Our Roadmap to Goal Achievement

“What made you think of running a resort?” is a question we’ve been asked many times. The complete answer is a long one, but the short answer is — goal achievement.  Without goals and plans to achieve them, our desires, and yours, are just destinations without a roadmap to get there. And without a roadmap, the chances of reaching any destination, or achieving any goal, are slim.

Goal setting

We’ve probably all heard many times that we should set goals – for our personal lives, for our business, for our finances – but we don’t.  Or if we do, we quickly forget them and rarely achieve them. Why?  The simple answer is that we lack a road map to goal achievement.

Many years ago, before Brian and I bought the resort, we read a great book by Tommy Newberry called Success is Not an Accident * and learned how to create and achieve goals effectively. It has helped us out greatly in our personal and professional lives and over the years we’ve taught goal setting with students we coach in our local high school.  

As we look ahead at this new year, and we review, adjust, and make new goals for ourselves and Campfire Bay Resort, we thought we’d share the process and what at least one of our goals are, in order to help ourselves, and you, achieve our goals.  In this post we share the best way (that we know of) to set and keep goals using a roadmap to goal achievement.

*As an Amazon Associate I earn a little commission if you buy the book through that link.

Choosing Good Goals

A roadmap to goal achievement all starts with identifying and choosing your goals well. If your goals are too hard, too nebulous, or not important enough to you, you most likely will not achieve them. I have learned this over and over again.  The secret to goal achievement requires you to do the following:

Reflect on your issues

Think about any anxiety, fear, or struggle you’re facing in order to set an appropriate goal to alleviate it. What could be the root cause?  Take time to connect the dots for yourself. Or, maybe your goals are connected to a strong desire for change or growth, whether it be spiritual, personal, or professional. Oftentimes, goals are dreams — but with a plan.

In 2001, I was burnt out from working over 10 hours a day in financial services. I was not seeing much of my husband or 2 year old son and I did not want to continue doing what I was doing. I needed to find out what I wanted, so I took a day off to reflect. I literally just spent hours in my car making pros and cons lists, praying, and tuning out the noise of my busy life.

Visualize the future

What do you want the future to look like for you, your family, your business, etc.? What does the future look like if your fears are eliminated, or your dreams are achieved?  What does it look like if you do nothing?

As I did this myself in my car over 23 years ago, I had this dream of having a place where people could get away and get counseling for any issue in a more natural, organic environment. I loved trying to help people financially, but I wanted to do even more than that, and in my favorite place — outside in nature.

Decide if the goal is attainable by your own efforts

Is it a goal that you can logically do, even if it will be very difficult?  For example, a goal to become a bird is not logical, but a goal to fly (using an assist, whether it be a plane or glider) is achievable. A goal to win the lottery is not dependent on your own efforts, but a goal to get out of debt, is. 

With a different future visualized, I went home and told my husband Brian. He was taken aback, to say the least, but open minded.  The goal to open a retreat center such as I dreamed, was attainable, but only seemed too difficult because we’d never done anything like it before.

Be specific

Too broad a goal is too vague. For example, who’s to say whether or not you are a better person this year than last? Make your goal as specific and clear as possible for your roadmap to goal achievement. 

The goal to open a retreat center was not specific enough. The goal to buy a lake resort close to family within 6 months and learn how to run a hospitality business that could be later turned into a retreat center, was. 

We closed on Country View Resort a little over 4 months later.

Writing Goals Correctly

After you have an idea what goals you want to reach, you need to write them down. Goals can not just stay in your head, a successfuly roadmap to goal achievement requires goals be visible so that you can review them regularly.

Write the goal in present tense

Our brains don’t compute future tense well and it makes the goal just a wish rather than a destination we’re on the path to get to.  A goal like, “We make our resort year round by year 2” is better than, “We will make our resort year round”. To be honest, we didn’t think to write down goals for the resort, but thanks to our bank, we had to make a roadmap to goal achievement before we even closed on the property. We’re so glad we still have those goals in writing, after having basically achieved all of them, for encouragment and proof of goal achievement.

