New Year's Goals

Maybe it stems from watching too many Tony Robbins infomercials growing up, but I always like to set goals at the beginning of every year.  Note that I call them goals, not resolutions.  Resolutions are short-sighted, often delusionary promises that are doomed to failure.   Goals are ideals to strive for.  Even if you fall short of a goal, you’re still moving the ball forward. Personal goals are good and I set those too, but I’m actually a bigger fan of business goals.  Personal goals are just too personal – lose weight, stop watching reality TV, cure baldness.   You know, things that I won't actually do this year.

Business goals by contrast are emotionless.  Just a list of things to accomplish in the year ahead.  At the same time they’re vitally important for keeping the business on track and for monitoring incremental progress.  And it’s always fun to sit around in December and figure out if you accomplished everything you set out to do in January.

The key to setting business goals is to make them aggressive, but doable.  There’s no point in either confining the limit of your successes or setting the bar so high that even great accomplishments seem like failures.

So with that lengthy preamble out of the way, here are my goals for Bruliam in 2011:

  1. Sell all of our 2009 pinot noir by August.
  2. Sell all of our 2009 zinfandel by December.
  3. Hit $10,000 in cumulative donations via our Brigade program.
  4. Collect a Bruliam t-shirt picture from the last continent.  You’ve sent in pictures from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.  That just leaves Antarctica…who’s going to help us out on this one?
  5. Either get to break even or greatly expand production in 2011.

I know that #5 is pretty wishy-washy, but that’s the beauty of setting a goal – you can leave it open ended.  I think we have the capacity to either break even or expand significantly in 2011, but not both.  Our progress on goals #1 and #2 will greatly influence which direction we head in, but it’ll be fun to explore the options with you as the year plays out.

Make sure you check in periodically throughout the year to see how we’re doing on achieving these goals!

How about you?  Any big goals for 2011?

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