Happy New Year everyone! For most people, the start of the new year involves setting goals, and so for our first podcast of 2021 our focus is exactly that. In this episode, I speak once again with Alli Ball, a former grocery buyer and founder of Allison Ball Consulting, which works with emerging food and beverage brands to help them succeed at retail. She's also the host of the Food Biz Wiz podcast, in which she shares all kinds of helpful advice for brands on how to effectively run their businesses and get their products on the shelf and into consumers' hands.

Alli takes us through the steps and strategies brand-owners can take to set and achieve effective goals (and common mistakes to avoid in doing so). She then shows us how to reverse-engineer those goals into tactics and timelines that will deliver optimal success without overwhelming you. Alli and I also go off on a fun tangent about productivity hacks that we each do and how these can be applied to your goal-setting practices. I really enjoyed this interview, and I know you will too!

ECRM connects buyers and sellers of fast-moving consumer goods in category-specific, highly curated face-to-face meetings. For more information, visit ECRM.MarketGate.com

Read an overview of these tips on ECRM's blog.

Here are links to some of the books we discussed:

Free to Focus, by Michael Hyatt

The One Thing, by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

Indistractable, by Nyr Eyal

My column on "Boundaries: Creating Work/Life Balance in a Remote World"

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