Chapter 10, Organization Goals: Take Two

So now that I’ve spilled my guts on that topic, and re-read the first part of Chapter 10, let me back up and articulate some of my organization goals. Since I am the entire organization, it is kind of hard to separate these from the processes and products whirling around in my mind.

• I want to make enough money at this so that my wife only has to teach five more years, and so that we can pay off our mortgage and debts and accumulate $2 million towards a retirement and security fund. That means I only have to extract $450 from each of the 6,000 studios on my magic list over the next five years. Although I doubt that is the metric I will end up using, it does make it a little more tangible.
• This is kind of like developing curriculum for the classroom. It’s difficult to know where to start because you can see so many connections. What I am referring to hear is my business plan. I mean, one of the goals (duh! I just wrote it down) of the organization is to make money. But I don’t have a business plan. I don’t intend to make a million bucks next month, but I do want to start somewhere. But how can you develop a business plan and decide how you are going to start making money without identifying a product or a service that you are going to offer for sale? Maybe it’s time to move on to the next step before I get too wrapped around some axle.
• I want to be at the very leading edge of consultancies that provide internet-based marketing services to small-studio photographers. I am the expert on all this stuff so they don’t have to be.
• I want to be recognized as the thought leader on this subject within the photography industry. I want to speak at trade shows and write articles for magazines and be asked questions by industry analysts.
• I want to automate and refine my processes to the max. I want to take advantage of the geographic spread – a studio in Red-Bluff California can be running exactly the same copy as a studio in Crown Point Indiana, and none of the consumers will ever know (I will not hide this from my clients). To wit, if I write one great ad it can be used all over the place.

There. Those feel a little more like organization goals. An umbrella and litmus test for my activities. I should be able to stop and ask myself at any point of any day if what I am doing is taking me closer to or further away from those objectives.