Indie business club with Barfield and McKinney
15 The Masterplan: goal setting
Pump the pipeline. Welcome to Indie Business Club, the podcast for independent creatives, freelancers, founders, and business owners. He's Ben McKinney. And she's Mel Barfield, and we're both copywriters and business owners. Sharing tips and advice we picked up along the way. This episode is called The Master Plan, and it's all about goal sets. On the show, we'll discuss the benefits and constraints of goal setting, goals we set for the podcast and for our own businesses, and what to do when it all goes patient. And we've got the usual suspects, a voice note from an expert on today's theme, and then my favourite part of the show, your friend of mine, which we're doing a little bit differently this time. Ben, what are your goals? Well, it's a good time of year to talk about it. Have you got a dictionary definition? Have you got a dictionary definition? You normally used to, when we did our LinkedIn lives, you'd always have a dictionary definition for whatever the topic was. I didn't think I'd need one for the phrase goal setting, but I can look on up on the computer if you want. Ben, what does goal setting mean to you? Oh, I think it means being really intentional and setting out a plan. I mean, I'm only talking about business, I suppose, now, but setting out a plan for what you want, a specific period of time, or if there's something that you really specifically want to achieve in a time frame, it means putting that out there and then setting the goal. The first thing isn't it, but then the second thing is taking the actions, taking the steps then to achieve that goal. What about you? Well, I do have on the front of my much neglected now file of acts, I wrote many years ago, I don't know why, a goal without a plan is just wishful thinking, obviously saw it on Instagram or something. But you mentioned that it's, we're talking about business goals, but you actually kind of intertwine, when you set your goals, you start with your personal life and family goals, and then kind of the business goals aim towards that as well. We'll be talking about business stuff, but as always, it overlaps, especially for freelancers and people without a nine to five where they're salaried. But yeah, my goals don't, I tend to make broad goals like I had the silly thing of wanting to be an award winning copywriter and international events speaker, which I just kind of think it kind of sounds good and it makes it sound like I know what I'm doing. So I just set that as a goal, but actually even though it was about vanity, partly, it does then also make you work towards or think about how you're going to achieve that. And once you tell people what your goals are, often then that helps massively as well. So I love a good goal, I'm long past setting unrealistic goals for myself though. But yeah, what are your goals, Ben? Stuff has to give you what my goals are, the podcast. Well, your goals, what are your goals? If you say it on the podcast, you have to do it. Well, I think there's probably something in there, isn't there? A lot of the time it's creating accountability for yourself in most cases. But yeah, saying them out loud, I mean, you're probably getting into like positive affirmation territory there, aren't you? But saying them out there, definitely writing them down. I think if you have a goal, writing it down and putting it somewhere visible, where you can remind yourself of the goal or just remind yourself what you're working towards. I can't remember, I should have done this. This is what I should have done as part of the prep. There is a stat out there, like a percentage, I think. I know I can't remember. I can't remember it myself to achieve a goal if they write it down and if they don't. Maybe our goal for the future of this podcast is to do more thorough research before we start recording because I know exactly what I've seen that stat as well. And it is impressive. I wouldn't even dare think to guess how much it is. But yes, it's very significantly more likely to happen if you set a goal and write it down than if you don't write it down. There's something about the act of committing it to letters. It does. So yeah, maybe that's that's our goal. You mentioned family stuff. And the reason I think it's really important for kind of anybody who's self-employed, I suppose, because I don't know about you, but I started my business to have more flexibility and more time. But I found over the years that as the need to earn more has come along as our family has grown, just the additional time pressures that come from having a family. And even if you don't have a family, once you're in running a business, I don't know. It can be hard to stop and it can be hard to switch off. And it can become the only thing, really, that almost not necessarily it takes over your life, but it can become the validating course in your life, I suppose. And I think the reason I'm building family stuff to start with is because that then helps me make better decisions within the business. And when it comes to goals, that's then those two things then play off each other. So, for example, I had a goal three or four years ago was to work four days a week rather than five or six in some cases when I was doing that, worked with a coach, but actually wrote that down and then put the actions in place to make that happen. And it just meant that when it came to making decisions about what work I was going to do, who was going to do the work, when it was going to get done, what profit I needed to make from that work, having that idea of, but I'm