Setting goals and working backwards

Introduction

Eight months ago I was working in clothing sales as a sub agent; man I was going to make it rich this was the big time my first real job. The big break! So knowing nothing about clothing sales I tried to soak up as much information about sales as I could, I was going to do it I had found my niche, I was a born salesmen this was what my whole life had been building up to.

Subsequently it was not all as wonderful as I had expected, When you get into sales you are told that in sales there is generally a three month cycle, to find clients make a sale and three months later you get paid, well thirty or sixty days depending on the contract. Now you’re also told that you make your money in commission. No problem, who needs a salary I’m going to be great at this. But it’s not all fun and games.

Yes you make commission but then you use that commission to pay for you phone allowance and your petrol before you know it you’re earning nothing. Now I was expecting this and thus it did not perturb me because i thought all I needed to do is get the ball rolling and this will gradually get better, which they did in fact.
But was it good enough?

After eight months of just making a profit over my expenses, I started talking about the possibility of making a move to the big city Johannesburg. I mean here I am an educated, well spoken, dangerously good looking healthy young man earning less than a waiter. Now although this may be a hippie’s dream it certainly was not mine.

So I decided it was time to make a move, get a fresh start make it happen for myself, remove the safety net that my parents were offering. My next challenge was a direction, not geographically but what did I want to do, what was I good at. I wasn’t bad at selling but it wasn’t working for me in Cape Town what would change if I did it in Johannesburg? I needed something new, so I sent out feelers, started to e-mail my CV everywhere I could, and I got a few responses from various sales positions but coming from the dark place I was, I decided it just wasn’t worth it. Then a few responses came back regarding estate agencies and I thought maybe I could do that I mean it doesn’t take a genius and I had had some exposure to it in the past.

Then finally through a series of fortunate events I was offered a job in recruitment. I bit the bullet and took it not thinking twice, I turned out to be quite a good venture for me as I seem to have a bit of a talent for it.

From this experience however I realised it doesn’t really matter what you do you need to put in the work unless you a model or something.
My point is arriving here in a new city in job I knew nothing about, I realised I had no option I had to set goals and ensure I achieved them or I would be in deep trouble financially and emotionally cause nothing crushes your spirit more than being unemployed with bills to pay and no safety net.

Fortunately I had someone who worked with me who took me under his wing and taught me all about goal setting. I must admit I had never done this before even in school my goal was generally to do the least work possible, but life isn’t like school, you can’t just float by. So first he said what are my goals? Now you start this on a large scale mine at the time was to get my flat furnished and buy a new car. In order to do this I would need X amount of money. So in order to aquire that amount of money I would need to complete X amount of deals a month at work, in order to do that I would have to market and sell to X amount of people per week, per day and I would need to perform various tasks every X amount of hours. In other words I works backwards well it’s been six months since I had this told to me and I now have a very nicely furnished flat and a very nice new car.

Give it a try it works

Set goals and work backwards!