Goal Achieved.
I’m in my second week of my SBA Emerging Leaders group and all of our homework thus far has centered on goal setting. And actually, that is sort of ironic because I am terrible at setting goals with any specificity. My standard operating procedure is to continually overachieve in all things, from the mundane to the most important. Every month, I’ll set a sales goal that is 100% over the same month last year and that drives Jason absolutely CRAZY because 100% growth is lofty at the very best.
So to help myself feel better, I took a look at each year on this day to see what we were doing and how we’ve progressed. Here’s how it went:
2020: At the height of the pandemic, I just wanted to figure out how to make our thermal printer work to make shipping labels so I could avoid our desktop printer (because we all know desktop printers sense fear and any sort of deadline, so they can promise you they won’t work). In the end, I never figured it out…but Jason did, so I’m calling that a win. I’ve fully enjoyed thermal printer labels for a year now. GOAL ACHIEVED.
2019: On this day in 2019, we announced our move to PJP Nifong from our former 1,000 square foot Buttonwood location. I was terrified, to say the least…Jeanne wasn’t worried at all. As it turns out, our move to our current storefront was the best decision we’ve ever made. And now we are working on PJP West End, hopefully to open in September. GOAL ACHIEVED.
2018: We rolled out a completely new home on the Internet, introducing an entirely new website for PJP and one for the blog site. Our original website reflected little of the brand we had become, so we partnered with Hoot Design for a major overhaul and it was worth every single dollar. We continue to evolve on this project by adding additional functionalities. GOAL ACHIEVED.
2017: For whatever reason, Jeanne and I tussled on this day in 2017. It seriously took us a hot minute (read: a few years) to figure out how to work together. Goodness knows what caused us to disagree on this day, but we probably felt it was legit at the time. We’ve progressed a lot since 2017 and now we rarely ever tussle because we’ve learned so much about each other. GOAL ACHIEVED.
2016: Every single time our oven timers buzzed, the timer buttons flew off the ovens across the baking space at PJP Buttonwood. Jeanne was on vacation during this week in 2016, but I apparently had a breakdown and used Gorilla Glue to fix the oven timers and they never flew off again. GOAL ACHIEVED.
2015: Jeanne and I presented at 1 Million Cups, a weekly entrepreneurial meeting that allows you to share your story with other entrepreneurs. We were still pretty new to speaking in front of others about our PJP story and we felt pretty special to be included by 1 Million Cups. I’m sure the presentation was cringeworthy, but now I’ve perfected the public speaking aspect of what we do. (For the record, Jeanne still makes me do all the talking.). GOAL ACHIEVED.
2014: We were celebrating one month of being in business. Oh my goodness…we were pretty clueless about all the things to come our way. But we had a lot of moxie (and really, that hasn’t changed, thankfully.). We had some very big ideas in the earliest days and I think 2014 us would have been thrilled by the 2021 versions of us. GOAL ACHIEVED.
