Didn't Hit Your Goals? Do THIS Instead of Freezing Up

Missing a goal doesn't mean the goal was wrong — it means you need a better framework for what to do next. Dr. Una breaks down exactly what to do when the numbers don't land the way you planned.

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A physician in the EntreMD Business School set a million-dollar revenue goal for the year. After Q1, she hadn't hit her quarterly target — and started wondering if she should shrink the goal altogether.

Dr. Una's answer wasn't what she expected.

In this episode, Dr. Una walks through the five-step framework she uses with clients when a goal gets missed: taking a breath before reacting, reviewing what actually moved (not just what didn't), analyzing the data to find what's working, building an upgraded plan, and — the mindset shift that matters most — choosing to be led by the vision, not the data.

She backs it with her own story: setting a goal of 1,000 book sales in the first week of launching the EntreMD Method, landing at 850, and what happened in the years after that. The goal didn't fail. It just had more runway to run.

If you've been in cruise control, or you've quietly talked yourself into a smaller version of what you originally wanted, this episode is the reset.

Tune in and get inspired!

Timestamps:

00:00 Why physicians stop setting goals 

 01:00 The million-dollar goal that didn't land in Q1 

02:20 Dr. Una's book launch: 1,000 copies, 14 strategies, and 850 results 

04:00 The approach: set the target, go all in, celebrate either way 

05:00 Deep breath. React less. Act more. 

