Last January, you wrote down a number. Maybe it was revenue. Maybe a client count, or a launch you were sure would happen by spring. Go find it, and put this year’s actual number next to it.
For most of the business owners I work with, those two numbers aren’t close. What comes next is almost always a conversation about effort. Where she dropped the ball. Which quarter slipped away. The gap often gets read as a character report.
But it usually isn’t one. Most of the time, the number was off the day it was written.
Where the Number Came From
Think about how you set it. You probably looked at your best season and extended that trend. The year you had the most energy and the fewest competing obligations at home. That version of you became the baseline, and every goal after that was built for her.
She’s not around anymore. Not because anything went wrong, but because a year passed and you’re a different person running a different business. The goal still addresses the old you.
This month’s Book Club pick, Begin Again with G.R.A.C.E. by D. Nichole Davis, looks at this in a unique way. Davis is a lawyer who survived three strokes in 2022 and rebuilt her goal-setting process from scratch because every framework she found assumed she had a full tank. She didn’t. She talks about rebuilding from a quarter tank and watching every goal she had set the old way crumble under the weight of capacity she no longer had.
You don’t need a medical crisis for this to hit home. A tough year will do it. So will a move, a change in your kid’s schedule, a lost client, or just the slow piling on of a business that’s gotten more complicated.
Two Letters
Davis tweaks the SMART framework by changing two words. Achievable becomes adaptive. Relevant becomes realistic.
That difference is bigger than it sounds. Achievable asks if something is possible in theory, which is almost always yes, so it’s rarely helpful. Adaptive asks if it fits the person setting it, in the actual season she’s in. Relevant asks if the goal matters. Realistic asks what this particular year can actually handle.
Two words, and the whole exercise shifts from dreaming big to doing the math.
Ambition Isn’t the Problem
There’s solid research behind this. In The Stretch Goal Paradox, published in Harvard Business Review, Sim Sitkin, Chet Miller, and Kelly See found that ambitious targets tend to work for organizations coming off a win with extra resources, but tend to backfire for those already in trouble. The paradox? The second group reaches for big goals more often because a big number feels like a way out of the hole.
Small businesses do this every December. The year was tough, so next year’s target gets bumped up. We set our most ambitious goals when we have the least wiggle room to absorb a miss.
Reverse the Math
Here’s where I suggest putting your focus this month. Revenue is an output, but nobody sets the inputs. The inputs are where a goal lives or dies.
Take your 2027 number and work backward. Divide by your average engagement value to get a client count. Multiply that by the hours each client actually takes, including unpaid time. Add the lead volume you’d need at your real conversion rate, then the marketing hours required to generate those leads.
Now put that total number of hours next to the hours you actually have.
I run this for my own business every year, and it’s why I cap my client list. On paper, it looks like I’m leaving money on the table. But the math says otherwise. Working six hours ahead of most of my clients cuts down overlap, and an extra client just doesn’t fit without something else breaking. The cap isn’t modesty—it’s math.
Most goals die right there, in about forty seconds. And that’s a good death. Better now than in August.
Check at Sixty Days
One more thing worth borrowing. When Davis set her first goal after her strokes, she gave herself ninety days to get back to presenting—seated if necessary, with a printed script as backup. She checked in at sixty days, adjusted the timeline, and delivered at eighty-three days.
That midpoint check made it work. Most of us set goals and then avoid looking at them until the deadline passes, turning a fixable timeline into a failure. Put a date on the calendar sixty days out—not to judge the goal, but to tweak it while it’s still easy to adjust.
Davis calls this type of goal a truth contract, not a performance contract. That’s the right way to think about it. A goal that honestly reflects your capacity will survive contact with your actual year. One that doesn’t will collapse, and you’ll spend twelve months treating a math error like a personal failure.
Write down the honest number. You can always beat it.