only working four days a week, just made me make decisions in line with that goal. And it definitely worked. There was a period of time. I don't do it now because family circumstances have changed a bit and work circumstances have changed a bit as well. But I think that might be a goal again for the future. And when it is, I know that I can achieve it because I know that I can step back into that mindset and take the steps that I took back then and make it happen again. So it almost like the goal gives you parameters or boundaries or it means it gives you permission to enforce those boundaries that you've set for yourself, because you're like, well, if I don't stick to my, if I say yes to this appointment on a Friday, and I've said that I'm not going to work on Fridays, then it's almost like the goal or the rule that you've set yourself is something external you can point to and go, well, it's because of this thing, like it then removes the personal decision-making almost because you're like, well, it says in my goals, it says in my rules that I'm not going to work on Friday, so I'm going to stick to that and make you more, the goals make you more disciplined. I'm not sure either of you're disciplined, but I think you're right about boundaries. And it, I don't know, that might not be the best example to use on the pod because that's a goal about reducing something. So let's say, for example, if your goal is as a business owner and you want to, let's say you're working in a business and you're earning, I don't know, as a very small round figure, £25,000 a year, but you want to earn a million pounds. Having that as a goal, it doesn't, I wouldn't ever judge anybody on that, and I wouldn't judge the fact that, well, you're only earning this, you can't, you won't get to that. What the goal does is just help you make decisions. So if you're, if you say, I want to earn a million pounds, and then you look at your clients and all your clients, you've got 25 clients paying you £1,000 each, well, you now know that you need to make different decisions in order to achieve your goals, which just helps you either broaden your thinking or expand it or whatever the word is. It just helps you look at things and contextualize them and think, well, to achieve that goal, maybe I've got to make different decisions that I'm making now, or maybe I can't make the same decisions that I want to. Maybe I can't do something I want to. Something probably needs to change, say, goals are quite a good, for me, anyway, goals are quite a good catalyst for change. And I probably only do them when I need something to change, like, if I need more time in the family, then, you know, that's a change that I've got to make. So therefore, having that as a goal without it, I'll just kind of keep planning on and doing what I'm doing, but then putting it as a goal makes me, then it's the catalyst for those changes and to make different decisions. And that's probably why it's a very good idea to revisit goals regularly instead of it being a case of like, oh, everything's gone off, off kilter. I don't like this. Let's look at the goals, have it built into your, and I know some people who do that each quarter, they'll do a reset and a review, and then they'll set their goals for the next quarter, just on the income thing that I, again, don't have stats because this just popped up. But I think the average income for a freelancer is around 25 or something. So for all, I just want to reassure any listeners who are setting their income goals and seeing tons and tons of people talk about six-figure businesses and how to scale to seven figures and all that kind of thing. If you're a freelancer and that's what you're owning, then you're doing good. But yeah, financial goals are obviously going to be one that will be, it's going to be influenced by what you need to bring in, but also what you want to bring in. So it's the needs and the aspirational side. But I've heard, I can't remember the anecdote, but it's to do with Serena Williams and how many grand slams she was aiming to achieve. And I'm going to get these numbers wrong, but just for context, say it was like 10, she then her coach encouraged her to aim for 20 instead or something like that. So it was a stretch goal of you aim for a number. And then that's what you're almost limiting yourself by aiming it at that number. And we're going to go a little bit psychology on it. But by then aiming for a completely massively higher number, she then her performance started to improve and she smashed the stretch goal, if you like. So there can be pros and cons to setting a numerical goal for yourself. Say you wanted to do the classic that people say is like, I want to do 10k months, but then in doing that, some would argue that you're kind of limiting yourself to 10k because you've put a number on it, getting it deep into manifesty stuff now that I'm not entirely sure I believe in, but I think that's, I think that's a reasonable thing to say off. I think often something that I've found in the business over the years is what once you've achieved a goal, so I'm good at setting goals and kind of working towards them. Once I've achieved them, it's then kind of evaluating that and then setting the next goal. Well, I've done it self-stop to kind of lose momentum. Yeah, or you've done it and you just then keep plotting and just sort of traips along and doing what you're doing. And then either for me, I think things probably get a bit stale or then you're not proactive enough so that then if something changes and drops off, you haven't then got anything that you're working towards to