Goal Setting for Entrepreneurs: Put the Owner on the List

Andrew's goal list had five rows. The last one was him.

He had worked 65 hours a week for so long that the number felt like the weather. When he ranked his goals, he put his own time in last place. He had known for years that he was tired. He had never written down that he was willing to trade his rest for the business.

Now picture your own list for next year. Revenue. A new client. A website, maybe a second location. Look for the row with your name on it: your hours, your free day, your own pay.

If that row is missing, the business has already decided how you will spend the year.

The till counted every cappuccino. Andrew's own working week he had to add up from the calendar.

A goal list without your own row lets the business spend your year for you. The Jirgenson Model puts the owner back on the list, with goals in order, real hours and a plan. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).

Goal setting for entrepreneurs starts with the owner row

A goal list for a business covers six areas: finance, clients, sales, processes and quality, people, and one more. That sixth area is development and the owner: future projects, plus the owner's own time, health and money.

It is the easiest one to skip. It also decides how long you can keep running the other five.

Giving up your time for the business can be a sound choice. It has to be a choice. Written down, ranked and dated, not a default that nobody voted for.

Write the owner row in five steps

This takes about twenty minutes. Each step shows a real entry from Andrew, the coffee shop owner, or Elena, a freelance designer.

1. Measure, do not estimate. Take your hours from the calendar or your time records, not from memory. Andrew: 65 hours a week. Elena: 50 hours a week.

2. Fill in all six fields. A row without a current value is still a wish.

3. Rank the row with the refusal test. Imagine you have half the resources. Cross out goals one at a time, starting with the one you would give up first. The last one standing is number one. Andrew crossed out his hours first and defended the cash reserve to the end. Elena did the same with her time and kept her income last.

4. Give any overload an end date. If you know a heavy stretch is coming, write it into the goal before it starts. Elena: no more than 35 hours a week, except from month 1 to month 3 while she writes her first online book. In those three months, up to 55.

5. Write your hard limit as a constraint. The load a person can bear sits with the law, safety and contracts. Those rules come before the list. They are not ranked, and they are never given up in turn.

That is the whole tool. One row, measured, ranked, with its exceptions dated in advance.

An overload with an end date is a plan. Without one, it is a lifestyle.

A business goals list for one person

Here is Elena's whole list, in refusal order. Three rows are enough.

Each area gets zero to three goals, and the whole list stops at nine. An empty area is fine, as long as you leave it empty on purpose and write down why.

The same holds for goal setting for startups. A founder with no history writes the same rows. A first month of zero is still a measured value, and it beats a hopeful guess.

And it holds for goal setting for small business owners with a team. Andrew's list had five rows: cash reserve, margin, regular customers, complaints, and his hours. His row was fifth. He put it there with a clear head.

The usual list against the owner's list

Compare two versions of the same year (illustration).

Here is what the second column produced. By month 14 Elena earned €3,000 a month from four sources. Her main client paid €900, packages €1,200, repeat orders €300 and the book about €600. Her main client's share fell to 30%. Her week went back to 35 hours. The book sells 21 copies a month without her daily work.

A year in, Andrew worked 44 hours instead of 65. The 40-hour goal was not reached, and he knew it. But for the first time in three years he had lunch at home on Sundays.

What it costs to leave yourself off

Now take the other path. Andrew could have called all five goals equally important.

A week later the supplier raises the price of milk. Sara asks for another barista for the Friday shifts. Andrew agrees, because he is tired and does not want to argue. A month later he finds he ran out of money before he ran out of time. Nobody chose that. Fatigue did.

The money side is blunt. At the old 9% margin, his reserve reaches two months of expenses at month 16. With an order and a plan, at month 10. Six extra months with every breakdown one step from a crisis.

The hours side is as plain. Six more months at 65 hours instead of 40 is 25 extra hours a week, about 650 hours in total. That is half a year of Sundays at the counter.

The villain is not ambition. It is the unwritten default: the overtime nobody decided on, so nobody ends.

What the owner row does not fix

The row makes your own load visible and ranked. That treats the symptom: you stop pretending the owner is free.

The cause can still win. You can see 44 hours, but you do not know at what point "a hard month" turns into "act today". And Elena's 55-hour stretch needs more than an end date. It needs a rule for when it may start and when it must stop.

Two steps close that gap.

• Zone thresholds and the red protocol. Where normal ends and an emergency begins, and what to do first when several rows turn red. Chapter 4.
• The manoeuvre. Launch conditions, stop conditions and a corridor for any planned push, so a three-month sprint stays three months. Chapter 10.

The goal row is the first of six steps: goal, state, error, levers, plan, forecast.

"I have no time for this." The first pass takes about 30 minutes: five wishes, the refusal test, today's numbers, one lever, one review date. Andrew wrote his ranked list in fifteen minutes. The full plan for next year, from tonight to this month, is in how to set goals for next year.

Two choices before next year

You have two choices. Write next year's list without yourself on it, and let the overtime decide its own length. Or write the owner row tonight, with a number and a place in the order.

The row gets you seen. The zone thresholds and the rules of the manoeuvre keep you from vanishing back into the business in the first hard month.

Test the logic for free: Chapter 1, with the refusal test. Or get the full control system on Kindle, on Amazon. It comes as a Kindle book, and every chapter ends with a task you can do on your own list.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

• Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
• Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
• Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
• GitHub: experiment folder
• Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
• ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552