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It's that time of year. You're reflecting on what's just been and you're thinking about the
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year ahead. I want to give you a goal-setting framework that is going to help you to crush
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your goals in the year ahead. I've been using this framework for the last 20 years and I want
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to share it with you. I call it the 5 A's. I used this in 2025 and had one of the best years of my
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life. I spent a week on Necker Island with Richard Branson. We added over $10 million worth of
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valuation to the companies. I wrote a book. I was on Diary of a CEO five times, but I also took the
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kids to school almost every morning. I spent lots of time in nature and I spent a lot of time on
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adventures out having fun traveling. All of that was made possible because I got clear about a
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goal setting framework that I want to share with you today. So the goal setting framework is called
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the five A's. I'm going to walk you through the five A's step by step first, and then we'll get
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into each of them. We'll drill in and I'll share with you some shortcuts and some hacks that will
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allow you to just kind of fast track the whole process. So the first one is alignment. So alignment
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is about being energetically aligned to the future, feeling of being pulled into the future,
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that there's a future that you want to have. And the feeling that you have is that you can't wait
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for it to happen. You're super excited for it. You need to feel excitement for the future. Now,
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the key things that we do around alignment is number one is the end state. The end state is
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where we actually look at what would perfection look like and ideally three years from now.
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So typically, I love to get entrepreneurs to choose. Do you want a lifestyle business or a
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performance business? Lifestyle business is going to be fun, freedom and flexibility,
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but it's going to be a little bit smaller. It's probably going to be a team of five to 10 people
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at most. And a performance business is going to be a bigger business, but it's probably going to
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be a bit stressful. There's going to be more grown up stuff that has to happen. You'll have
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to have an executive team and you'll probably have to manage 30, 40, 50 people. You'll probably have
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to develop new technologies and all sorts of things like that. So you've got to figure out,
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do I want to have a business that gives me fun, freedom and flexibility, but it's a bit smaller,
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a lifestyle business? Or do I want to build a business that can sell for a hundred million
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dollars, a performance business? You need to feel drawn towards it. There's no point saying you want
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a lifestyle business when your heart wants a performance business. And there's no point saying
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you want a performance business when your heart really just wants a lifestyle business. You've
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got to pick the end state that you're genuinely aligned to. The next thing is you need to meet
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people who have that end state or at least study people that have that end state. Maybe you study
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them on YouTube or read their books. And the goal here is to understand the details of that story.
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So it's one thing to say, oh, I want a lifestyle business. It's another thing to know exactly what
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the headcount would be, what type of revenue, what type of products, what systems, what technologies
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would be in place. So this is understanding the detailed roadmap. So you've got a three-year goal.
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You then understand the three-year roadmap towards the end state.
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And then you ask yourself, do I feel aligned to going on that pathway?
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And if you don't feel aligned, you have to figure out what would make you feel aligned.
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Do you need more rewards involved?
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Do you need it to be faster?
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Do you need to do it with a particular group of people or a friend, right?
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So what would actually get you aligned to that roadmap?
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The final thing is to align those around you.
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You've got to align your spouse.
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You've got to align your closest friends.
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They have to understand that you're going on this journey and there's going to be some
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sacrifices involved. However, there are rewards involved as well and that they're included in
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those rewards. There's no point for you to become a multimillionaire at the expense of your family
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and the family just like, why do we miss out on seeing you all the time? There's no rewards for
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us. It's all about your desires. We're not aligned to it. Now, if you've got people who live with you
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or you've got people who are close to you in your life and they're not aligned to your goals,
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they're going to put the brakes on. They're going to subconsciously hold you back because they don't
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feel aligned to you achieving these things. So one of the things that you have to do in alignment
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is have some tough conversations
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to see if you can align those around you.
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You've got to get a team of people into alignment.
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When you're starting a company,
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you and your co-founder have to be aligned.
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When you're growing a company,
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you might have to have an entire team
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of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 people aligned.
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Everyone has to understand the roadmap.
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Everyone has to understand the end state
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and everyone has to understand the reward structure,
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what's in it for them.
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Now, what does this look like in practice?
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In practice, it means every 90 days
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when I'm working with my teams,
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I'm reconnecting them to the vision.
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I'm reconnecting them to the road ahead.
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I'm reconnecting them to the reward structure of what's in it for them.
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I'm going through a process of getting people re-enrolled, getting them excited about achieving
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these outcomes.
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I want myself and my team to feel aligned and clear about what it is that we're all
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shooting for.
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My assumption is that that only lasts for 90 days at a time.
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So every 90 days, you have to get re-enrolled and realigned to these goals.
