How To Systematically Set & Demolish Goals In Your Business

A framework for allocating your scarce resources of time & attention

Nov 16, 2025

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Now onto today’s newsletter.

The single highest-leverage activity in your business is not marketing, sales, hiring, or product creation.

It’s ALIGNMENT

And in this post I’m going to walk you through the exact system we use to set goals across our portfolio of education businesses that’s served over 30,000 customers in the last 5 years.

Now let’s get right into it:

If you prefer to learn via video + audio, you can watch me break this framework down on YouTube:

Here’s the exact 10-step process I use to set goals in my business

Step 0: Understand goals are just math
Step 1: Identify a monthly revenue goal
Step 2: Identify your current trailing monthly revenue
Step 3: Quantify the gap between your goal and your current
Step 4: Identify if your bottleneck is volume or efficiency
Step 5: Brain dump list of all ways to solve that bottleneck
Step 6: Rank each item on Impact (1-5) and Effort (1-5)
Step 7: Attack each 1 Effort “Low-Hanging Fruit”
Step 8: Set 1-3 strategic high-impact initiatives
Step 9: Block 3 hours per day to work on just that most important initiative until it is complete
Step 10: Repeat the exercise to identify the new thing to work on

Let’s walk through each of steps one by one.

For each of them, I’ll give a high-level overview about how to think about it + walk through a full example using the framework to set goals for one of the profit centers in our business.

Step 0: Understand goals are just math

This is the most important insight to understand when setting goals in your business.

The gap between where you are and where you want to be is one number.

That number is made up by an equation that has input metrics + efficiency metrics.

Your job is to analyze that equation and find out the part of the equation that needs fixing to unlock the next level of growth.

The part that needs fixing will create a new demand of you — some kind of new thing you’re not currently doing required to improve it.

Those demands will force actions that you need to work on every day until those demands are met & the equation looks like you want.

That’s it.

Everything that is not improving your equation is a distraction.

And so most of business goal setting is around getting extremely clear on the gap, the demands it creates, the actions that fulfill those demands, and then ignoring everything else and staying focused on those few critical actions.

Let’s walk through what that looks like.

Step 1: Identify a monthly revenue goal

The first step is the easiest: where do you want to go?

This goal will serve as the direction guiding the rest of our actions & analysis. Most business owners cannot name the monthly revenue milestone they’re climbing toward, and that lack of clarity shows in how they operate. This doesn’t have to be a forever goal, just pick something you want to consistently achieve over the next 2-4 months.

It will be helpful to see how we do this in practice, so in each step I’m going to walk through an example of applying this framework to our business. In our case, let’s use an example of us wanting to hit $500k of new front end cash collected for our Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

Step 2: Identify your current trailing monthly revenue

The next step is also easy: where are you currently?

Look back at your last 30 days to find total revenue generated. If you cannot easily find this number, we’ve found our first bottleneck: data. (We’ll talk more about that one in the forth step)

In our example, we did $330k of front end new cash collected last month for this particular vertical.

Step 3: Quantify the gap between goal & current

Now we’re going to measure the distance between where we are and where we want to go.

Gap = goal revenue - trailing 30-day revenue

In our case, we are $170k short of our goal.

Armed with this gap, we now need to build an equation that allows us to reverse engineer the necessary inputs to close it.

Step 4: Identify the type of bottleneck you have

This step deserves its own post, or even its own book (wink wink) but I’ll simplify the idea of bottleneck analysis as best I can.

At the highest level, your bottleneck will fall into 1 of 3 categories:

Data → you actually have no clue what your bottleneck is because you are not measuring the data that allows you to spot it. This is where most businesses find themselves. They don’t know how their business works, so they don’t know what parts need fixing. As we walk through the next few steps, you will know you have a data bottleneck if you’re unable to easily complete the rest of the exercise.
Demand → you have a demand bottleneck if your business could take on 50-100% more customers than you currently have without any fulfillment systems breaking. Most businesses are demand constrained. With a demand constrained business, you will either have a volume bottleneck or an efficiency bottleneck:
- You have an efficiency bottleneck if you could reach your goal by more efficiently converting the number of leads coming in on a monthly basis
- You have a volume bottleneck if you are at “good enough” KPI on all of your efficiency metrics and simply need more people coming into the system. I’ll talk more about how to find the KPIs for your particular business in the steps below
Supply → you have a supply bottleneck if your business either 1) has a fulfillment/product issue right now or 2) would have a fulfillment/product issue if you increased demand by 50%. With a supply constrained business, you will either have a quality bottleneck, a capacity bottleneck, or an efficiency bottleneck
- You have a quality bottleneck if your business is failing to generate results, has high refund rates, or generally your customers are not happy
- You have an efficiency bottleneck if your current team is fulfilling on a number of customers that is below what they could fulfill on with better tech/processes/systems
- You have a capacity bottleneck if bringing on new customers into your business is impossible because you cannot fulfill or deliver the service for those additional customers AND you’ve squeezed out any efficiency gains to deliver more efficiently

It would be difficult for me to list 50+ examples of different businesses to show you these in action, so part of this is on you to think through your business system and spot the type of bottleneck you have. But here’s a quick rundown of some rough rules of thumb we’ve followed across our portfolio:

If you have a service-based business as a solopreneur, there’s a good chance you have a demand constraint. You need to make more content, run more ads, or reach out to more people. Or you need to a better job doing those things. In the rare case that you are fully maxed out capacity-wise, you likely have an efficiency bottleneck. Spend time making yourself more efficient + raising your prices. Then once you’ve done both of those things, you have a capacity constraint. If you want to keep growing, you will either need to hire a team to free up more of your time or offload some of the fulfillment.
If you have a software business, there’s a good chance you have a demand constraint or a product quality constraint. If your churn is > 5% per month, you have a product quality constraint. Invest more time in talking to users + getting that number below 5% before you start to marketing more aggressively. If your churn looks good and people are staying, turn your attention toward generating demand.

If you have a digital products business, there’s a good chance you also have a demand constraint or a product quality constraint. If the NPS score of your product is above 60, your product is in good shape and you can move on to generating more demand. If you aren’t measuring NPS scores, you have a data constraint. Start surveying each customer at various parts of the customer journey and ask how likely they are to recommend your product to a friend. If you’re measuring it correctly and your NPS score is below 60, you need to spend more time talking to customers and figuring out what else they’re looking for and what’s missing so you can generate better results.

This type of thinking is what I spend nearly all of my time doing at the moment.

If you want my personal help analyzing your constraints & installing the right playbook to remove that bottleneck, DM the word SCALE on Instagram with a few sentences about your business and I’ll send over some info on how I can help.

Now let’s apply this framework to the example we started in the last few steps.

Do we have a data bottleneck? Absolutely not. We’ve invested a ton of time & effort to make sure we have measurement systems in place to make the correct decisions.
Do we have a supply bottleneck? No. If we added 50% more leads to our business, we have the capacity to fulfill them due to excess student success team & sales team capacity.
Do we have a demand bottleneck? Yes. We have excess fulfillment capacity and need to close the gap with more customers.

Great! We’ve identified there is a demand bottleneck.

Now, do we have a volume bottleneck or an efficiency bottleneck?

To find out, we need to map the full funnel equation from click to close for someone who purchases our 1:1 + group coaching program.

Visits landing page → opts in → fills out application → books call → we approve the call → shows up for call → purchases → pays

That’s the entire funnel modeled out in a singular formula. The value equation in your business will differ, but take the time to map the entire thing out.

For our business, we split this journey up between marketing and sales. Marketing owns everything until the person books a call. Sales owns everything that happens after that.

So now we can model out each step of the equation to measure our efficiency metrics.

For our particular business, the golden number for marketing efficiency is around 8% kept call to lead ratio. And for sales efficiency, the number is around $1000 cash collected per booked call.

Marketing efficiency: Lead to kept call ratio: ~8%
- Landing page conversion: 35%
- % of leads who fill out an app: ~45%
- % of apps that we keep on the calendar: 20%

From a marketing perspective, every metric is in line with an acceptable level based on industry standards. Again, these will differ for your business, so take the time to find your own metrics & have conversations with other people who operate the same type of business as you do if you’re unsure.