keep building. And I'm not saying that everybody should always keep building, that's a really LinkedIn thing. You've changed man. You know, growth or all times growth, you know, you might be that if you work for yourself, or you're an indie business owner, it might be that your goal is just to earn enough, you know, and to enjoy time and to have flexibility and all that kind of thing. They're brilliant goals. I've had those goals, you know, in the past myself. So it's not a case of always having to be achieving something. So I've had it recently where in the window cleaning business, a couple of clients have dropped off, because I haven't been focused on that business as much. I've been working on a copyright I've gave that actually I haven't really put anything in place to react to that. If that happens and I haven't preempted anything by continuing to think, or I'll just get another couple of clients, I ordinarily probably would have seen that coming because in that industry, clients and jobs tend to be repeat, but they have a lifespan as well. So I kind of know that if I get even a long-term client, probably something will change. Get a new facilities manager in. Somebody will move on. They'll know somebody who they want to use that kind of thing. The budgets will change whatever. So ordinarily, I might have been a bit more on that and thinking right now I need to just have that goal of keep get something else in. If anything drops off, I'm kind of prepared for it. I haven't done that. So yeah, kind of once a goal is achieved, what do you do then next? I think that that's something that I'm not brilliant at. I suppose when I run my own stuff. Can we talk about your goals? You mentioned about the ones being an award-winning copywriter and international event speaker. So the award-winning copywriter, we know you've achieved because we did an episode on that a couple of years. And I don't like to go on about it. A couple of months ago. I don't like to do anything either, but I sometimes feel like I have no choice. You're such an ally, Ben. Can we talk about what made you set that goal? And then once you set the goal, what steps did you take to achieve it? Being a middle child made me set that goal, wanting validation and external praise because I like it. I was thinking it would look good on a LinkedIn headline, basically. I just thought I would look like quite a good award-winning copywriter and international event speaker. The two things I do and want to do to the highest level that I can do. I think we've talked about this as well before, about how we're quite similar in that we very different in many ways, but similar in this way, where if we do something, we want to be really good at it and learn as much as we can about it. So that's kind of like the little gold staff for doing that, I think, is achieving a goal and being able to brag about it a little bit shows that all the hard work was worth it. And I just kind of tend to set goals off just like flippant, quite flippantly, really. Actually, I don't put a lot of deep sort into it. I know a lot of people do really thorough planning with lots of post-it notes and spend an entire day mapping out the next five years or whatever. I don't really do that. I've got vague ideas about what I want to do. And I kind of follow my gut on something. So if I think all actually this year feels like a really good year to focus on for the next year, like aiming at doing a TEDx, for example, I've just got that feeling that now's a good time to start thinking about how I'd get there. But that quote I said at the beginning, author unknown about it being just wishful thinking if you don't have a plan. I do think that's true. But I don't feel like you necessarily have to map out your entire plan and steps and timelines. It's probably a lot more efficient if you do, though. Maybe that's my goal for this year is to have much more structured goals and processes, not processes, but plans in place, steps that I'm going to take. So by this month, I will have done this. I'm in Pascala Bergman's talk drive, so she'll whip me into shape, which is a group focused on helping people to get good paid public speaking gigs. So I'll learn a lot there. But yeah, so the other goals I've got of Workie, because of the aforementioned award that I won that I don't like to talk about, I'm focusing a lot more on tone of voice work this year. So I've got a little goal of like four to five meaty tone of voice projects would be nice to do. And then I want to complete a 10k run, not months run, because I did half marathons between my two children and my youngest is six, and I haven't got back into running until now. So that would be a nice achievement. So I'm doing couch to five K. Now, Ben, have you had enough time to think about what your goals are yet? I'm going to keep asking you to give me one. What I want to talk about before I answer that question is, you touched on something interesting. So I'm not going to keep going back to your goals, but you said in there, you have the goal and it kind of relies on gut. And then don't necessarily have these kind of structured ways of getting to to achieve it. And I was thinking, we're not really taught, we certainly weren't when we went to school. Back in nine days. We're really taught about about kind of setting goals and achievement goals. Obviously, they don't really set in school. And I went to, there wasn't, I don't really ever think it was presented to me an option that you could work for yourself. They didn't want us to be able to choose whatever you choose, whatever you wanted to do. So I just wanted to touch