How do I set myself good goals?

Evaluate your financial results:

• How much money did you earn
• What were your expenses?
• What was your total profit, i.e. income minus expenses?
• What was your profit margin (profit divided by income)?

If you have this data for the previous year, this is a good time to compare these figures with those of this or other previous years. 

In the beginning, estimating the income for the following year is a question for the crystal ball. Only with one or better several years of experience does the estimation become somewhat easier. So don’t think that the estimate has to be right. As a rule, you can still tell the tax office or the artists’ social insurance fund in the current year that you want to change your expected income.

However, if you have already collected some data, you can roughly estimate when there will be lulls, which clients you can count on and whether you might have a continuous order that creates a certain basic financial noise. Of course, you can also actively approach your clients to see if they are counting on your support in the coming year. 

So go through your current clients and think about what income could be realistic for each. 

It will be a little easier if you first estimate your order volume for each month individually. This way you can work out when you’ll be on holiday, when you’ll have fewer gigs and orders, and in which months you might want to work a little less in order to do some training. 

Do you know what the beauty of self-employment is? You are the boss. Accordingly, you can behave with your orders a bit like a child in a sweet shop: a bit of this, a bit of that and next year I’ll finally treat myself to a big bite of that!

Especially in the beginning, this may seem a bit unrealistic, as you first want to earn money and gain a foothold. But little by little, the market learns what it likes about you and at some point you can choose what you want to work for and with. So when you plan your year, you can also think about where you want to go. Here you can just dream. Whether it’s realistic or not is completely irrelevant here. Just look at what you really want and what you would have to do to get there. And until you get there, you can still pay your rent in a very down-to-earth way with what you’re super good at and what sells well.

• What would you like to do less of?
• What would you like to stop doing altogether?
• What would you like to do more of
• What would you like to start doing?

If you know what you want to do, you need one thing above all: customers.
But this is precisely the biggest challenge when starting out on the market.
Building up a solid customer base can be tricky. Here
not only about finding paying customers, but also about finding the right
but also discovering the right clientele.

The first step is to distinguish between two types of target groups: 

• the people you are already selling to and
• the people you are supposed to sell to in the future.

Sometimes these two groups are identical, but sometimes they are worlds apart. For example, if you start your writing career at a local newspaper, you probably see small provincial papers as your target audience because that’s where you collect most of your royalties. But your real audience is the publishers to whom you will soon want to pitch your books, and of course the readers for whom you want to write your books. So, when you are planning your new life and work, also ask yourself: Who do you want to do this for?

The way to find your target group is to ask specific questions:

• Where do your clients work (e.g. in the press office of a university or in the booking department for a scene location)?
• And how much do you earn?
• What do your dream clients do in their free time, i.e. what kind of people are they?
• What problem can you solve for them?

Since you are planning your future, you should not only consider who you are already working for, but also that your future clients will have a say in the direction of your career. For example, if you want to be a science journalist, working for Bild probably doesn’t make much sense. The same is true if you actually want to work for a school book publisher but spend all your time painting birthday cards for children’s birthdays. Your choice of clients shapes your credentials and your portfolio. The choice of each client is also the choice of your future. Of course, especially in the beginning, you can’t always be as choosy as you might like, but you can always readjust.

Now it’s time for fine-tuning. For each of your answers, think about when you want to achieve this goal and what you need to do to achieve it. For more information, see above on how to set smart goals:

• What topics do you want to focus on next year?
• What do you want your professional title to be or become?
• What services or products do you want to offer?
• What do you still need to learn?

And since you are not only a worker but also a human being, you may also take time for these questions:

• How do I want to feel?
• Who do I want to be?
• How do I want others to perceive me?
• What should be the title of the next phase of my life?
• What do I want to learn?
• What do I want to do less of?
• What do I need to let go of something I don’t like?
• What do I want to stop doing altogether?
• What do I want to do more of?
• What do I want to start doing?