Now, let’s say that our landing page conversion was something like 5%. That would be an example of massive efficiency bottleneck. Getting that in line with industry standards would result in a 700% increase in throughput of the system (going from 5% to 35% is not a 20% increase, it’s a 700% increase).

Moving on to the sales efficiency metrics:

Sales efficiency: $900 per booked call on average
- 75% show rate
- 75% up front cash collected
- 22% close rate @ $6.8k price point

Both of our efficiency ratios for sales & marketing are in good shape.

If you’re unsure, look at the efficiency metrics in your formula and ask yourself: could I realistically double this metric?

In our case, the answer is clearly no. We are not going to double the conversion of a landing page, or a close rate, or a show rate, or any sub-step of our funnel. Maybe we could eke out 10-15% additional gains, but that is not going to be enough to reach our goal or fill the excess capacity.

This means we need to turn all of our attention toward volume.

Now—this is where the gap number we calculated in the last step comes into play. We need to divide our gap in dollar terms into an input-focused marketing number so that we have a goal to align the marketing department.

To do this, you can choose any metric in your value equation and divide the total amount of revenue you generated last month by that metric. This gets you the dollar per X → X being whatever metric you choose.

In our example, we could dive $330k by the number of leads and get the $ per lead. Then we could focus all of our attention on generating more leads. Or we could do the same thing per application. Or per call. Or even per landing page visitor.

The pro-tip here is you want to start with the number that is closest to the actual value collected as the variance will be lowest when you optimize for that number.

For example, we could zoom all the way out and set our goal to be generate more PAGE VIEWS to our landing page by generating the dollar value per page view. But that is 7 or 8 steps away from the actual collection of money, meaning all of the further downstream metrics could be impacted. If we start doing a ton of things to drive more clicks to the page, we might find that our opt in rate changes significantly, or our call-booking rate, etc.

So instead, we want to go further down the chain and optimize for the number of booked calls. We first find the dollar collected per booked call, then divide our gap by that number to find the gap of booked calls.

$170k cash collected short of our goal (found in our prior step)
@ $900 per booked call average cash collected (found in our prior step)
$170k/$900 = 188 calls short of our goal, assuming all other metrics stay the same

We currently book around 400 calls per month, so we need to raise that number to around 600.

Great—we have an extremely clear goal to work toward.

Now it’s time to take action. What do we do to reach that goal? And how do we know we’re working on the right thing?

Step 5: Brainstorm all the ways you can fix that bottleneck

This is where the process will diverge significantly based on the bottleneck you identified.

However, the principles will remain the same. We are going to think about all the ways that we could remove our bottleneck in a big creative brainstorm. And the best way to approach this is through the Alex Hormozi’s “more/better/new” framework.

More → you’re going to look at all the things you’re currently doing and think if doing more of that thing would remove your bottleneck
Better → you’re going to look at all the things you’re currently doing and ask if doing them better would remove your bottleneck
New → lastly, you will look at all the new things you could potentially do that you think would remove your bottleneck

Let’s look at some potential examples based on the different types of bottlenecks:

If you have a Data bottleneck…
- Likely need to track more data points or increase the frequency (more), improve the quality of your current tracking system (better), or install new tracking systems (new).
If you have a Supply bottleneck…
- If you have a Capacity bottleneck… → interview more candidates (more), create a better hiring funnel (better), or maybe start hiring in the first place (new)
- If you have an Efficiency bottleneck… → stop doing something that isn’t worth it to free up time on higher-leverage things (more), improve your AI usage to do things faster (better), or install new software that saves time/effort (new)
- If you have a Quality bottleneck… → spend more time talking to users (more), invest more time improving the depth of your product (better), or start offering something that you aren’t currently offering that could generate better results (new)
If you have a Demand bottleneck…
- If you have a Volume bottleneck… → post more content (more), spend more money on ads (more), post better content (better), post better ads (better), start posting on a new channel (new), start advertising on a new channel (new)
- If you have an Efficiency bottleneck… → call your leads more (more), improve your VSL or sales call booking page (better), start implementing a 2-call close (new), start doing daily sales training with your team (new)

Again, these will differ depending on your business, your team, your revenue level, the platforms you use, etc. These examples are just meant to get the juices flowing.