about on kind of a bit of research has come up with that. Is it an acronym or the other one? It's smart SMART. So let me try and see if I can remember what they are. Go on, see if you can do it. Specific, correct, measurable, yes, achievable, correct. I want to say realistic and time bound, but achievable and realistic and same thing. So why is that? Yeah, I've worked. I've been an employee before. Of course, I know what SMART is. You have, you've hardly been an employee, so you probably didn't have SMART goals when you. No, I had to get, I had to get this information from my wife. Yes, but your response, so specific. So it's no good necessarily just saying, I will get more work, kind of what work you're going after and specifically where and if you're doing it on social media or on LinkedIn, kind of what tactics will you take to get it. The measurable, how will you know when you've succeeded? What does it look like? Can you measure your success or failure against the metric? Achievable, you know, don't say I'm awful, being aspirational and reaching for the moon, but perhaps setting a ridiculous goal that you know you could never get to is probably just a precursor for failure. I was realistic. So that is very similar, I think, to being achievable. Yeah, I just want to spell a name. Be realistic about yourself and your circumstances. Because otherwise it would be SMART. SMART. It's just like a Boston accent, and it sets some SMART goals. SMART goals. And then T is time. So give yourself a sensible time frame. So on my, my turn, my wife said, within two years, we will have a house with a driveway. But hopefully people don't drop their dog poos in. But I guess if they're not timed, you can kind of wish the time away and it can become just a pipe dream. So how are you going to get how are you going to achieve that? Let's break down the goal of having a house for the driveway that people don't drop. I mean, we'll we'll drop off that last bit because that's, no, but that is specific to be fair. And they start with the last bit because we need to move away from an area in which, in which people walk their dogs and don't pick up their dog poos. And yeah, so I mean, in our case, it's about completely finishing the work that we started last year and finishing the garden and making the house ready to sell. That's the first one. And then, so work will then become involved. So this is an interesting way of looking at the kind of family and work thing. So work would then become more involved because I'd probably have to earn a bit more just to bump up the profits in the business to make sure that if we needed to borrow more, I'd be able to. So I'd have to have a specific goal about that. I'd probably have to set a specific income goal, not necessarily for this year. If we're going to do that work, then probably for 2026, almost look at it and say, right, I'm going to need to earn X amount in order to either save up for the moving costs and to just build up enough profit in the business so that when a mortgage company looks at us, they'll lend us what we need to, but we need to borrow to move to the type of house that we want. And that is a house that can fit in the amount of humans that we now have in the family. And of course, has a driveway in which people do not leave dopply. Look at you. You just set yourself a smart goal. You're proud. I am actually. Listeners, come back in. We're going to do an episode in 2026 about Ben's moving experience. And that's copyordie.co.uk. Is it over UK? So I get the end bit, right? Yeah. Well done. Proud of you. My goals tend to kind of be smart without meaning to be just because I'm yeah, I'll have a really specific idea in my mind. But maybe not the achievable and realistic, I don't know. That's the bit that's perhaps they're definitely a specific measurable in time. Because like we say, I am all for people being aspirational. And often the goals that I've set, sorry, the targets that I've achieved in the best way are the ones that at the start, I thought, Oh, I don't know whether I can get to this. So I remember like three or four years ago, I'd lost quite a bit of work in the business and I had to replace it quickly. And I wrote the goal down and on paper, it felt like, and that was a financial turnover goal for the business. It was like, I have to hit this turnover in order to create enough, you know, the kind of profit to pay me, the income I needed. And I looked at it and I was like, I don't know whether I can do it. And it's so it felt like it felt a long way off, but it did make me make those decisions. And actually what happened was the decisions I made at that point were like, this is holding me back. X, you know, certain things within the business were like, I can't do it if I keep hold of this. So even though on the short term, that meant losing a bit of work that I knew wasn't particularly profitable and was taking up more time than I wanted it to. But it was turnover and it was bringing in revenue. So I was like, I'm denied for months about whether to keep it or not. And actually having the goal of the bigger turnover was like, I need to lose some before I can then build and have the time to do it. So I probably wouldn't have made that decision without the goal. And I hit that goal within about six months. So yeah, I think the achievable and realistic, I guess there's a balance there, isn't there, that you've got to look at it and think, well, there's that story, isn't there, Jim Carey, we might have even mentioned this one before, where he wrote himself a check for a million dollars and kept it in his wallet. And it's that reminding