Create Yearly Goals for Business and Balance

Aligning Business Success with Personal Fulfillment

For many women entrepreneurs, creating yearly goals is about more than business growth. It’s about creating a lifestyle aligned with personal values and aspirations: the things that made you want to start your business in the first place.

Annual goal planning needs an approachable, structured framework that weaves business goals into intrinsic ones like work-life balance, travel, or more time with family.

I want to discuss a goal-setting approach that starts with reflecting on the past year. You’ll use insights from these reflections to define and clarify goals for the year - all while integrating your version of work-life balance.

You’ll learn:

• Using reflection to funnel insights into goal creation and planning 
• A process that guides you through this planning process
• Intrinsic and extrinsic goals that support business growth and work-life balance
• How to break big goals into mini-goals, visualize success and outcomes, and create realistic timelines
• Why it’s essential to anticipate and plan for obstacles
• About “The 12-Week Year,” one of the best books for women entrepreneurs who want to accomplish their goals all year long

Reflection as a Foundation for Goal Setting

Creating new goals starts with reflecting on the past year. 

Reflection isn’t about dwelling on mistakes or regrets; it’s about learning from wins and challenges to set a stronger foundation for the future. 

Ask yourself: What went well? What didn’t? Which moments made you feel most fulfilled, and which felt draining? Reflecting in this way helps you identify patterns that reveal what’s most important to you and where you want to see change. 

This process brings clarity and sets the stage for goal creation. For example, if you felt most energized when engaging directly with clients but burned out from social media management, this insight could guide you to prioritize tasks that play to your strengths and outsource the rest. 

Reflecting ensures that your next steps are grounded in a purposeful approach that uses goal-setting to align life and business.

A Simple, 4-Step Goal Creation Process

Step 1: Learn About and Define Your Intrinsic and Extrinsic Goals

Intrinsic goals are values-driven. These are about personal fulfillment and represent the reasons you started your business. Examples of intrinsic goals are achieving balance, time for travel, spending time with family, or paying tuition. These goals are the “whys” behind your business and provide the core benefits you hope to experience through your work.

Extrinsic goals are business-focused. These are conventional and measurable business objectives. Examples include reaching specific revenue targets, improving client satisfaction, expanding newsletter reach, or growing your team. Extrinsic goals are practical and results-oriented. They help you move the business forward and also support your intrinsic goals.

Aligning with both types of goals creates a balanced approach to planning. For instance, meeting a quarterly revenue target (extrinsic goal) could fund a big family vacation or writing retreat (intrinsic goals). This is how a business milestone can support your values and personal aspirations.

When business and personal goals work together, women entrepreneurs are better positioned to achieve a healthy, fulfilling lifestyle and a successful business.

Step 2: Visualize Your Outcomes and Create SMART Goals

Once you’ve created yearly goals, it’s time to define their ultimate outcomes.

An outcome is a clear picture of what success looks and feels like when a goal has been achieved.

For intrinsic goals, success might mean feeling more at ease, enjoying more family time, or the feeling of being more financially secure. Extrinsic goals are the satisfaction of reaching a sales target or the confidence that comes from receiving positive client feedback.

Once you’re clear about “big goal” outcomes, it’s time to break them down into actionable mini-goals. A mini-goal breaks a large goal into manageable tasks and shorter timelines.

Once done, circle back to make each mini-goal SMART. This stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. 

Say you want to hire a full-time assistant (extrinsic) so you can have more time for work-life balance (intrinsic). A SMART goal might be: 

“Sell 20 more memberships during the first six months of the year to pay for a full-time assistant. I can do this by expanding marketing efforts to 3 new platforms and following up with leads daily.” 

NOTE: If any of this feels intimidating, tedious, or overwhelming, remember that you don’t have to know everything. You don’t need all the details. This is a brainstorming session where you define and create tentative strategies to accomplish your goals for the year. Knowing that they’ll ultimately support your intrinsic goals lightens the process. I also have a goal-setting workbook that guides you through the process simply and efficiently. 

Step 3: Anticipate and Prepare for Obstacles

Every goal, hope, and dream comes with potential challenges and competing demands. Anticipating these in advance allows you to address them proactively. 

For instance, if an intrinsic goal is to take a two-week cruise, an obstacle may be the need for consistent client support during that period. Thinking through this allows you to build solutions and strategies, like preparing content in advance, setting up automated customer response systems, creating templates, or hiring temporary support.

If your extrinsic goal is to expand high-touch client outreach, but time is limited, you could automate parts of the process or delegate specific tasks. By preparing for these obstacles, you’re more likely to stay on track if things get complicated.

Step 4: Map Tasks and Plan by Yearly or Quarterly

A conventional way to create yearly goals is to plan annually. This is when you create goals to reach by the end of the year. You break these big, 12-month goals into smaller, sequenced quarterly goals. I’ve planned one of my programs annually because I thought I needed a full year to accomplish it.

Annual goal planning has a lot of pros, but it’s a long timeline with more potential to lead to burnout, lack of focus, or procrastination.

Another planning framework I’ve been using is outlined in “The 12-Week Year.” 

This approach focuses on actualizing one big goal per quarter. For example, if your goal is to launch a new product in 12 weeks, tasks include product design, marketing, customer outreach, and setting up sales channels. 

Planning by quarter rather than year helps you focus on less so you can accomplish more. This gives you confidence, motivation, and momentum because you get big “wins” throughout the year.

A 12-week timeline breaks the year into four focused sprints, each allowing you to recalibrate and set new goals based on recent achievements. This quarterly approach maintains urgency, encourages frequent milestones, and provides a structured yet flexible plan.

Each 12-week cycle concludes with reflection, celebrating wins, evaluating progress, and setting fresh goals for the next quarter. This cycle ensures you’re consistently moving forward and adapting as needed.

I encourage you to read “The 12-Week Year” to see if it might work for you!

Create Aligned and Achievable Yearly Goals With This Guide

Women entrepreneurs build successful businesses and support balance when they create achievable and motivating goals for the year. The process starts with an honest assessment of how things went the past year. You can use resources like a goal-setting workbook or The 12-Week Year to get ideas or guide your goal-setting process.

Check Out the Goal Setting Workbook

Sign up for my monthly newsletter to get my top 5 tips for business and balance.