05:45 Review the progress, not just the shortfall 

07:40 Analyze the data to find what's actually working 

10:45 Data-driven decisions aren't just for big companies 

12:20 Devise an upgraded plan 

13:10 Be led by vision, not by data 

15:00 The goal is direction, not a deadline for failure 

16:25 What happened to those 850 book sales years later 

17:10 The tenacity it takes to stay committed to your vision

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• EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
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To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Do you find yourself not setting goals? Because once upon a time, you set a goal and you didn't hit it. And maybe it made you feel like a failure. Maybe it made you feel like you're not good enough. You did not like that feeling. So you decide, you know what? I'm just gonna work hard and I'm gonna give things my best shot. I am not going to do goals. Hi dogs. Welcome to the Entre MD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, Dr. Una. So I want to talk to you about that because setting goals is one of the most powerful things that you can do in your business is giving your GPS a great destination, and all of a sudden it can reverse engineer it, tell you which way to go, and now you can get there. Goals are powerful, but it's also important that we build the right relationship with goals. So whether we're hitting them or not, we have the right approach to it. Okay. Okay. So this is something that I've talked about a lot, but it kind of came top of mind again for me because I had a client in the entrepreneurial business school who brought this up. Okay. And to start with, I am already so proud of her because this doctor started her private practice and she set a goal for this year that she was going to do a million in revenue. And when she said it, of course, you know, it was like music to my ears. I'm like, what? Let's go, right? Let's go. Let's get this stuff done. And, you know, she set a goal for the first quarter of the year and she didn't hit the goal. Okay. And she said she didn't hit the goal. So it's kind of got her fozzled, it kind of got her to this place where can we even accomplish this goal of a million? Should I shrink my goal and pick a more realistic number and all of those things? And so I talked with her and I wanted to share that conversation with you because it's important for your goals. Okay. Now I will preface this by saying, I have set so many goals that I did not hit at the time, at the timeline that I put for it, right? So many. But the thing is this where I am now is because I set those goals. Right. I would not be anywhere near where I am now if I did not set those goals. So you want to see your goals as something that kind of gives you direction, gives you a container, gives you accountability. But we set the goals, right? And so if we don't accomplish the goal that we set, there is no problem. Now we're going to do everything to hit it, but if we put everything we have in it and we don't hit it, Crimea River. Okay. So I tell you the example a lot about the first business book that I read, that I wrote. And that is the on-tremday method. And if you have not read it, you do want to read it. Okay. It's kind of like the roadmap for doctors who want to live life and practice medicine on their terms. So I wrote that book and I had read that the average nonfiction book will do 250 copies in the first year. And so when I read that, I said, huh, interesting. What if we could do a thousand copies of the entree emblem method book in the first week? Okay. And I came up with 14 strategies. I actually did a podcast episode on it where I shared those 14 strategies. I did 14 strategies that we would use to get to a thousand. Okay. Now we went at it and we went at it hard, like from the beginning of the week to the very end of the week. We pushed and pushed and did all the things. And we did not hit a thousand. Okay. We did not hit a thousand book sales, but we hit 850. Now, what do you think my response was after that? My response was interesting. Now, first of all, if I didn't set the goal for the thousand, I knew I would not have hit 850. So you have to believe I was not mad at the 850, right? And I gave my absolute best shot. I left everything out there. So I was not mad at the 850. Okay. So I was like, at the end of the day, there is no problem here. And I'm going to tell you how I reframe that after we're done with this, but I want to show you the approach. My approach was set the target, develop the plan, go all in on the plan, give it everything you've got, and let's go. And if we hit it, we celebrate. If we surpass it, we celebrate. If we don't hit it, we celebrate. Okay. So she talked about this and she's like, do I shrink my goal? Am I, you know, like and all this? I said, okay. Now I did ask, I said, okay, those of you who are running businesses over a million, I want you to raise your hand and, you know, and tell me what you did when you had a goal you didn't hit and all of that stuff. And so one of the doctors talked about, you know, like, yes, we're living in quarters and all of that stuff. But when you look at the real results of business, you're looking over a longer term. And when you look at it, you find out that you almost always accomplish a lot more than you you think you would, right? And so if there's one quarter that kind of looks funky, we don't get bent out of shape about it. Another doctor came up and then she talked about, you know, a number of things, some of them which I'm gonna incorporate in this anyway. But the first thing she was like deep breath. Okay, so I'm gonna start from there. So number one, what do I do when I don't hit my goals? So I set the goal, I reverse engineered, I think I gave it my best shot, but I didn't hit the goal. First thing is deep breath, like deep breath. We don't react, we act, okay? We don't react. So we don't see that and get bent out of shape and no loss. No, we act. So which means we have to slow down long enough. And when I say that, I don't mean slow down for days or it's uh stuff like that. I mean like we need to slow down, come back. I'm the boss, right? I determine the direction, I choose how I want to respond to this. I don't react, I choose my action, and then I strategically act, right? So it's kind of like deep breath. That's the first part, deep