Make it positive

We also don’t process negatives well, like the word “don’t”.  So, our brains will comprehend the goal “We maintain a debt to income ratio of 1:4”, but not “We don’t go into too much debt”.  A roadmap to goal achievement includes positive, present tense statements.

We used every dollar we had, including all retirement funds, to buy the resort.  Brian would lie in bed awake at night the first couple of years and worry.  He’d often ask me, the bookkeeper of the family and business, if we were going to go bankrupt.  I always told him no, stop worrying, but to this day he still claims fear motivates him to achieve goals. I, on the other hand, was, and still am, motivated by just wanting the resort to be better for our guests. Regardless of the motivation, having positive goals, and God’s grace, kept financial collapse from happening.

Have specific reasonable deadlines

Goals are always time sensitive, otherwise, again, they are just wishes. There’s an old saying that goes, “You can spit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one gets full first.” Set a date when you plan to reach the goal and keep that date continually in mind. By having a timeline, you are also able to assess the success or failure of your goal. A great roadmap to goal achievement includes specific, reasonable deadlines.

The resort was in better shape than many Minnesota lake resorts that we’d visited, but it still had a lot of issues. We wanted to create a wonderful resort where people could relax and create great memories with friends and family and we knew that was going to take a lot of work. Here was our list of goals for 2002 to 2004:

• Make the resort year round and host business, church, and couple/family retreats by the winter of 2002/2003 (tried, but the one duplex cabin we were told was winterized when we bought the resort wasn’t, and the frozen pipes of the second story cabin burst and flooded the 1st floor cabin. Took until 2006 to go year round)
• Renovate the game room garage into a conference room that seats 50 by fall of 2002 (if you would have seen this garage, you would laugh just as we do every time we read this goal!)
• Finish the bathrooms for the garage-turned-conference room by fall of 2002 (ditto for above, LOL)
• Build a new cabin in place of a mobile home seasonal camper by summer of 2003 (nope, not until 2006, but 2 of them — Willow and Tamarack)
• Build 2 more cabins in place of mobile homes by summer of 2004 (nope, 2008, Poplar)
• Groom trails in the woods for cross country skiing and hiking by summer of 2004 (whoa, not until 2023!)
• Build a lodge by the end of 2004 with offices, seats 150 conference space, small kitchen, spa, and 10 hotel rooms (hilarious, not until 2010 and no spa or hotel rooms)
• Add organized activities starting the summer of 2002 (goal achieved!)

You might realize that you need to change your timeline to achieve your goal, but you can easily do so. As you see in our list above, most of our timelines were not reasonable as we had no idea what we were doing!  However, we didn’t give up, we just changed goal achievement deadlines, and even some goals (like renovating a storage room of our home into the resort store and reroofing the beach cabins) as we learned how long it took to fix, build, and improve buildings.

Have an action plan and set goalposts along the way

Every goal has a plan and most plans include action steps. What do you need to do daily, weekly, monthly to achieve your goal? Make a to-do list and stick to it. Depending on the nature of your goal, it can be beneficial to set some goalposts, or “mini-goals” for yourself. We all tend to procrastinate so having smaller goals within a bigger goal helps keep you motivated as you see progress.

Every new building project at the resort was a goal post within our overall goal to improve the resort. When new buildings replaced the old full size mobile home seasonal campers, the resort looked completely different and those winterized cabins allowed us to achieve that first goal of being open year round.

Make it challenging

Your goal should be attainable, but not too easy.  If it’s too easy, or is going to happen anyway, it’s not a worthwhile goal. Making Campfire Bay Resort nicer by simple building improvements was a given, expanding our lakeside cabin resort by buying adjacent properties and building brand new cabins was challenging, but worthwhile.

Because we beautified the resort property by taking out the mobile homes and replacing them with cozy, charming cabins, we were able to offer great vacations and getaways to over ten times the number of people than before.  That’s a lot of great memories that wouldn’t have been made by folks if we hadn’t set big, challenging goals for ourselves and then did the hard work to achieve them.

Successfully Achieving Goals

After you’ve written your goals down, now it’s time to put the wheels in motion for goal achievement. We can easily and quickly forget anything if we don’t reflect and review regularly.  We’ve found this to be so true and we probably could have achieved our resort goals sooner if we’d done the following more faithfully:

Make goals visible

Rewrite your goals on post it notes or note cards, or print them out, and stick them places you always look.  Your bathroom mirror, or the wall opposite your toilet are great places. Or create a graphic with your goals that you make your screensaver so that you always see it on your phone, tablet, or computer.  

