How are you accomplishing the most important—not urgent—goals for your business? How are you determining whether you have actually accomplished these goals? You do this with a GAMEplan. This stands for:

• G — Goal
• A — Action Items
• M — Metrics
• E — Execution

You can use this concept to prioritize and accomplish the most important tasks for your business or life.

Last week’s post was all about business statistics, both company-wide (gross) and per-customer (unit). If you have done the work to collect all of this data for your business, what do you do with it? You’ve likely noticed areas that could be improved in your metrics, so how should a business owner start that process?

You need to identify the goals that will move the business in the direction you want. These goals need to be important. They can be urgent or not, but they should not be unimportant. For example, if you fail to address something in the next couple of months that would cause the business to fail, that is both important and urgent.

Start by establishing goals for this month—the most important things to improve about your business. You should be able to easily say, with a yes or no answer, if you accomplished the goals.

Once you have determined your goals, identify the actions you believe will accomplish your goals. For example, you may aim to reduce churn from 6% to 5% in the upcoming month. Below are some potential actions that could help achieve that goal:

• Identify indicators of clients who are likely to cancel
• Identify time periods of elevated cancellation risk. This could be the lifespan of the client (e.g., the first six months) or maybe tied to the calendar year (e.g., summer)
• Establish SOP for high-risk clients (e.g., send them an email to schedule a call)
• Establish SOP for high-risk time periods (e.g., schedule fun events during the summer, like a lifting meet followed by a barbeque)
• Have automated onboarding & and follow-up processes for early clients

These are some examples, and they might not actually accomplish the goal. You’ll need to be able to measure progress toward a goal with metrics.

Just like in lifting, metrics help you objectively determine if you’re moving toward your goals or not. As you set up your GAMEplan, you’ll need to schedule a time at the end of the month to assess your progress. Depending on what you accomplished, you may focus on different goals for next month, or try different action items to move toward the ones that fell short. Once you’ve decided all of this, create a new GAMEplan for the next month.

When setting up your GAMEplan, you’ll also need to schedule time to complete action items. A good strategy to use is the Pomodoro technique, which we’ve talked about before.

Be careful to not be overly ambitious with your goals. A month is not that long. You still have your regular tasks to complete for running your business, and trying to focus on too many goals can dilute your attention and effectiveness. If you find you have chosen lots of important goals, reduce the list down to 4 or fewer. The rest can wait for next month. This will allow you to spend more time and effort on a few things, which will increase your success rate.

Keep developing ambitious goals, pursue them with actions you believe will accomplish them, and measure them with metrics. Then execute and assess. There are many ways you can err with the GAMEplan, but with each cycle you will accomplish more and refine your ability to improve your business with deliberate action.