breath. Okay. Then the second thing, and I always tell people to do this, is I tell them, review the progress. It's easy to see what we didn't accomplish, what we didn't hit, what we don't have, and all of those things. But review the progress because if you're someone you listen to our podcast, you're the entrevone business school and all of those things, and you're kind of following along, chances are you are making a significant amount of progress, regardless, right? So, like review the process. Progress. So I asked, I said, two years ago, if I told you would be working on a million-dollar practice, would you believe me? She was like, no, this was not something I could even think of. I said, So the mere fact that you have owned this to the point where you're like, this is a goal, you broke it down into quarterly goals, you had the guts to raise your hand in front of all these people and talk about your goal and talk about where, like, this is evolution of evolution. This is progress, right? And then the revenue that you did create, that is progress. The team members that you led at a higher level, that is progress. Taking the time to identify the strategies that work the best, that is progress. So we don't just throw everything away and say it didn't work. No, we stop. Okay, so where do we make progress? Where did we have breakthroughs? Where did we have results we haven't had before? Right? And so even I was like, you know, compare Q1 of this year to Q1 of last year. I think it was up either 25% or 40%. I don't remember. So you grew. It's not that you didn't grow. Now we say settle there, no, but you do have to acknowledge what is working, right? So review the progress. Like, so for me, did I sell a thousand books? I didn't sell a thousand books in the time frame that I wanted, right? But I did sell 850 books, and that is nothing to sneeze at. That is 850 doctors who are learning a different way of doing things. That's the second thing. So review the progress. The third thing is then analyze the data. So the beautiful thing about setting a goal and taking action is that it gives you data. Okay. All right. So let me give you an example with this over the summer. So in pediatrics, over the summer, it tends to be the most dead time in a pediatric practice, right? Because first of all, the kids are not in school, so they're not getting sick as often. Okay, we're not mad about that, but that means all those sick visits go away. Second of all, even if they were sick, they don't need a school note and stuff like that. So they're not coming in. Like, you know, they could wait three, four, five, seven days, you know, to get better. And third, school is not sending them back, like, oh, your immunizations are not up to date, or you're overdue for a wealth check, so they're not coming. And then they travel, you know, so they're all over the world, all over the country, they're not thinking about you or your pediatric practice. So it tends to be a slower time of the year. Now we have always taken the approach of we are proactive. So that's fine that it's a slower time, but what can we do to be busy? And so we'll use different strategies. One of the strategies we use for a really long time was the recaller. We would find all the people who are overdue for checkups and we would bring them in. We'd tell them, hey, back to school rush is gonna start in August. We want you to completely miss that party. So we want you to bring Johnny in, phrase well, check now. So when everybody's scrambling last minute for back to their back to school stuff, you don't have to be part of that. Okay. And that worked. Except that when COVID hit, the recall it now became the all-time strategy, right? To keep our schedule full and all of that. So when we get to summers, we are not having that big block of people, right? Of people who could come in for appointments because we were working that all year long. So we had to develop something new. And so last summer, we said, okay, this is the strategy we're going to use for digital marketing. This is a strategy we're going to use for referrals, and this is a strategy that we are going to use even with the recaller, right? And so we mapped out the strategy. Every strategy is a hypothesis. Like we think this will work, right? We don't know. We don't know. In this combination, we do not know. And so we went at it for 90 days. Okay. I think we've probably sorry end of May to end of June to end of July, right? So we had this 90-day block, and then we went full speed ahead at it. Okay. Now, when we finished with that and we found out, okay, we were able to have a busier summer and all of those things, we're like, great. And now, what worked? What didn't work? What worked the best? And all of those things. This hypothesis, was it true? And then we came back, and to my shock, because I think this is the first time that this has happened in my practice, the to my shock, rather than referrals being at the top, it was online. Like people finding us on Google, finding our reviews, all of those things. Like the number one way people new patients found us was through Google. Right. And I was like, okay, that's interesting. But what did it do? It gave me data. What does that mean? It means, okay, if this is working, we can now pour gasoline on the fire, right? It means let's go optimize our Google business profile. Let's go get more reviews. Maybe let's start putting some posts on Google, on our Google business profile and things like that, right? And maybe we want to supplement and throw ads at it, like whatever that is. But now we had data so we can make data-driven decisions. Okay, data-driven decisions is not only for big companies, it's for our companies. Okay. And they were like the referrals. Okay, so it wasn't as much as we thought it was. Do we throw it away? No, we don't throw it away. We put more muscle behind it and see maybe it's because of the way we did it. We look for different approaches to go at it again and see if we can revive that, but you know, beef it up, if you will, and stuff like that. So we can make data-driven decisions. So for this doctor who is like, I didn't hit my goal. Well, the business still grew, right? So the question then becomes what is working? So the patients, the new patients who came, how are they finding you? The patient visits that happened, how did they come about scheduling those visits? For your revenue that came