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And you've got to do that, not just for yourself, but you've got to do that for everyone who's
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involved in this goal.
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Every single person, top to bottom, needs to feel that sense of alignment towards this goal.
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Now, what is alignment? Another word for alignment is magic. What does it feel like to be aligned?
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It feels magical When you aligned magically the resources appear Magically the right person shows up Magically there are breakthrough moments that just happen Magically the creativity is flowing and things are happening in alignment with the goal When you feel like you walking through wet cement when you feel like you walking through
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a jungle and you're just going in the wrong direction, I promise you it's highly likely
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that you're out of alignment. You or your team are just not feeling aligned to this goal. If you're
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watching this and you honestly feel a sense of emptiness or a lack of passion or a lack of purpose,
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you need to start with alignment. You need to get to the point where you feel super, super excited
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for the year ahead. That if these things were to happen in the year ahead, I would be pumped.
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So what does that look like for you? Where do you want to be a year from now? Where do you want to
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be three years from now? What would be happening in your life that would make you feel totally
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aligned? So as soon as you have alignment, that you want to do this thing, the next thing that
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will happen is your brain naturally brings up something called awarenesses. And your awarenesses
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are essentially the things that bubble up where you go, oh, we're going to need one of those,
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or we're going to have to figure out how to fix this problem. So here's an example. If I said
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that we want to sell this business for $100 million, then one of the awarenesses is that
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the revenue is too low. We don't have enough revenue, so we're going to have to grow the
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revenue. Another one is that the recurring revenue is too low, that we have to have a recurring
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revenue product, or that we don't have any financial forecasting tools, and that therefore
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it would be unlikely that we could achieve any of this. Another awareness is that we're not
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developing technology or we don't own the technology that we leverage. And that awareness
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would also be a reason why we're probably not going to hit the goal. So your awarenesses are
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essentially things like your insecurities or your concerns or your blind spots and your brain starts
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surfacing the awarenesses. Now, what most people have been trained to do is to ignore their
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awareness. They essentially sit there and say, oh, I don't want to think about my blind spots. I don't
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want to think about my insecurities or concerns. I just want to be super pumped and super excited
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about the goal, but I don't want to have to address the awarenesses. But what you want to do if you
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want to achieve your goals is keep what's called an awareness list. An awareness list is where you
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write down in your document all the things that come up, all the things that bubble up from deep
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within that tell you these are the things we have to address if we're going to achieve this goal.
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So for me personally, I have an app on my phone, which is the notes app, and I have my rolling
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awareness list. Everything that's bubbling up that is my awareness list, I'm capturing it
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so that I can surface my awarenesses and deal with my awarenesses. As a company, we have
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company-wide awareness lists. For example, our leadership team has a senior leadership team
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awareness list. Broader team has a awareness list that we're always working from. When we bring on
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new people onto our team, we actually hire them and we do an onboarding and training session around
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dealing with awarenesses, how to recognize an awareness, how to surface an awareness,
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how to document the awareness, how to check in with people and raise an awareness. Within the
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culture of my companies, we always talk about the idea that raising an awareness is never a risky
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business. We want anyone top to bottom to be able to raise an awareness. We even teach people the
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language of how to raise an awareness where we say, can I raise an awareness with you? Or can I
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share an awareness that I've got around that? Simply by giving people that language and the
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ability to raise awarenesses when they have them means that the company is always dealing with the
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real stuff. See, in many businesses that don't raise awarenesses, they're all pretending that
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they're doing all the right things. But secretly, the whole team knows that it's not going to work,
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but no one's saying anything. That is the last thing that you want. You want to have a company,
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you want to have a team where people raise the awareness and they talk about it, they discuss it,
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they solve it. Listen, let me be real with you. If you don't have an awareness list and you don't
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surface and deal with awarenesses, the same stuff is going to haunt you over and over and over again.
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You are going to be on a merry-go-round of destruction where the same thing hits you over
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and over and over again and you keep scratching your head saying, why is that happening to me?
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And the reason it's happening to you is because you're not training yourself to recognize the awareness early to surface it and deal with it.
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So two things that I want you to have so far.
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Number one, I want you to have an alignment document where you feel totally inspired just reading this end state.
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You understand the reward structure and you understand all the people who have to be aligned and that everyone has access to that document so that everyone can feel aligned around it.
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Number two, I want you to have an awareness list where everyone can put stuff on the awareness list and it can get discussed and talked about and ideated and solved.
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We've got a document that tells us what we're aligned to and we've got a document that is a living, breathing, updating document called an awareness list.
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Once you've got awareness, now you need to turn that into accountabilities.
