Between Christmas and New Year’s, I do what a lot of people do. I sit down and write out goals. Personal goals. Business goals. The whole life inventory.
On the personal side, I break things into buckets. Family comes first. What do I want this year to look like with my kids? With my wife? What does a good marriage year actually mean, not just sound like? Then finances. Am I saving? Paying down debt? Buying another property? Investing somewhere new? Friendships matter too. And health. What’s my target weight? More importantly, what am I actually going to do to get there?
That last part matters. Goals without a plan are just wishful thinking with better handwriting.
I do the same thing on the business side. How much do I want to earn? What should my average fee be? What do I want my average fee to be? What do I want my client mix to look like? Lender work versus private work. Attorneys. Estates. Divorce. And again, the key question is always the same. What are the steps to make this happen?
For years, I kept all of this in a Word document. I’d print it out, leave it on my desk, and maybe look at it once a quarter. It was better than nothing, but let’s be honest, that document mostly just sat there judging me.
Midway through this past year, I read Do What Matters Most, and it flipped the script for me. The big takeaway was simple. Big goals don’t get done by thinking about them harder. They get done by breaking them into actions you can actually put on a calendar.
So I tried something new.
I bought a simple weekly planner on Amazon called the Productivity Weekly Planner. Same layout every week. Monday through Friday. No fluff. No motivational quotes yelling at me. Just structure.
Each week forces you to take those big, ambitious goals and turn them into small, manageable steps.
For example, one of my goals is to host a non-lender panel event in the first quarter. Instead of writing that goal once and hoping it magically happens, I now schedule the work. One week might say “Create marketing flyer.” Another week is “Meet with colleagues to flush out event details.” As the event gets closer, the tasks get more specific. Outreach. Logistics. Follow-ups.
I do this for everything. Business goals. Personal goals. Health goals. When I flip the page to a new week, I already know exactly what I should be working on because the thinking was done upfront. No guessing. No scrambling. No pretending I’ll “get to it next week.”
The result is progress. Not perfect weeks. Not superhuman discipline. Just consistent forward motion.
If you want to grow your private appraisal business in 2026, this kind of structure matters. Goals are easy. Execution is where most people fall apart.
And if you want help growing your non-lender work, expanding your referral network, and staying accountable to real business goals, that’s exactly what the Appraisal Referral Network is built for.
Join the Appraisal Referral Network and stop hoping your goals happen. Put them on the calendar and make them happen.
