This is a great series on goal setting. Like Jill talked about last week, setting realistic goals is key to being successful and also helps to motivate you to set new ones once you reach a goal. For instance, Rachael and I had set some goals for 2011 when she started. One of them was to maximize the time her guests are here with her. When she started in February 2011, her guest count was 36 and she performed a total of 58 services. This was mostly just straight manicures and pedicures with a few add-ons. Her ratio of service to client was 1.6, which means she upgraded only about half of her clients.

Fast forward to December 2011, she saw 87 guests and performed a total of 159 services. She is now offering not only manicures and pedicures but artificial nail enhancements and Gelish. Her ratio went to 1.8, which means she is now upgrading a little more than three-quarters of her guests with additional services. That is a huge increase and we successfully met and exceeded our goal which was to get her ratio to 1.7.

Another goal we had set and have been working on all year is pre-books. We wanted to see her percentage at about 40% by the end of the year. When she started last year she only pre-booked five of her 36 guests. By December she had increased that to 50 of the 87 guests she saw. That is huge to go from pre-booking only 1% of her guests to pre-booking 57% of them. She not only met but exceeded that goal as well.

Had we not set reachable goals for her she would have felt a sense of failure even before she had begun. By setting smaller goals over the course of the year she was able to see and break down how much progress needed to be made towards those goals each month. It made things much less scary for her and much more coachable for me to help her to attain them. I am so proud of her progress.

On a personal level, I achieved one of my owns goals this past weekend — it was to compete at the ISSE show in Long Beach, Calif. I competed in four competitions. For both the 3-D Nail Art and Hand-Painted Nail Art categories, I could do the art on tips and turn them in for scoring. Then I competed in the Soak-Off Gel Art and Soak-Off Gel Manicure competitions. My goal was to just get in there and compete and to finish the nails in the given amount of time. I finished and didn’t even make myself sick stressing over it. I have set a new personal goal of competing in Orlando at Premiere and in Las Vegas at IBS.

— Sandy