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Accountabilities are the big things that have to be solved in the next 90 days.
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Now, there's a great book called Who Not How and this tells you about the power of getting people on the team who know how to solve the big problems.
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So once you know that you got maybe two three four major things that have to be achieved in order to get a breakthrough this is not about you doing this on your own This is about you assembling a team of people who can get onto all of this See the critical thing people don think about is who going to do this with you
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I don't really believe that anything great
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can be achieved on your own.
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I think all of it needs to have a who
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who's going to get you the breakthrough
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in the accountabilities.
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For example, people who have a breakthrough in business
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are either on an accelerator
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or they've got a business coach.
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There is someone else that's involved
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in that bigger picture of accountability.
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These things only work if the team are aligned,
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if the awarenesses have been surfaced, and now we're dealing with the real things that people
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need to be accountable for. So we've got those first three things. Now the rubber hits the road.
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This is called activities. So the truth about success is that you have to do the same stuff
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over and over and over again. There are certain activities that drive results. So for example,
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people who get fit, they go to the gym over and over and over again. A famous musician goes touring
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and they play in front of audiences over and over and over and over again. There's this repetition,
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There's activities that really drive the needle.
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So what we need to do is to understand for every single person, what are the weekly activities
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that really move things?
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So here's what we do.
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We have a Monday morning meeting and on the Monday morning meeting, everyone declares
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what their three to six things are this week that are their most important activities.
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And what we do is we ask the rest of the team to suggest whether they should add or subtract
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or change any of those three to six things so that you're getting feedback on a Monday
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morning so that each person says, yeah, I think you're doing the right things this week.
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I think those are the most important things that you should be doing.
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We then have a Friday afternoon debrief where we check in on the three to six things.
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This is where I might say, these were my three to six things that I said on Monday, and this
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is how I did.
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This one's done.
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This one's done.
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This one's not done.
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I've got to do it next week.
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This one's not done.
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And this one's done.
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Right.
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So I check off my three to six things.
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And all of this starts and finishes with what we call the quarterly reset.
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And the quarterly reset is where we revisit the alignment, raise awarenesses, make sure
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we've got the right accountabilities and then make sure that for the next quarter, you've got the
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right big three to six big things that you're going to do in the next 90 days and making sure
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that every quarter you understand the three to six big things that you're going to be doing in that
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90 days that move the needle. For activities, we've got a quarterly reset that gives us three
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to six big things to do in the quarter. We've got a Monday morning meeting where we declare the three
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to six things this week that I want to do and the Friday afternoon debrief that declares whether I
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did the three to six most important things to my team. We've got alignment. We've raised
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awarenesses. We've set accountabilities. We know who's responsible for the big things.
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We're now tracking this on a weekly basis. We're having weekly activities. The final thing is
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assets. Now, when it comes to assets, you've got three options. You can buy assets. So this is the
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asset exists and you can just simply buy it. You can develop assets, which means that you are going
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to innovate. You're going to be the one who creates this asset. Or you can improve assets,
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which means you've got something already in place but it needs a refresh and you're going to improve
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it. So for example you could buy a property, you could start with a block of land and develop a
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property or you can take something that's run down and improve the property and same thing with your
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website. You could go and buy an existing business that has a website, you could develop a website for
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your own business or you could take your existing website and improve it. So with all of the assets
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that are out there you've always got some options buy, develop or improve. So what you want to do is
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with your team, you want to figure out what are all the potential investments that you could make.
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And you want to make a list of maybe 15, 20, 30 different assets you could invest into. You could
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say, we want to invest into building a YouTube channel. We want to invest into creating lead
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generation assets. We want to invest into writing a book next year. We want to invest into having a
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better website. We want to build a property portfolio. We want to own some high yielding
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stocks and shares. We want to have a pension fund. Whatever assets you think would make your life
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easier in the year ahead. Those are the assets you need to invest into now. And then what you want to
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do is have an asset investment meeting to try and figure out what would be the wisest asset
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investments you could make. What would give you the biggest bang for buck? For example, you could
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put 1 million into property and it might give you 30,000 worth of rent. Or you could put 10,000
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into an online assessment or a scorecard and that could actually give you 1,000 leads per month,
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which translates into 100 grand per month worth of new customers.
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So in that case, it would be way better to make a 10,000 investment into your lead generation
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assets than a million dollar investment into a new physical property.
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In business at the moment, there are 24 really important assets that your business could invest
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into.
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I wrote the book called 24 Assets to cover all of them.