yourself what the very, very end goal or not end, but you know, the target is, then yeah, perhaps makes you make different decisions because you've got that in the back of your mind. And I, that's something that I don't think we've talked about that much about saying no to work can be so important to be able to then, that if you, if you, if you are having your diary clogged up with a tiny, tiny retainer that doesn't serve you or bring in enough money, but it stops you being able to take on a bigger project, then yeah, the bigger project might not even be there yet. But by shedding that smaller, smaller bit of fluff from your, not fluff, that sounds very rude. But you know, that, that the bitty jobs, that can really, I think what it does is it not just literally frees up your diary, but it also frees up your headspace to be able to go out and pursue those bigger fish. I don't want it to be like financially based girls. I'm just trying to think, so when my son started school, I tried one of his eight, so when he started school a few years ago, the, I wanted, the, got my goal was to be able to do the school run at least three days a week. So that, that was good. That meant changing the working week, because I wasn't, you know, when he was at nursery, he was in the nursery. A couple of days a week, and I would, I would take him one of those days, and it was too, you know, close to, close to a house, it didn't really affect me. Whereas with when he went to school, we have a little bit of a drive, and it was like, okay, so I can't really start work until realistically 10. I could probably get back for 930 if I wanted to, but actually, it's become a nice little piece of quality time. We drive together and we listen to music, and if I hadn't made it happen, it wouldn't, it wouldn't have happened. And it would have been easy to say, I know, I can't do that, because I need to take these jobs on, which will mean I have to start working at this time. But it did mean that my financial goals didn't change. I still needed to earn a certain amount. That then helped me make the decision. Well, no, I've only now got between 10, and if I pick him up, 10 and 230. So I have to do all the work within that four and a half hour period at the times when I work in the evenings and different times of the day as well. But actually, that was a focusing moment. Like, no, that is really important to me. I want to be able to take him and pick him up. Therefore, I want to change the way I work. No, he's won't be. It's practically moved out already. Independent. He'd missed the telly too much. Yeah, and that's why I think especially as freelancers or business owners, you have to start with what you want your life to look like. And even if it's, yeah, as you say, it's not necessarily about the finances. It's what do I want my day-to-day life to be like? Do I want to have more time for a certain hobby? Do I want to dedicate more? It might be that you want to dedicate more time to working, and you need to ditch some friends. It depends where you are in your business journey. Is this a good time, Ben, to get a voice note in from a guest? Yeah, definitely. We've got a good one this week as well. Oh, they're always good. We always say we've been spoiled, and today is no exception. This is from Janine Coombs, who is a sales and marketing coach for one-to-one coaches, consultants, mentors, and strategists. Janine is also an event speaker and very experienced brand marketer in her previous life before she went solo. And I'm just quickly spell her surname because I want to show off the fact that I know the phonetic alphabet properly, and I don't say "Afe Apple." So Janine's surname is Charlie Oscar Oscar, Mike Bravo, Echo Sierra. I won't say that again. That's too long. Yeah, Janine Coombs. C-O-O-N-B-E-S. Yeah, but that didn't sound as impressive. Let me play her voice note of her thoughts on goals. Hi, Men and Ben. As with most things in life, there's no one size fits all when it comes to setting good goals for your business. It can be motivating to have a clear set of goals, and you do need a general idea of what direction you're going in, otherwise you won't know how to steer your ship, aka your business, a little metaphor there. But what if you set some goals and you don't reach them because of life events, or world events, or you pick the wrong strategy? That wouldn't mean you failed. It means you will have had to have adapted and learned. It's better to keep yourself accountable to doing the actions that you decided to do to reach those goals rather than beat yourself up if you don't meet them. I can set a goal of getting 5,000 people on my email list by the end of the year, and then perhaps one of my posts goes viral, and tons of people do join my list, but it was by accident and it was the wrong people. The actions you're taking to achieve the goal are actually more important than reaching the goal itself. It would have been better for me to have guessed it on 20 podcasts written 15 blogs run quarterly master classes, promoted one of my lead magnets on social media at least once a week rather than going viral. Even if I missed the big goal of getting 5,000 people on my list, I would have taken the right steps and my business would be further forward. So make the actions your goal. That was good. I really like that. That's a bit make the actions your goal. Make the actions your goal. Make the actions your goal. That's going to be our podcast mantra. That'd be our slogan. We're going to nick it, Janine. Hope you don't mind. Sorry, Janine. I'm having it. Thanks. You can find more from Janine. You can find