Now let’s apply this to our example in our demand-constrained business.

If we needed to book 188 more calls, what are all the things we could do?

First we look at all the places we’re currently generating traffic and make a list of all the places we could do “more.” This is our highest risk-adjusted return and return on effort.

Places we could do “more”:

More viral drops on LinkedIn? Already at 1x per week, likely capped out
More posting on Instagram? Posting 2x per day, capped out
More emails? Sending daily email, capped out
More YouTube videos? Opportunity here

So from that list, we have:

Post more YouTube videos
Increase ad spend on our webinar to get more people to show up live and here us talk

Now what about “better?”

We want to look at all the places we’re currently posting and ask if there are any volume-generating areas that we could do things better to get more out of the current slots we’re using.

Better posts on LinkedIn? Maybe
Better posts on Instagram? Maybe
Better emails? Likely some result
Better YouTube videos? Not posting right now so need to do more first

So from that list we have:

Better posts on LinkedIn
Better posts on Instagram
Better emails

Lastly we want to think about “new.”

What are all the things we aren’t currently doing that we think could help us generate more calls.

Start having a daily outbound dial cadence to our entire list of leads to maximize self sets → great idea
Launch a low-ticket funnel that allows us to have a ≤ 7-day payback period on the ads we run to get more people into our ecosystem → also a great idea
Run a paid 3-day “Ghostwriting Clients” challenge → basically a webinar on steroids

Alright now we have a list of all the things we could do to remove our bottleneck. We then sort them into one long list of potential things we could work on.

Start having a daily outbound dial cadence to our entire list of leads to maximize self sets → great idea
Launch a low-ticket funnel that allows us to have a ≤ 7-day payback period on the ads we run to get more people into our ecosystem → also a great idea
Run a paid 3-day “Ghostwriting Clients” challenge
Start making better posts on LinkedIn
Start making better posts on Instagram
Start writing better emails
Post more YouTube videos
Increase ad spend on our webinar to get more people to show up live and here us talk

Great—we have a good mix of things we could do more of, things we could do better, and new things we need to do.

We should just get to work on the first one right?

WRONG!!!

We only have limited time, energy, & resources. We need to deploy that into the things that have the highest likelihood of helping us close the gap and reach our goal.

How do we do that?

Using a simple ranking algorithm.

For each of these initiatives, we want to choose the ones that have the highest likelihood of getting us closer to our 188 additional booked calls goal relative to the amount of effort it takes.

So we are going to rank them across two dimensions:

Impact (1-5). 5 being we think it has the potential to book an additional 200 calls if we JUST did that thing, 1 being it’s only likely to book a handful more calls.
Effort (1-5). 5 being this would be extremely resource intensive with the entire team / lots of time & effort deployed on it, 1 being a very quick win you could just “do” or “decide on” in under an hour

Once we’ve ranked them on these two dimensions, we’re going to calculate an “Impact/Effort Ratio” that will be our guiding metric for choosing what to work on.

With that metric calculated, we will resort our potential project list from highest to lowest impact/effort ratio, then get to work on the 3 highest ranking projects.

So you can see this in action, here is our actual list of stack ranked initiatives across each dimension with commentary on how we arrived at that number.

Please, please take the time to do this full exercise for your business.

Do not skip this part!!!

Make the list of all the things you could do
Rank them on effort & impact
Find the impact to effort ratio
Reorganize the list sorted on that number from high to low
THEN, only then, do you start to work on things

Over the next few steps, we will choose the things to work on and MORE IMPORTANTLY choose all the things not to work on.

Step 7: Attack each 1 Effort “Low-Hanging Fruit”

From the list of things you’ve generated, there will be be a handful of “1” effort projects.

Even if these are relatively low-impact, you should tackle these immediately. You should be able to knock these out in under 2-3 hours. They will be either immediate changes, 1-off decisions, or something else along those lines that don’t take a lot of time.

You want to tackle these because they are will almost always have an impact/effort ratio above 1. Those type of quick wins stack up and will help you build momentum heading into the following steps.

In our example, we actually don’t have any 1-ranked effort projects, so we will skip this step. We have built a culture that usually attacks these opportunities the second they present themselves, so there is nothing glaringly easy to work on.