in, where's 80% of that revenue coming from? You have all these data points so you can find the things that are working and pour gasoline on the fire and then look at now add it on a new experiment. Well, we didn't do this at all, but this might could work. So let's add this for this next 90-day block. Analyze the data. Analyze the data. So analyzing the data, when you do that, leads us to number four, which is devise an upgraded plan. So this worked. Let's put more gasoline on the fire here. Let's work this even more, right? The same way I was talking about the online stuff. You could say we've never tried this, but it's a proven method, right? So this is something, you know, Dr. Una has been teaching about this. I saw this classmate of mine in the on-the-minute business school, do it, and it worked and all that. Let me add this on and see if this will give me the bump that I'm looking for, right? And you can say, oh, and in this area, I know I said I was going to do this, you know, five times a week, but I actually did it once every other week. And so now your upgraded plans include your upgraded level of consistency, right? Like so you come up with a plan, a new plan, and then you go at it again, right? Okay, so number one, deep breaths. Number two, right? Review the progress. Number three, analyze the data. Number four, come up with your upgraded plan. Number five is a favorite one because it's always mindsets. That's the beginning, end of everything. This is what I told her. I said, let me offer you a thought. I will be led by my vision, not my data. Right? Because you're saying, I'm gonna take this data and I'm gonna change my goal, but I have a goal. I have a vision, I have somewhere I'm committed to getting to, right? I am going to be led by my vision. I will let my vision drive me. I will let my vision help me come up with better strategies. I'll let my vision do all of that rather than my data. The data is a historical, it's a historical point, right? This is what happened over the last 90 days. I'm not gonna let the past be the driver. The vision will be the driver, right? The vision will be the driver. So that's what I told her. And I think it was a big breakthrough idea for her. I was like, so the data is the data. I can analyze the data and adjust the plan and do all of those things, but the data will not be the driver. The David I will not be the boss of me. My vision will be. And so I have the vision, I own the vision, and I'm going all in. So I said, we have another 90-day block. We have the second quarter of the year. Let's go. Not from a place of frantic energy, like, what will happen if I don't do it? It's like, this is the vision. It's available to me. It's something that I want, it's something I've seen others do. I see a pathway to it. I'm gonna go all in. I'm gonna go all in. And I'm, you know, I'm happy to say that, you know, she's gone all in. And I hope for you, you make the decision to go all in as well, right? So maybe you have a vision that you dropped somewhere because you're like, you know, I tried it, it didn't work. I'm inviting you to go pick it up. Maybe you've quite quit, right? You're in cruise control, you're just going through the motions. People think you're at it, but you know you quit like quite a while ago. I want to invite you to take that vision, be inspired by it again, and go all in. Maybe you are kind of all in, but you reset your goal. And you reset your goal not because your goal initially was outrageous, but because you're like, I've tried this and I didn't hit it, right? But the thing is this that goal will give you the most beautiful plans. It will inform how you need to change your mindset, your leadership, your strategies, all of those things. It'll make you the best version of yourself. And even if you fall short in that timeline, it doesn't mean that you can't hit it. And I'll give you an example of that in a second. And if you're like, oh my goodness, I want to be in this kind of environment where I can go from challenge to challenge without losing my enthusiasm, where I can have this kind of support. So instead of getting bent out of shape for, you know, three months, six months, nine months, twelve months, I could be bent out of shape for like five minutes, raise my hand, get really world-class mentorship and keep moving forward. And I have colleagues that constantly remind me that what I thought was impossible is possible. Then, you know, come join us in the on-trained business score, right? You can give us a call, on traemd.com slash call, right? We'll be happy, we'll be happy to talk with you. Okay. I want you to think about, like I told you the story about on traMD, right? We wrote the book, we did 850 copies in the first week, but this is what happened after that, right? So it's like woo-hoo, Crimea River, we didn't hit it. But that book has gone on to sell thousands and thousands of copies. And it is now the first of five business books, right? So we did the Entre MD method, we did the visibility formula, we did made for more volume one, we did the profitable private practice playbook, we did made for more volume two, right? So it's now one of five. And those five have sold thousands and thousands and thousands of copies. So did I hit the 1000 in the time I wanted? No. Did I hit the 1000? Yes. Had that 1000 multiplied? Yes. Like a thousand times, yes. Okay. So I want to invite you to have the tenacity. In fact, I don't even want to invite you to. I want you to just flat out imagine it, right? Having the tenacity of a bulldog to a bone. And there may be delays and there may be denials and there may be disappointments and there may be failed projects, but it doesn't stop you from moving full speed ahead. As the end of it all, you hit the vision, you become who you imagined you could be, you do what you imagined what you could do, you have what you imagined you can have. That is available to you. And we have this one precious life. What better way to use it than to use it, becoming everything we can be? Every single thing we can be. Not from a place of negative hustle, I'm about to die, and I'm burnt out energy, but from a place of what if? What if that level of curiosity? Okay. So I know that this has been helpful to you. If you they're physician entrepreneurs you love in your world, I want you to send this to them because it will be such a gift to them. And I will see you, my friend, on the next episode.