her on LinkedIn, obviously, but you can also find her at a website, which is Janinecoons.co.uk, and she's writing a book, Mel. She is. She's writing a book for coaches at the moment. The URL, URL website for the wait list is what's the phonetic alphabet for you? What uniform Romeo lemur is good. Anyway, her website is easy-yes.com. I need to tell you something related to the phonetic alphabet. Let me just say that again, though, easy-yes.com. That's Janine's book. Thank you, Janine. I know the phonetic alphabet, Ben. I will run through the whole thing. If you want, no, it won't. That would be terrible content, but I have registered, I don't know if I've told you this. I can't remember. I registered the website, Mike Bravo, with Mike Speldt, like a microphone.com, because I thought that would be a good name for something, because my initials are MB, and MB in the phonetic alphabet is Mike Bravo. I thought that's a good name for something. I haven't decided what yet. It might be my speaker website. A comic strip about an intrepid- Don't ruin it. I want to pick up on something Janine said in the voice note that you might set a goal and then life happens or stuff happens and gets in the way. So I think that's- Yeah. Without going mega deep into it, Dave and I copyright, I made some goals about 14, 15 months ago. You've told this story before, just going to stop you right there, but carry on. I'm not going to go that deep into it, thanks. That's why I said, I'm not going to go mega deep into it. But life got in the way. And actually, now we're at a period of time where we have adapted and managed to keep going and things have gone the way they've gone. But actually, now we're at a point where we do need to revisit things. It's not stale in any way, but it's just got to the point where in terms of we do want to grow the business, but actually now we need to revisit the goals. So yeah, interesting- That's why you told me before we started recording that you might have a little spa day to do your goal setting. And I don't think you were entirely joking. I don't know. I think it's a great idea, absolutely how you should set goals, where you've got no distractions, you're completely relaxed. And you might be like, do you know what? My goal for the business is to have a spa day every two months. Let me have half my between Liverpool and the AGM just becomes an expa day. Equidistant between Norwich and Liverpool. Listeners, if you're in the Birmingham-ish region, keep your eyes peeled. Can you please email us in with recommendations of incredible spa hotels? Yes, but in all around, it would be great. Thank you, everybody. For Dave and Ben to have a lovely relaxing goal setting day. But it is important to take time out to do the goal setting, though, doesn't it? Otherwise, I can't string a sentence together, sorry. I gave up caffeine. So that's now the reason that I mess up. Any sentence will be, I'll be blaming that. I don't know what my excuse was before that. What about pronunciations? What's- What's the cause of that pronunciation? Is that giving up our goal? How dare you? What did I pronounce wrong this time? You've been OK this episode. This episode. We digress, or digress, as I should say. Sorry. You've thrown me off track now. I was making a good point about how we should set aside time to look at goals. And we shouldn't just do off the cuff. It should be something that we, in general, that we take time out of the business and think, "What do I want out of life?" And obviously, there's going to be loads of external factors as copywriters, in particular, generative AI has hit the industry and changed things. So you do have to be adaptable and think about what your goals- how your goals were six months ago might have to be tweaked and changed. You have to have a forgive the term "course correct" and make sure that that's what you're still working towards the goals in the right direction. Ben, have you set your goals yet other than a new house or the driveway? Give me another one. I feel like that wasn't- that was your- That was a good one. I thought that was a good goal. I don't know because I don't want to kind of set goals for copy or die without having set a podcast goal. There we go. We can't have a spa day. That would be weird. So let's do it live. What are our goals? We already said one of our goals, which was to become- that was the vanity thing again, though. Become an award-winning podcast. Yeah, become an award-winning podcast. No, it's interesting, so when we set that goal either one or two episodes ago, we said at the time what goes into making an award-winning podcast, and neither of us really knew, but I did go away with the intention of writing it in one of the upcoming emails. I went away and had a look at different things. So what judges look for in an award-winning podcast, and it was quite interesting that I opened in because in terms of having- so the goal effectively is a vanity goal. But actually, looking at what people look for, I found it quite validating because I felt like without blowing our own trumpet too much, a lot of the things that people look for in an award-winning podcast, I felt like we had made decisions along those lines anyway. So in the way that we wanted the show to run, in the way that we wanted it to come out, and everything like that. And so that was quite an interesting and validating thing in terms of if that is going to be a goal, we don't necessarily need to change any of the major constructs of what we're doing. The reasons we're doing it for are good, and the way that we're trying to produce the podcast is good as well. So