Once you’ve attacked those quick wins, it’s time to set the high-level strategic initiatives.

Step 8: Set 1-3 strategic high-impact initiatives

Now is where things start to get fun.

In this step, we’re going to scan our highest impact to effort ratio projects and hone in on them.

At absolute MOST here, you should pick the top 3. Bonus points for picking just the top 2. And extreme gold star focus points for picking just the top 1.

These initiatives are where all of your discretionary focus & effort should go.

The best way to figure out if you’re focused enough is if your mind continues to drift toward this initiative when you take a shower / go on a walk / wake up in the morning. When your mind is clear on its most important initiatives, it will be CONSTANTLY working on it in the background.

Everything else on this list you’re going to make an active choice to not do, yet. If it feels uncomfortable to choose not to do things that you know could improve the business, that’s a good thing. Congratulations, you just prioritized for the first time.

At this stage, you should see how the way most people operate is completely incorrect & inefficient. They have no filtering system for choosing what to work on. A new idea pops up and they immediately start working on it (or worse, having their team work on it). They repeat this cycle every day and every week for months and months on end and wonder why they are never growing.

(And no, I’m not immune to operating this way. Most of the point of this note is a reminder to myself to actually use this system rather than just talk about it. It’s not easy to turn down ideas in favor of others. But the people who move the fastest in business are the ones who recognize the scarcity of their resources and deploy them only in the highest-leverage initiatives.)

Now, back to our example.

For us, the first one is just a “decision” → we are going to go much bigger for this webinar and risk more to get more people to show up. We’re going to run a VIP version that hopefully lets us get a good chunk of ad spend back before the event that derisks things by 30-50% before we even begin.

Next we’re going to build a low-ticket $27 product funnel that will let us run a low-ticket cold funnel, have an asset to create VIP webinars, and have a new product that our organic audience can buy to reengage them. This will take significant amounts of team effort, but our hypothesis is that effort is worth it.

Lastly we’re going to invest in writing better emails. To do that, we need to diversify the types of emails we send, implement more story-driven narrative-type emails that build more emotional resonance with us/our story, and provide even more high-quality education that builds reader trusts and makes applying more likely.

From here the steps/rules start to diverge based on whether you are a small-team/solo operator or have a more fleshed out team

For those with a small team / who operate by themselves, you are going to have to block time to attack these while continuing to run all of the other things you have going on in the business. If you want to grow, you have to do all the work you’re currently doing to fulfill + allocate extra effort toward the things that help you grow.

For those with a larger team/department heads/multiple profit centers within the business, you can run this exercise at the department level that helps each profit center work on the profit-maximizing things. Then you will have each of your individual contributors/department heads be the ones who are responsible for doing the actual execution of these initiatives.

Step 10: Repeat the exercise to identify the new thing to work on

From here, we’re going to attack the initiatives we’ve chosen until they are complete/up and running. Then we simply repeat this exercise when setting new goals.

In our case, part of our goals just require us to invest more money into paid ads. So there’s a world where once we do the first two initiatives, all we have to do is increase our ad spend and then continue to do the things we’re doing. At that point, reaching our goals likely becomes an efficiency problem, which we would find by repeating the exercise.

Then, we repeat this exercise every couple weeks/months/quarters for as long as we are in business.

Aaaand that’s it. That’s the entire framework we use to set goals inside every vertical of our business.

To recap all 10 steps:

Step 0: Understand goals are just math
Step 1: Identify a monthly revenue goal
Step 2: Identify your current trailing monthly revenue
Step 3: Quantify the gap between your goal and your current
Step 4: Identify if your bottleneck is volume or efficiency
Step 5: Brain dump list of all ways to solve that bottleneck
Step 6: Rank each item on Impact (1-5) and Effort (1-5)
Step 7: Attack each 1 Effort “Low-Hanging Fruit”
Step 8: Set 1-3 strategic high-impact initiatives
Step 9: Block 3 hours per day to work on just that most important initiative until it is complete
Step 10: Repeat the exercise to identify the new thing to work on

Give it a try and let me know what you think by leaving a comment below. I personally read and respond to every one of them.

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