Setting Business Objectives 101

Greetings, Anon.

Today we’re going to setting objectives with your business.

Sounds broad, right?

Well, to give some context, my W-2 in consulting works with banks to assess the performance of their consumer products. For example, we’ll come in to take a look at the historical performance of their debit portfolio and provide recommendations for how they can get cardholders to spend more.

With this, one of the first questions I often ask is, “how are you measuring the performance of your portfolio?”

I can’t tell you how often I get the response, “we don’t…”

How does someone, who owns a portfolio, not measure its performance?

The idea is crazy to me. But think about this, anon…

How many people go to the gym and don’t use a lifting journal? How many people put money away for retirement but don’t track its performance? How many people want to be better golf players but don’t keep a log of their scores?

The list of use cases is endless, and I’m just as guilty in certain aspects of my life of not tracking performance.

However, over the last year, I can’t emphasize how important it has been to measure the performance of my textbook reselling business. Particularly when starting out, it is crucial to be aware of performance in the testing phase.

People don’t just float into a profitable business that contributes to their income…

They set goals, build strategies to achieve those goals, and make changes when necessary.

I want my textbook reselling business to scale to a point where I can pay myself $3,000/month.

Bowtiedbookseller, how are you going to do that?

Well, as of August 2024, my average proft / book is $15.

Therefore, I would need to sell ~200 books per month in order to achieve my objective.

Now, this is just a high-level example of the type of thinking that’s required to grow a business, while keeping reality in check. I would argue that it’s one of the most important parts of growing a business.

Over the next few sections, I’ll break down how I think about building a dashboard of performance and setting objectives.