peak performance tomorrow. You just gradually improve what you’re doing and that, right. That’s a big part of the success that we want our audience to have. That’s right. So Phil, I think that’s a wrap, lots of great stuff and we encourage you all, go to truestfancoaching.com and sign up for The Truest Fan Roundtable. Take care.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of The Truest Fan Blueprint. If you want to learn more, head over to our website truestfan.com. On the site, you’ll learn more about becoming a truest fan. You’ll also find today’s show notes and links to the other gifts and resources we talked about during this episode. Again, thanks for listening and remember, we’re rooting for your success.