Setting goals and working from home

By: dpbuk | Posted: 30th June 2008

Copyright (c) 2008 Daren Burbridge

Are you looking to earn a few extra pounds by working from home in your spare time? Are you set to fail before you even start? With a large number of individuals failing in the industry is it the industry or the individual? Start with some knowledge and you could be one of the successful group..

Amazing I believe that 80% of work from home start ups fail because from a lack of understanding to attract customers to a business and mainly failure to achieve their primary goal after two to three months. In a complete reversal of this when individuals start a work from home business with the correct information 79% of work from home seekers succeed in their goal to earn the extra income that they are looking for. This statistic can be reversed simply and easily with guidance and support whilst you are working from home. This will give you a good set of principles and increase your chances of success; how to achieve end financial goals, sales and marketing principles, how to market, failure and how to gain from it, Creating a USP.

However these basic understandings will not be achieved unless the individual has a desire and a willingness to achieve their own personal goals. Every individual has a different reason for wanting to earn and extra income from home, whilst running a full time job; For many it is to achieve a better standard of life, others it is a nice holiday, some it is car. But everyone has a different reason for wanting extra cash. Working backwards from your goal is the key and success is born from achievment.

How often do I hear "I want to earn ?1000 per month" or "?100 per week would be what I am looking for"? Virtually every time I speak to a potential new customer. So how do you achieve this goal, well the equation is very simple;

Target income = Average profit per item X number of sales

For example if your average profit per product if ?5 and you want to achieve ?100 per week your equation would look like this

?100 per week = ?5 * 20 customers

So now we understand that we need 20 customers to buy a week to achieve our primary goal; We have already begun to work backwards from our primary goal and we can now move from our primary goal to our new secondary goal which is not money related but target related; that is now to achieve a set number of customers buying from us each week.

Getting 50 customers buying each week? There are three main ways that we can do this ;

1. Get new customers
2. Sell more to existing customers
3. Sell more often to existing customers

I bet you are sat there thinking well the easiest way is to get new customers; Well you are not alone, many business owners within the home working market focus their strategy on getting new customers as their only form of marketing. This is probably the most costly and time consuming way of building your business! Building business with your existing customers by creating ways for them to buy more often is much less costly and much quicker!

Introduction of the 80/20 rule. It is the 80/20 rule. Many large blue chips, sales people and marketing companies will use this rule. Let me give you some examples of this;

* 80% of your customers will provide you with 20% of your business
* 20% of your customers will provide you with 80% of your business
* 20% of your customers will buy from you each month

These figures are not actual figures but guides that will help you! Why am I telling you this, I can hear you saying. Using this information will enable you to understand the importance of a long term strategy. Your residual income will be made up of the number of customers you have, multiplied by their average spend by how often they buy;

Estimated income(Target income) = Customers X Value X Frequency

EG: If you have 100 customers; 20 of these customers(probably not the same 20 each month) will spend ?2 per month profit, 80 of them will spend ?2 per year will provide you with a residual income of; 20(customers) X ?2(Profit) X 12(Orders each) = ?480 PLUS 80(customers) X ?2(Profit) X 1(Orders each) = ?160 TOTAL INCOME Per annum ?640 or ?12.21 per week

So we now know that 100 customers will return us an estimated profit of a little over ?12 per week based on a profit of ?2 per avearge sale, we can now take this information and work out how many customers we need to provide us with our ?100 per week primary goal;

Target income / Total income * Customers = Total Customers

So in this example;

?100(Target income) / ?12.21(Total income from 100 customers) * 100(number of customers) = 819 customers required to make us ?100 per week.

Now remember that this is not an exact science and that these figure will vary; however this will mean that you can work out how quickly you can achieve your goal realistically, for example if you said to yourself I am going to get one customer per day, it will take you nearly three years (819 days) to achieve your goal based on ?2 average profit per item sold. However if you said I am going to get 4 customers per day you would achieve your goal in around six and a half months.

People fail because they don't meet the primary goal, which is normally a financial goal. By setting a more achievable goal from day one that you can meet will will get a sense of achievement whilst you are becoming a success in your primary goal.

Now remember this is information is only going to help you in understand how to achieve end financial goals, you still need to understand and set goals for how you are going to achieve the required number of customers that you need to fulfill your work from home financial goals.


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So you want to earn an extra income and work from home! Are you going to succeed or fail with the information you have to hand? Improving your goals will increase your success. If you want to earn a good income and work from home this article will give you a good grounding.
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Tags: ups, extra cash, usp, target, statistic, three months, sales and marketing, working from home, full time job, spare time, start ups, financial goals, marketing principles, willingness, personal goals, understandings, extra income from home, home seekers