Goals

There's a moment in The Success Framework where everything changes gear, and this is it.

Up to now we've been setting direction. Who you are — your Values. Why you're even in business — your Purpose. Where that takes you — your Vision and your Legacy. Then we got structural: your Brand, your Business Model, your Value Proposition, an honest look at your Competition. That's the whole Analysis and Strategy stack, and it's been deliberately heady. A lot of reflecting. A lot of writing things down that you'd never quite put words to before.

Goals is where that stops. This is the section where we start getting really practical, tactical, tangible. It's the first move in Planning, and the whole job of Planning is to take everything you've decided about who you are and where you're going, and turn it into a concrete plan you could hand to your team on Monday and say: this is what we're building, and this is what we're doing about it.

So the question shifts. It's no longer "what's our direction?" It's "what do we bring the team together to deliver on? What are we actually doing to create the future we've defined?" That's Goals.

Why this isn't a brainstorm

Here's the trap I want you to sidestep before you start.

The instinct, when someone says "set your goals," is to grab a pen and start dreaming. Double the revenue. Hire a team. Win an award. It feels productive, and it's nearly useless — because a goal pulled out of thin air has nothing holding it in place. It's a wish with a deadline stapled to it. The first hard quarter comes along and it quietly disappears, because there was never a real reason for it beyond "that'd be nice."

That's not how we do it here. In The Success Framework, your goals are derived, not invented. They cascade down out of the work you've already done — and that's the whole reason we set direction first. The maths I keep coming back to: Values plus Purpose equals Vision. And your Vision and Legacy sit right around the ten-year mark. So your biggest goal isn't something you have to dream up from scratch on the day. You've already written it. We're just going to decompose it, layer by layer, from ten years all the way down to the next ninety days.

I'll be honest about why I built it this way. The framework is really just the answer to my own frustration — I was sick of running to a dozen different places for all the pieces of setting a great direction and a real plan. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, who created the BHAG, the Big Hairy Audacious Goal, laid out a brilliant process for the ten-year horizon. Shannon Susko's 3HAG WAY nails the three-year. Go and read both. What I've done is stitch the decomposition into one clean line you can walk from your Legacy down to a single quarter.

Four horizons, long to short

The plan lives across four time horizons, and the order is non-negotiable. You go long to short, because each one takes the one above it as its input.

Ten years — the scare-you goal. This is the BHAG. It should be arduous, but not overly arduous — big enough to frighten you a little, not so big it's fantasy. This is your Vision and your Legacy expressed as a goal. When I run people through it, I ask a few questions and let them sit: What will scare you to go after? What will fulfil you until you die? What will make every single day a great day, regardless of the rubbish flying around you? That's the Stoic in me, using the fact of death to create a bit of momentum. Read your Legacy and your Vision before you answer — you'll either write the ten-year goal fast, or find a hole in your direction that needs patching. Both are useful.

Three to five years — the bridge. Now you decompose. If you've got ten or fifteen things you want true at the ten-year mark, you look under each one and ask: what has to be in place at three years to make that inevitable? What will you have done to make sure you get the ten-year goal? Each ten-year goal sprouts a handful of three-year components beneath it.

Twelve months — the focus. Here it gets sharp. This is literally what you do in the next twelve months to move one or two of those things — not all of them. You review your longer horizons and pick the one or two goals that would create the most momentum in the direction you're already headed. Then: what will you have achieved in twelve months? What must happen in the business to feed the longer goals? And what are the measures that tell you you're on track?

The quarter — the doing. The most tactical layer: the stuff you actually have to do to make the twelve months real. You take one twelve-month goal, pick the priority, and ask: what do I have to do in the next ninety days? Who do I have to see? What are the consistent activities that make it all happen?

When it's done, you can stand back and look at a single traceable line — Legacy and Purpose, down through ten years, three years, twelve months, into this quarter — and you've got a genuinely clear plan for the business you said you wanted, with the people you want around you. A goal set at the quarterly level without a ten-year horizon above it drifts. A quarter with that whole line running up its spine doesn't.

One thing I'll say loudly, because it's easy to skip: write it down first. By hand, in a journal, before you touch any template or canvas. The journaling is where the brain-dump comes out of your head. Get the thinking onto paper, then structure it.

The thing that separates a goal from a wish

If the cascade is the skeleton, this next part is the muscle — and it's where most goal-setting falls down.

A goal that survives contact with a hard quarter isn't just a number on a horizon. It's been set with discipline. This is where I lean on some NLP-style goal-setting that I've found does the real work, and I'm not going to hand you the full worksheet here — that's reserved for the people I take through the framework properly — but I want you to see the shape of it, so you understand why it works rather than just what to tick.

Every goal gets run through a handful of checks. Is it stated in the positive — what you want, not what you want to stop? Are you the one who initiates it, or does it depend on someone else? If it's not only for you, you don't actually have control of it, and you need to go back and rework it. Is it sensory — can you see it, hear it, feel it, the way you would in the actual moment of having it? Have you run the ecology check — what you'll gain and lose if you get it, and what happens and doesn't happen if you don't? Those ecology questions feel weird the first time. Trust them. They surface the hidden costs a goal carries that you've never named out loud — and an unnamed cost is exactly what quietly sabotages a goal six weeks in.

I compress the whole thing into one word — CREATE: Clear, Realistic, Ecological, As-now, Towards what you want and Timed, and an End-step you'd recognise as evidence. Run a goal through CREATE and what comes out the other side is something defensible.

Then you write it in a very particular grammar, and this is the bit people find odd until they feel it work: "It is now [future date]. I am, or I have, [the end step]." Present tense. As though it's already happened. So instead of "I want a thousand users on my platform one day," it becomes: "It is now the 12th of August 2025, 9am. I'm at my desk looking at the dashboard, and there are a thousand active users on the platform I built." I did exactly that one for myself, live, when I taught this — sat in the future, named the date, described what I could see and hear and feel. Times are funny things. Say it as now, and your mind starts treating it as a destination it already knows the way to, rather than a hope it's allowed to forget.

That's the difference. A wish is verbal and vague. A goal is sensory, ecological, self-initiated, and written as already real. Everything downstream gets built on these — so it's worth doing them properly, because if the goals are wishes, everything that decomposes from them is decomposing the wrong thing.

Where this points

Goals is the opening of Planning, and it hands a clean baton to everything after it. Strategies and Tactics decompose straight off these goals — strategies are the essential courses of action, tactics are how you hit the quarterly objectives. Habits installs the daily behaviours that compound towards them. Marketing inherits your three-year goals. And your Operating Rhythm is what you meet against, quarter by quarter. None of it has anything solid to stand on if the four horizons aren't set, and set well.

So if you take one thing from this section: don't dream your goals. Derive them. Cascade them down from the Vision you've already composed, set each one with enough discipline that it holds under pressure, and write them as though they're already true.

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Here's the question I'd leave you sitting with. Forget the ten-year goal for a second. Look at the next ninety days — can you name one thing you'd do this quarter that traces, in a clean line, all the way back to your ten-year Vision? If you can, you're already running the cascade, whether you've called it that or not. If you can't, that's not a failure — it's the most useful thing you could notice today. It means the plan and the direction haven't been wired together yet, and that's exactly the wiring this section does.

That's the work here, properly done: the moment your identity and your strategy stop being a beautiful document and become a plan you could actually execute. The full goal-setting questions, the cascade worksheets, the "set it into your future" process I run live — that's what I'm building out here, in the order I'd run it with you in the room.

If you'd like me to walk you through it, join the list. No hard sell. Just the framework, one section at a time, in the order it actually works.

See you in Strategies and Tactics.