One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in business was not realizing the importance of setting goals sooner. Sure, I read lots of books just like this one that told me how important setting a goal is, but I always just thought it was garbage, motivational fluff. I figured that if I just told myself, “Get more clients,” that would be enough to get going. I was so wrong.

Like many of you, there was a point in my life where the economy had taken a toll on my business and my family. Life has a funny way of forcing you to learn sometimes. While working to “get more clients,” I met a woman named Anita, eight months later I proposed, four months later we were married, and three months after we were married she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. It was her second bout with a stage 4 cancer; she had an unrelated cancer five years prior and successfully fought it. This second bout with another cancer made her and her medical team fear for the worst, but they came up with a plan to help her survive. We had to make plans of our own.

We lived three hours away from MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the nation’s top cancer treatment facilities. Their plan was to have us drive up every other week for cancer treatment. My plan was to take as much time off work as possible so I could spend time with my wife.

We made another plan. We weren’t sure how long we would have together. I knew there were a lot of things Anita and I wanted to do together, so we decided that running up our credit to do these things was okay. If she lost her battle with cancer, Anita would have done all she wanted to do and insurance could pay off the debt. If she didn’t, no big deal. The cards had pretty low interest rates and we both had enough money to pay off the debt in a few years without impacting our quality of life.

For a few months it worked out great. My staff handled the day-to-day operations of my business. My wife and I drove back and forth to cancer treatment. I was able to go to every single appointment and treatment day. I took a few weeks off during her hospitalizations and stayed with her at the hospital. When she was feeling good, we would travel to wherever she wanted and do whatever events she thought would be fun.

Two years later, she was clear of cancer. We also had accumulated over $150,000 in debt from medical bills and credit cards. Not a problem, since the business was doing well, right? Well, it would have been fine, except for the fact that in the first year of treatment the credit card industry started losing its mind and raising everyone’s rates to the sky. Also, since I had placed myself in the position of salesperson and neglected to put anyone else in that position during this time, my business was staying level and not growing. I was paying an average credit card rate of 9 percent when we received the diagnosis. Now I was paying an average of 24 percent.

Combine all this with my wife not working for eighteen months during the treatment (as I begged her to; she wanted to work forever), and we have a pretty severe problem. What we thought we could pay down comfortably in a few years became a monster that consumed the majority of my funds to pay down in the same amount of time.

Early one morning, a noise like rushing water woke me up. It was a really weird noise to me because it sounded like water running in the house. I checked all the faucets and found them all off, but the noise just kept going. That’s when I figured it must be raining. I went to look out the window and found the source.

Water was pouring down the inside of my window frame. There was a hole in my roof and water was running down inside my house. I called around for a roofer and found a reasonable quote of $4000 to fix the roof.

With all the credit card pay downs and medical expenses, we had no reserves. All of my cards were maxed out and I was paying several thousand dollars a month just to maintain a maxed-out balance. Things were bad.

The stress of dealing with the finances, my wife’s health, my business struggling under the debt load I had created, and the beginning of my own health crisis was beating me down each day. I had to do something.

I knew I needed $4000 to fix the roof. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but in that crisis mode it was killing me.

So, I wrote “$4000” on a piece of paper. Next to that I wrote “to fix the roof.” I also knew I needed $4000 in 30 days because the roof had to be fixed now, and the company’s invoice had 30-day terms. So I added “in 30 days” after “to fix the roof.” Then I began to assess the different services I sold at my business that could get me $4000 in profit quickly.

I used some simple math to identify how many of each product I would have to sell to hit my goal. Then I identified which services were most likely to get me the $4000 fastest.