Read the goals out loud

This may seem weird, but it’s critical to the success of achieving goals. Research shows that we are twice as much likely to believe something if we hear it, and even more so from our own mouths. 

Visualize goal achievement

This step is similar but still different than when you did it while choosing your goals.  Be very specific and picture where you are, how you feel, what the future looks like once you achieve the goal. Or if you are more driven by fear than joy, picture what your life will look like if you don’t achieve your goal.

Daily review and follow your action steps

Are you on track to reach your goal?  Continually ask yourself if what you are about to do is going to help you reach your goal or keep you from it. If the answer is that your next activity will keep you from reaching your goals, do something else (see how we avoided the negative there?). 

Enlist an accountability partner

Share your goals with someone you trust who can help keep you accountable.  Just the act of telling someone else adds pressure to do something, but if they care about you, they can also help you achieve your goals.  Ask them to set a reminder on their phone to touch base weekly with you on your action steps and where you’re at in achieving your goal. 

Adapt as necessary

If you get off track, adjust your action steps to get you back on track.  You might have to work harder, but if the goal is worth it, so is the work.

We’ve had to do this several times in the last 23 years due to health issues, family issues, and unforeseen events. For example, because we didn’t write down an action plan for rebuilding the beach cabins, we missed our window to get permits from the county in time to build over the winter.  When we readjusted our goal and planned to build, building materials skyrocketed because of the pandemic.  It cost more, but we built the five beach cabins over two years and expanded our year long rental options by five more units.

Once again, Campfire Bay Resort got just a little more beautiful and provided more people with a great place to stay on the lake.

Click here to see what the resort looks like today, if you don’t know already :)

A Roadmap to Goal Achievement

Now, after sharing how to choose, write, and achieve goals effectively, we will share just one of our goals for 2024 so that we’re more likely to achieve it. Tag, you’re it, you’ve just become our accountability partner! Whether you choose to email or message us occasionally to see if we’re on track to achieve it is up to you ;).

Goal: Reduce resort and personal single use plastic by 75% by January 1st, 2025.   

Why do we want to achieve this goal? As lovers of the outdoors and outdoor activities, we want to do what we can to protect it.  We’ve seen first hand the damaging effects of pollution, created mainly by fossil fuel products, like plastic, has on all the ecosystems that we enjoy and from which we benefit.  Recycling is not enough.

The above photo was taken in 2009 on a beach where many currents worldwide flow past. Trash from around the world thus ends up there. Thankfully, where our resort is located has not been as adversely affected as this beach and many other places on the planet — yet. However, it is only a matter of time before it does– unless we all buckle down and start doing what we can instead of just wringing our hands or giving up.  Without specific, attainable goals and roadmap, nothing will change.

We know the above goal will be difficult and inconvenient, but still attainable.  We hope that we can also encourage our guests and anyone else to join us.

So what are our action steps to achieve this lofty goal? 

1. Sell only beverages in glass, aluminum, or carton in our lodge
2. Put a water cooler with reusable cups in the lodge
3. Reduce the number of snacks in plastic wrappers that we sell by half
4. Bring reusable bags and bins everywhere we shop
5. Look for and only buy products that come in paper, glass, or metal for personal and resort food products
6. Contact vendors of gift items we sell in the lodge and ask that products come without plastic packaging.  If they are not willing or able to do so, find alternative vendors, if possible.
7. Stop using plastic garbage liners and set up a garbage/recycling bin cleaning station by the dumpster where everyone dumps their trash and/or use recycled grocery bags guests bring in.  We already do it for recycling, we can do it for trash as well.
8. Communicate our plan with our staff, and with our guests on our website and in the cabins.

There you have it, our challenging goal for the year.  We hope you’ve found this post helpful and inspiring.  We also hope that you’ll help keep us accountable to our goal we shared here.  Most of all, may you choose, write, and successfully achieve your goals with your own roadmap to goal achievement!