If you want to achieve a goal, you’ve got to really see and feel the way life will be when its achieved. Goals define a point where things clearly change, a point in time where you know you’ll be able to do things differently because of the platform the goal has created. There are so many things that we should do, but there’s a reason we should but never do them, they don’t mean anything to us emotionally or we haven’t found how they get us going. Quite often there’s a scenario you can see in your minds eye that makes you excited and makes you smile, the way life could be if we could just get to this point, thats the gold! Get clear on what that point is, thats your goal, Put the scenario down in words, get a picture that reminds you it, write it down, and throw it into PlanHQ

2. Get Commitment

A goal is only as good as the people who are going to make it happen, so everyone needs to feel the love of the outcome and agree to when its going to happen. Ideally get as many people as possible involved in visualizing the outcome, different people will have different outcomes that make achieving the goal worth while. If you’re a team, the best goals are ones you all want. If you’re the main leader of the goal, then you would have been assimilating all the ideas and thinking of others in the team and set a goal that you know everyone will love.

3. Break it into bits, its action time

When you see the goal, the point in the future where life is that much cooler, think of all the things that lie between now and then. Throw down any that come to mind, add them as actions against the goal, and try and put in a realistic time that you can do them by. A goal is something big, and something that really gets you and you team emotionally charged up, but some of the things you’ll have to do to get there are less exciting, but have to be done, use the buzz of knowing that if you do them you’ll reach your goal be your driving force to get things don

4. Start Now and make constant Progress

We’ve all heard there’s no time like the present, and there’s a reason for this. There’s only one thing worse than not setting goals, its setting a goal and leaving it to sit in words and and idealand. When you’re charged up on your goal, use this energy to to do the first thing you can do. If you want to have that feeling that you will achieve your goal, then make some progress. Everytime you do one thing towards your goal, you send a clear signal to yourself, this goal is important and I’m already on the path to getting there.

5. Celebrate Success

Its too easy to keep adding more things into a goal, and to keep expanding it. This is natural, because as you make more progress, your mind will reward you by letting you see further into the future, as it trusts that what it shows you, you will do. But seeing the next step ahead is just one reward for making progress on achieving your goals, you also have to remember just how far away achieving the goal once was, when you first set it, and feel the gap you’ve closed. Acknowledge your success, you’ve all worked hard to achieve the goal, so enjoy hitting it and take some space to enjoy it!

Achieving Goals Regularly

Goals can be set at many different levels, in PlanHQ some people set their long term strategic goals, but most set short and medium term goals that can actually be achieved in a reasonable period of time, so you’re regularly generating outcomes, rather than just staying busy. Like launching a new verison of your product, a new website, raising some money, hiring a sales person, launching a new marketing campaign, securing 3 major deals… These are visible and measurable outcomes that will change the state of your business. You know that when you achieve them they enable you to do something else you couldn’t before.

Think about what outcomes you want to see over the next few months, write them down and get them into your plan on PlanHQ and get to working on achieving them with your crew, and

So while you’re thinking about what the environment might mean to you and what you are and could do about where its heading, why not:

• walk or bike to work
• buy some fresh food without plastic packaging
• open the window and turn the AC off

And take some time to enjoy how much less of many things you need.

Citylife, City based decision making

In many modern cities, with airtight, air conditioned buildings many of us spend so much time living in, even fresh air and water is a precious commodity. Almost everyone loves ‘getting away from it all’, and hitting nature, the beach, the forest, parks, mountains… and there’s a very simple reason for this (besides just letting go of fast pace), we’re all natural, and a healthy natural environment makes for healthy happy people. So don’t think doom and gloom, just remember how good the natural environment feels and be inspired to do something about the fact that its taking a bit of a beating from modern day living.

So whatever you’re doing in the city, in the busyness of the day and building your business, remember that its the actions of ourselves, our cities and the people in them making decisions about the wider world everyday that make or break the wider environment around the world. There’s so much beautiful natural world out there, but there’s also a lot of pollution and destruction. There are reasons you can’t just go swimming in the water so close to so many cities, or drink the water from the tap, why greenbelts are shrinking on large land masses, oceans emptying of life, and while in a ‘modern’ world this may just seem like the way it has to be, there is most certainly another way. It will take time to transform from what has been done and continues to happen, but if we keep our heads up, stay switched on, and make the environment part of our small daily lives and big decisions and plans, we will keep coming up with smarter ways to live cool lives that mother nature will smile at us for.

Private Goal Settings 

A Private Goal in PlanHQ

Manager: Has unrestricted access. They can view and manage all the company data, including financials, others private goals and reports

Staff Members: Restricted access - Cannot view the company reports, Have summary or no access to financials and can only view private goals if invited by a manager.

Board Members/Advisers: Unrestricted Access, but they cannot be assigned goals or actions. When major changes are made to the plan or goals are completed, managers can choose to email the board/advisers.

Getting the whole team on board

As more medium size companies come on board with a clearer distinction between managers and staff members, but a need to get everyone in the team working together in PlanHQ having these roles has become key. Once you start managing weekly priorities as a team, and get everyone tracking their progress, the whole team is on the same page, and you really start achieving goals.