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And if you want to check that out you can go to www There be a link in the description You can actually answer 48 questions and do an assessment It actually tell you which assets you already got and which ones you should develop next I created that framework because I wanted to know for myself which assets
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I should be developing each year. And I wanted a framework for making that decision. So 24 assets
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would be a really good place to start. So as I said, I've been doing this now for many, many years
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where every single 90 days I go through and I do a 5As assessment with my entire team. But let's
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take this as an example for you. Let's say you want to have a lifestyle business and you want to
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pay yourself $300,000 for the year. And you want to do $1.2 million a year of revenue. And you say,
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okay, who do I know who's already done that? I know some people who've got that kind of business,
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very similar to what I know how to do. And they've got a team of eight people in order to achieve
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that. And here's what their roles are and here's what it looks like. And here's how long it took.
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And here's what their website looks like and all of that. So the first step is alignment. And you
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might say, in order to do this, who do I need to get into alignment? I need to get my spouse into
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alignment. I need to have a co-founder into alignment. I need to have a salesperson who's
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in alignment. I need to have my delivery customer success person in alignment. These are the people
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I need to get into alignment today. You then have an alignment session where you paint the picture
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of what you want to achieve in the next three years and you show them this is what it's going
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to look like and here's what everyone gets out of that. And then you ask them the question,
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what awarenesses do we have about our ability to do this? You might say, what if we get disrupted
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by AI. You might say we're not very good at generating the leads for those high quality
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clients. You might say we're not particularly good at delivering value to the types of people
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who pay the bigger money. So all of this, it's good to talk about. These are all the problems
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that we need to solve. Then we say, what do we have to do in order to get a breakthrough in the
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next 90 days? We need to solve these four big problems and who's going to be in charge of that?
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I'm going to do this one. You're going to do this one. This person's going to do this one. This
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person's going to do this one. So we've got our big problems and we know who's accountable and
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the whole team understands what everybody's going to be doing in the next 90 days to be super
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accountable to getting those breakthroughs. Then we say, what are we going to do for the weekly
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activities? We might say, all right, every week, person one is going to make sales calls. We're
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going to develop this content marketing strategy. We're going to record these videos. We're going to
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do this, right? There's three to six big things that have to happen every single week. And we're
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going to check in and make sure you've done those three to six things. And we're going to do that
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with every single person. And we're going to check in every single week. Monday morning meeting could
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be on Zoom, could be in face-to-face. I used to do mine in a cafe and we all used to have omelets and
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coffee. So Monday morning meeting, everyone checks in with their three to six. They discuss anything
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that's getting in their way. Friday afternoon debrief, everyone talks about their three to six
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that they got done and talks about any issues that came up. And then the quarterly reset is where we
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actually go back and solve some more awarenesses. And then finally, every 90 days, we're saying,
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what are the big assets we want to invest into for the next 90 days or the next 12 months? What
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are our big investments. Now we've got some capital. Now we've got some ability to invest.
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What are we going to invest into so that life gets easier year on year and we get closer to this end
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state? And if you just simply follow this every 90 days, alignment, awareness, accountabilities,
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activities and assets, it starts to snowball. It starts to compound up and everything gets easier.
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And the things that you used to think of as incredible goals that you would never achieve
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in your lifetime become the normal things that you're doing every 90 days. See, the truth is
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goal setting and new year resolutions, they're great and they're a lot of fun, but they're just
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a tiny little part of a bigger picture. If you're not getting yourself and others into real genuine
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alignment around this, if you're not dealing with the awarenesses, if you're not having
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accountabilities where you're accountable to a team, if you're not checking in on a Monday and
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a Friday and having the right activities every week, and if you're not making life easier through
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the purchase or development of assets, it's just never going to happen. You have to have this
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complete system. You have to have a complete way of doing this. And the other thing too is
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success is a team sport. Anything great that you want to achieve, there has to be other people on
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the team, which is why you need other people in alignment. You need other people's awarenesses,
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other people with accountabilities, activities, and working together on the assets. And if you
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can get all of that complete picture, you can live your dreams. If you've made it this far,
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I'm sure that you're really interested in the world around you. And I want to share with you
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an event that is coming up called Make It Big 2026. It's a live event on Zoom. It's completely free
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to attend. I'm going to unpack the four big trends that are going to impact your life and
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your business in the year ahead, I'd love for you to come and join me for a live event. Register with
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the link below and I'll see you there. So I hope you enjoyed that video. Leave me a comment below.
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Are you going to put the 5As methodology to the test? Are you going to try it out in your life?
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If you enjoyed this, give it a like, give the channel a subscribe, and I look forward to making
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you more videos in the coming months. I hope your business is doing really, really well. I'll see you soon.