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Setting Goals for Everything: Josh Linkner ’s Key Move

It’s ironic, in a way. The whole idea behind Josh Linkner’s company is to get consumers to take a chance on something, maybe by entering an online sweepstakes or test driving a vehicle.

But when it comes to growing ePrize, Josh leaves nothing up for grabs. He sets specific goals for absolutely every aspect of its growth, achievements, and operations, and Josh believes his dedication to goal setting has been a key move in ePrize’s success.

“If you don’t have a clear view of where you want your company to go, it makes daily decisions nearly impossible,” Josh says. “If you want to build a thousand-piece puzzle and you throw away the cover of the box, you have no idea what to do. But if you have that clear picture on the box in front of you, before you know it, you’ve built a beautiful puzzle.

“If you can’t clearly articulate your vision and your specific goals, how can you expect your people to put the pieces in the right spots?”

So far, Josh has been able to exceed every major goal he’s set for ePrize. A former website architect, he learned about incentivizing consumer behavior in the late Nineties, when he built and ran an online sweepstakes for a client. Soon, he founded ePrize with the express purpose of becoming the biggest designer and operator of prize-based promotions on the internet.

By 2005, ePrize had reached $30 million in sales and 150 employees in four U.S. offices and another in London . Josh’s client list includes 62 of America’s top 100 brands, including Coca-Cola, Dell, Home Depot and several Procter & Gamble lines, all of whom count on ePrize to concoct games and promotions that captivate consumers.

The 2005 results were ahead of where Josh had planned to be when he set goals for last year, but in fact they illustrate the effectiveness of his goal-setting obsession. EPrize was supposed to shoot for $23.5 million in sales for 2005 and end-of-year employment of 110 people. Josh even set a goal for “PR wins” for last year – meaning, significant mentions of the company in the news media – and the company actually ended up with 130.

And in an accomplishment that he characterizes as the company’s “most amazing” of 2005, ePrize racked up 73% of its sales from existing clients, slightly eclipsing the goal of 70%. “I’m really proud of the fact that we’re having such a strong retention track record with the world’s most recognized brands,” he says. “These are big clients and hard-fought wins.”

How did ePrize pull all of this off? The company sets 10 major, tangible goals for each year and then lists the several steps necessary to achieve them, department by department sub-goals. Each team leader sits down with her charges and maps out what each group needs to do to reach the goals as well as identifying any potential risks or barriers. “Then they establish an action plan to shatter those risks,’ Josh says. Then, throughout the year, everyone at the company constantly refers back to the goals and sub-goals and continually monitors their progress at individual, group and company levels.

“If you write down tangible, measurable goals, and you focus on them, it’s amazing how they tend to materialize,” Josh says. “You can break them down into certain behaviors and then hold people accountable for them.”

Josh picked 10 goals in part because he likes a round number whose use in lists has been popularized by cultural phenomena such as David Letterman’s nightly Top 10. “Ten is about the attention span that people have,” he says. “Besides, you can’t possibly achieve 100 goals. And if you come out with only one, and rally just behind that one thing, you become unbalanced.”

Now, Josh insists he didn’t set “light” goals for 2005 sales just so that ePrize could exceed them. The $23.5 million sales goal, for example, actually represented a significant increase from 2004 sales of $18.6 million. “You want to put goals out there that are attainable, certainly, but also ones that push you forward,” he says. “So you don’t want to set light goals. You want to push people out of their comfort zones.”

One way that Josh gets buy-in from ePrize’s employees for his goal-setting mania is that the company sets its goals as a team. “You either reach them as a team, or you don’t reach them as a team, and there’s no finger-pointing,” he says. “The ones that you don’t hit have a purpose, too: You revise your goal, or you revise how to reach your goal in that area.”

Josh’s democratic approach extends to the fact that each year, ePrize solicits suggestions from all of its employees for what should comprise the top 10 goals for the next year. Each individual is invited to make two suggestions. “This is important, because you want people to have ownership of whatever the goals end up being,” Josh says. “You can’t just force them on people.”

No one’s ever had to force goals on Josh. He remembers having a dedication to goal-setting at least back through high school, a stage of life more typical of apathy than ambition. “I wanted to achieve certain grades or be able to do certain techniques as a musician, or achieve athletic goals,” he says. And even today, personal goals also remain important to Josh, such as playing jazz three times a week and exercising regularly.

“Goal setting is appropriate in all aspects of your life,” says Josh. “I have goals for my family and my marriage, and financial goals, and all of those are really important. If you have a vision for what you want to be in life and in business, the only way to get there is to map it out and work backwards.”

So where, according to Josh’s goals, is ePrize headed from here? As a long-term goal, the company wants to become “the gold standard of the next generation of marketing agencies,” a leader in helping clients achieve “direct, permission-based, one-on-one relationships with consumers,” he says.

And as a medium-term goal, ePrize wants to notch $150 million in annual revenues by 2009. “That’s a huge goal,” Josh admits. “It’s like there’s 1,000 feet of sheet rock in front of you and you’re supposed to climb that mountain. But it’s not like we’re saying we’re going to do $1 billion in sales; you need to set goals that are attainable. Yet there’s no way to do it unless we put the goal out there and share it and measure it.

“Maybe in 2010, we’ll be saying, ‘Why did we only put a goal of $150 million out there for last year?’”