Setting realistic goals for your first year

Most new membership owners set their first-year goals in one of two ways. They pick a round number that feels exciting, such as a thousand members, or they avoid setting goals at all because they have no idea what's realistic. Both leave you without a useful guide. An exciting number you miss by a mile is demoralizing, and no number at all makes it hard to tell whether things are going well.

A good first-year goal is honest, built from numbers you can actually estimate, and trackable month by month. It covers not just members and revenue but also your own time, the resource most owners forget to budget.

Why first-year goals often go wrong

• Borrowed numbers. Results someone else reported, from a different niche, audience and price, tell you very little about yours.
• Vanity targets. Followers, free sign-ups and page views feel good but don't pay the bills.
• Forgetting cancellations. Members leave every month, even from excellent memberships. A goal that assumes nobody leaves will always be too high.
• Outcomes without actions. “Get 200 members” says nothing about what you'll actually do each week to get there.

Build a member goal from reach, not hope

Start with the people you can realistically reach: your email list, your followers, your clients and the groups you're part of. Then make a cautious estimate of how many might join at launch, and how many new members you can attract each month afterward.

Next, account for people leaving. The share of members who cancel in a given month is called your churn rate, and there's a full explanation in calculating churn rate and what it tells you. For planning, simply pick a cautious assumption and apply it.

Here's an illustration with made-up round numbers. Say you launch with 30 founding members, add about 10 new members a month, and lose roughly one member in twenty each month. It's tempting to expect 150 members after a year: 30 plus twelve months of 10. With cancellations included, you'd end the year closer to 110. That gap is why churn belongs in your plan. A goal of 110 that you hit feels very different from a goal of 150 that you miss.

Turn members into a revenue goal

Revenue follows from members and price. For a recurring membership, the most useful figure is monthly recurring revenue: the total you can expect to collect each month from current members. For the details, see monthly recurring revenue: tracking the heartbeat of your business.

Continuing the illustration, 110 members paying $30 a month is $3,300 of monthly recurring revenue by the end of the year. Your total income for the year will be well below twelve times that figure, because you started with fewer members. From it, subtract what you pay out: payment processing fees, software and any help you hire. Knowing the net figure early helps you decide whether the membership is a side income, a part-time business or a full-time one, and plan accordingly.

Set a goal for your time

This is the goal almost nobody writes down, and it matters as much as the others. Decide how many hours a week you can sustainably give the membership, and what those hours are for. For example:

• Creating content: 6 hours
• Community and support: 3 hours
• Marketing and outreach: 4 hours
• Admin and technical tasks: 2 hours

If your member goal needs twenty hours of marketing a week but you only have four, either the goal or the plan has to change. A time goal also protects you from burnout, one of the quieter reasons memberships stall in their first year.

Back each goal with actions you control

You can't directly control how many people join, but you can control what you do. Pair each outcome goal with a few input goals, the regular actions that drive it:

• Publish one public article or video a week.
• Have five one-to-one conversations with potential members each month.
• Appear as a guest on another person's show, newsletter or event every month.
• Email your list every week.

Input goals keep you moving when results are slow, and they show you what to change when results disappoint.

A sample first-year goal sheet

Here is how the owner of a hypothetical business coaching program for salon owners might write it all down:

Members: 30 at launch, about 110 by month twelve.

Revenue: monthly recurring revenue of around $3,300 by month twelve, at $30 a month.

Time: 15 hours a week, and no more than 20 in launch weeks.

Actions: one public video a week, five sales conversations a month, a weekly email and one guest appearance a month.

Watch monthly: new members, cancellations, total members, recurring revenue and hours worked.

Review: every three months. Adjust the plan, not just the target.

Track monthly, adjust quarterly

Once your goals are set, review a handful of numbers at the end of every month; the short list in the membership metrics that matter most is a good starting point. Every three months, compare what happened with your assumptions. If new members are arriving more slowly than expected but cancellations are low, put more effort into marketing. If sign-ups are strong but people leave quickly, focus on the member experience.

Your first steps:

1. List the people and audiences you can realistically reach.
2. Estimate launch members, monthly new members and a cautious cancellation rate.
3. Work out total members and recurring revenue at month twelve.
4. Set a weekly time budget and split it by activity.
5. Write three or four input goals you control.
6. Put a monthly review and a quarterly review in your calendar.