Visibility Mobility and Freedom for you and your business

Tools: We run our business very heavily around web tools, not because we like tech, but because we value visibility, mobility and freedom. We use gmail for email, google calendar for central calendaring, google docs and spreadsheets for word processing and speadsheets , PlanHQ for Planning, team collaboration and project management, Xero for accounting, Pipeline Deals for deal tracking and bunch of other tools like google analytics for website tracking, feedburner for blog reader tracking, crazyegg for usability analysis, campaign monitor for email marketing, silverstripe for content management wordpress for blogging and I’m just picking out some of those we use most frequently to make it happen.

Integrated Experience: When I get sent a document or spreadsheet, I open it in gmail and just click on the open in google docs link, or view as html if I’m just going to quickly scan it. When I hit my google calendar, I see all the appointments I’ve scheduled in and the key actions I’ve got to get done to stay on track with our master plan feeding in from PlanHQ, so I don’t just end up in meetings all day. As you can see, google doesn’t have a product for everything, (although they play a role in most areas of running your business now), and they rely on the eco-system around them delivering good products.

Fitting in to the eco-system

When you provide an online business management tool like PlanHQ, you build it with this eco-system of other products in mind, and always assume more will keep turning up. You try and avoid building something that someone else does, you build to plug-in to them as the ecosystem grows. When looking at google, you always assume they’re going to do the basics, and probably give them away for free, so you build the more targeted and niche applications that will use and connect with the basics they provide. (eg. Google have google docs, so they want to see products making and managing documents in their engine.)

PlanHQ linking in: It’s early days for PlanHQ connecting into the eco-system, its something we also want to do more of, but like everything, it has to be timed. We link in with Google Calendar and the iphone in the most basic way, which works cool, but we’ll over the coming months be doing a lot more, including pushing out plans and progress reports directly into google docs and spreadsheets, and making it easier to manage actions in PlanHQ from anywhere including close to your gmail inbox.

Free Adwords vouchers coming soon to PlanHQ customers

BTW - We’ll also soon be offering free google adwords vouchers to all of our paying customers who don’t already have adwords accounts, more on this soon when It gets to the top of the plan ; )

Jeremy

Although there’s still a few days to go, Steve Jobs won’t be announcing PlanHQ as Apple major partner, although I think if he could see just how well the icon from our PlanHQ logo fits with the iphone, he might think again (Our shiny little on track arrow is made for it!). We support all platforms, but we like simple and cool, so we’re pretty mac’d put here at PlanHQ and while we haven’t yet made any apple specific goodies, an iphone app is bound to happen at some point…

I’ve been video chatting with Tom on skype every few nights over the last year as he’s been working on getting the business off the ground with deal number 1, and after assisting him through a couple of RFP’s to no avail, and supporting him through the usual long process of discussions with potential opportunities that never turn into dollars, its great to see his hard work pay off. Getting your first deals is what its all about when you’re starting up, if you’re on the path to this, then hang in their, work hard and get the photo of you and your contract out to your friends!

So what is the fabric that weaves these needs together? Communities.

My ‘Local’ Web & Hi-tech Community - Silicon Welly

I spend plenty of time in the US, where most of our customers are, where our product gets reviewed, where we launch on stage, and a growing number of our peers are, but I also have a home here in New Zealand where most of our core team work from. After years of doing business between the US and New Zealand, seamlessly, can see both the opportunity for New Zealand and the Valley with what we can do connecting both ends of the pacific ocean, and I run a site to help connect and raise the bar in the community called Silicon Welly, its helps the community, and it helps me.

While New Zealands web community here is significantly small compared with the valley, its a spoke on the wheel, and there is an opportunity to build a healthy web and Startup community. If you take a macro view, as an individual, an entrepreneur, you can work to the strengths and advantages of the a small but cool country like New Zealand, you can make a difference and take that difference to the world. The lifestyle, small business culture, low cost base and need to always think global since the local market is too small are all opportunities. I find playing an active part in building a solid community here a way to build on the strengths we and others can take this into our product experience, and to our customers around the world.

I’ve used these factors when building PlanHQ. We understand small business, we run a tight ship, we think about how we can solve the problems of small businesses everywhere in the world, and we keep an open mind and think laterally. Being surrounded by Ocean helps the last one I find, as does swimming in it regularly.

Our PlanHQ - Make it Happen Community

I spend lots thinking about communities, how to build one around the business, as our customers are people who get where we’re coming from, think in a similar way, so we all want to stay close. So far to acknowledge and help connect this community, we’ve done some of the basics as we’ve been building the business up an going from a Startup to an early stage business. We run this blog make it happen, and have a handful of hundred daily readers, and we speak at events all over the show about entrepreneurship, raising money and other topics on growing the business. This is the small tip of a very big iceberg that will become clearer over the next few months.

I’m interested in other peoples community endevours, and how you weave them into your business development - feel free to share!