What do three wishes cost you?
Ask an owner what they want from their marketing and the answer is usually three things at once: more customers, more awareness, and a better Instagram. None of them is a number, so none of them can be missed, and so none of them is ever reached. "More customers" is true at one extra customer a year.
A single number does three jobs. It decides between strategies, because the one that moves the number most wins the hours. It tells you when something is not working, because the number did not move. And it ends the argument about whether marketing is worth it, because the answer is on one line.
How does a wish become a number?
The road from "more customers" to a goal runs through money.
| Step | A dog groomer (example figures) |
|---|---|
| The wish | More customers |
| In money | $14,000 a month in takings, from $10,000, by December |
| In customers | The gap is $4,000 a month. A regular is worth $46 a month ($85 every 8 weeks), so about 87 more regulars |
| In new customers a month | About 15 new regulars a month for six months, allowing for the ones who do not stay |
| The goal | 15 new regular customers a month, every month to December, with takings at $14,000 by then |
Now every strategy has a test. Does it bring 15 regulars a month, and at what cost each, against the $911 a regular is worth in margin over three years.
How does the sum work for a trade that quotes?
An electrician wants $30,000 a month in invoiced work, from $22,000. The average job is $2,400, so the gap is about three and a half more jobs a month. The electrician wins one quote in three, so the goal in enquiries is 11 more a month, or three a week, and every tactic under it is judged by enquiries and by the close rate, which is the cheaper of the two to move. The money goal stays at the top; the enquiry goal is how it is chased from Monday to Friday.
What are guardrails?
One number does not mean nothing else matters. It means everything else is a limit rather than a target. The groomer chases 15 new regulars a month, and alongside the goal sits a short list of things that must not get worse: the cost of winning each one must stay under $150, the existing regulars must keep coming, and the reviews must stay above 4.8. Guardrails stop a goal from being reached in a way that hurts the business. They are checked, not chased.
How does the goal work in CoraVision?
In CoraVision's onboarding call, Cora asks for your goal in your own words and for your average sale, and works the two into one number to chase. The 12-month plan is built back from it, in three layers, and the weekly check-in reads the number first. The goal lives at the top of your strategy document in the app, and every project's action plan sits under it.
Questions
Why not several goals?
Because strategies compete for the same hours and dollars, and a plan with four goals has no way to settle the competition. One number decides. The others become guardrails: things that must not get worse while you chase it.
What if I do not know what number to pick?
Start from money: revenue a month, or profit if you know it. Then work back to the number of customers that takes, at what they spend. Most owners can answer "how much do you want to be taking a month by when" in a sentence.
Can the goal change?
Once a year, or when the business changes shape. If it changes every quarter, nothing underneath it has time to work.