Anyone who’s ever set a New Year’s resolution knows how difficult following through on your goals can be — and that can be a problem for small businesses trying to move the needle on strategic objectives. A recent survey reveals that only 5% of small companies achieved their goals in 2019.

Founders Jody Mitchell and Brenton Moss of Directed Analytics set out to change that statistic by developing a product to help businesses track and achieve their goals. “That is basically the core of Directed Analytics,” Mitchell says, “helping organizations get from where they are to where they want to be.” They developed proprietary technology, 4SightGPS, to create actionable roadmaps. “4SightGPS takes the practitioner’s expertise and organizes that information in a way that can optimize their system to find the quickest path to reach their goals,” Moss explains.

Here’s how Mitchell and Moss relied on process and experimentation to define and achieve their own goals.

Experimenting With Use Cases

To find the right vertical that made the most sense for their product, Mitchell and Moss applied their software in several industries. They started by testing the waters in the secondary education space.

“We did some testing, had conversations from that perspective, and learned a lot that helped us to refine our framework,” Mitchell says. “[But] we did understand that it wasn’t necessarily a good business use case.”

Next, Mitchell and Moss applied 4SightGPS at a community college to help students with cognitive disorders set and meet their goals to develop employment skills. From there, the founders tested their product in healthcare services and state and local contracts.

Finding the Right Market Fit

Mitchell and Moss identified digital marketing and human capital management (HCM) as the best candidates for optimizing their software. Both industries deal with a lot of variables that could impact their ability to reach their goals.

“From a digital marketing perspective, it’s a system with a lot of moving parts,” Moss says. Managing people and their progression towards individual goals presents similar challenges. Using 4SightGPS to lay out a roadmap for achieving goals makes those variables visible, giving digital marketers and HR professionals more control over them.

Digital marketing and HCM also deal with intangibles — it’s hard to prove your return-on-investment on a more efficient employee training program, for instance. Mitchell and Moss’s software projects ROI on each goal users plug into it, which makes getting buy-in and resources from leadership easier.

Learning Along the Way

As founders, Mitchell and Moss have learned a lot about leadership, drive and forging new paths ahead. “When you get put into a pressure situation, you start to see some of the areas you struggle with,” Mitchell says. “Then you can start working on improving where you need improvement.” Learning to delegate was hard for Mitchell, but he knew he had to let go and trust others if he wanted to become a successful leader.

The business partners also learned to trust themselves, especially when making hard decisions. People compare founding a startup to running a marathon, Moss says, but that implies a specific endpoint.

“People leave out the part that you don’t know where you’re going,” he says. “And nobody can help you out of that: we learned to keep pushing through it and keep trusting our instincts.”