Goal Setting: Why the Feedback Loop Matters

Goal Setting: Why the Feedback Loop Matters 

One of the most important things we can have in our lives, both personally and professionally, is goals. Setting goals gives us something to continually strive for, keeps us motivated as we move forward, and gives us a way to measure ourselves on a path of growth.

Where do you want to take your business or your career? Is the goal to build up the team internally and work yourself out of the day to day? Is it to spend more time with family, travel more, or have more time for your hobbies?

Setting goals is a great first move, but the next step is building in a feedback loop for accountability. Without that feedback loop, even the most well-intended goals can quickly get lost in the busy shuffle of life.

Professionally, one way to approach goal setting is to think about where you want to be 5 to 10 years from now. Once you have a picture of where you want to be over that time frame, work backwards to the intermediate goals and steps it will take to get there. This usually means building out 1- and 3-year goals, along with the plan behind them, that move you toward the long-term vision.

From there, the short-term goals are the near-term steps that help you hit the intermediate goals, and ultimately the long-term ones. In business, the common time frame for reviewing these targets is every quarter.

The most important part of setting quarterly goals is getting back together at the end of the quarter to analyze how you did. Did you hit your targets, and is everything still taking shape toward the intermediate and long-term goals? If so, great. If not, what was missed, and how do you get back on track?

One of the books I read recently on planning made the point that the plan itself is much less important than the act of planning. In my mind, goal setting works the same way. The quarterly check-ins, and the conversations about how the short-term goals are adding up to the long-term ones, are what keep everything on track toward the big picture.

This is the same practice we started at Schulz Wealth toward the end of 2022. Before that, we had discussions about internal goals, but not with the structured feedback loop we have now. At the end of 2023, we mapped out a set of 3-year goals covering 2024, 2025, and 2026. At the time, those goals seemed a little crazy. As we work toward putting a bow on 2026, I looked back at that plan and realized we had achieved those goals a quarter early. I firmly believe that if we had not built the structure for those internal progress reviews, we would not have reached this level of success as quickly as we did.

The same idea translates to goals outside of the office too. These could be health goals, family goals, or how you plan to keep your mind engaged after you are done working. Whatever the goal is, setting out a roadmap with a feedback loop to check in with yourself will help you get there faster.

In a recent conversation with a professional coach, his advice for tracking out-of-office goals was to use a habit tracker. Decide on the habits that support your bigger picture goals, then measure yourself weekly on how well you stuck to them. Your goals and target habits will undoubtedly change over time, but creating the space to set them, and then checking in on the process, will help you build the best version of yourself for whatever season of life you are in.

Build out your goals, build out the roadmap and feedback loop, and build out the best version of yourself.

Until next time,

Austin Smith CFA®, CFP®