actually, what we need to do is to kind of double down on that and keep doing what we're doing and sort of believe in ourselves, I suppose. So in terms of having that as a goal and then letting that influence the decisions that we make, I thought actually, even though it wouldn't necessarily bring us anything other than some kudos and perhaps a good feeling, actually, it would help us develop a good quality podcast that people would hopefully still enjoy listening to. So it was a good one. Listener, have you noticed our incredible sound? What's the word I'm looking for? Quality. We have invested in microphones and our mics. Our mics, Mike Arms, see, caffeine. Ben, this is already a really long episode, but we'll blame the fact that it's the first one back after a little break of putting out some minisodes. But is it time to move on to my favorite feature? Your friend of mine? It can be, yes. And it's actually... Oh, do you want to dig explore goals? Well, I was going to say, have you got any other goals for us as a podcast? That was the only other thing I was going to ask. We've got the goal of becoming an award-winning podcast. Are there any other things for the podcast you're willing to share? It's for 10 people who hear this episode to email in and give us lovely testimonial. There you go. I've made a goal that is someone else's job to do. So, yeah, please email us in and tell us what you think we should change about the podcast, if anything, what you like about it. I just made that one up because I couldn't think of anything else. Sorry. Listen, it's helped Mel achieve her goal. Hello, you're disting yourself on this goal. This is specifically Mel's goal. She will need attention. It's show@indibusinessclub.com. I won't spell that out with the phonetic alphabet. It'll take too long. Thank you. Thank goodness, yes. Anyway, we've got something a bit different this time for your friend of mine, haven't we, Ben? Because two friends of the show have exciting things happening. They obviously set goals and are now achieving them. So, we thought we'd hype them up a bit. Ben first up is your friend of mine. He's already got a mention. He always gets a mention. In fact, and please insert Dave Noise here. That's bastard. It's your cop, your dive business co-founder, Dave Harland. Yeah, Dave is already a friend of the show, but he's got something new coming out. It's called Write the Funny, and it's basically 20 years of word mess aboutery all in one video course. You'll learn the dozens of writing techniques that Dave has honed from two decades. He doesn't look old enough of helping businesses find the funny. There's loads of examples of how brands of all sizes turned lollars into dollars. You can sign up at his website. It's going to be brilliant. He's got a weightless going at the moment, and I know he's working hard on the course, but you can sign up at his website. It's the wordman.co.uk/course to get your name on the list. And if you do sign up, Dave has promised a very, very healthy discount for anyone that signs up before his release. Next is Mel, not you. It was our first ever, your friend and mine. So she definitely is a friend of the show. It's the lovely Angelines. It is the OG. It's Angelines. And she's started a podcast called Creatives Like Us. The podcast is dedicated to opening up the conversation and amplifying the voices of underrepresented creatives, especially people of color. This podcast is all about breaking down barriers and showing that a successful career in the creative industry is possible for everyone. Through open conversations with inspiring creatives, Angel provides a platform for stories that challenge the status quo and provide insight, encouragement, and practical advice. Creatives Like Us is here to empower and uplift the next generation of diverse talent, whether you're a student, graduate, or exploring a new career path. So we'll put some links to Angel's new podcast in the show notes. Once again, it's creatives like us. And you can find it on Spotify and Apple wherever you get your podcasts. Well done, Dave. Well done, Angel. Excited for both of those things. I think they're both going to be brilliant. Yep. Well, that'll do for today. If you're enjoying the show, there are a few ways that you can support us. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're listening on Apple podcasts or on Amazon, you can leave us a review. Yep. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, which is my favorite place. He's been McKinney and I'm Mel Barfield. And new for 2025, you can buy us a coffee. You might have to do the optimistic alphabet of this one. It's kilo, Oscar, hyphen, Foxtrot in indigo or India. Oh, no, I've come undone. I thought it was indigo, but yeah, I'm not sure. It's indigo. It's definitely indigo. Ko-fi, Ko-fi dot com slash is Ko-fi. Ko-com dot com slash indeed business club. Can you say it in your Boston accent again? It'll go to me. It won't be just Boston. It'll be like a, I can't tell the difference between Boston and New York. Sorry to any of our American listeners of which we have some. We have quite a few. Hello. Thank you to our American listeners. Yeah. Ko-fi-fi dot com slash indeed business club. Every penny of your contributions helps us to keep making the show we're really grateful. Do you want to think of how to say hello in American? With howdy. So, can you think of any other ways to say hello in American? No polite ones, no. That's sorry for the chaotic ending there. Blobbling the cafe. First show of the year. Hi, and thanks for listening. Bye-bye. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]