5 Ways Creative Service Providers Can Stick to Their Business Goals in 2026

Running your own business means doing a little bit of everything, and getting pulled in tons of directions every week. This leaves little time to work on your own goals if you aren’t proactively setting aside time to work on them.

In The Breakroom our membership for creative service providers, we ended last year with a masterclass all about intentionally planning out your North Star & big goals going into 2026 (there’s a replay available inside the membership).

Now that we’re 2 weeks into 2026, though, how can you set up structure and habits that help you stick with all the intentions you set for the year?

Below we’ve put together a list of 5 ways that you can stick with the goals you set for yourself & your business this year

Partner with an Accountability Buddy to Stay on Track

When you were on holiday planning out your year, you didn’t have clients emailing you, project deadlines looming on your calendar, or having drop off & pick up your kids at school. It’s really easy to come back from a break and jump right back into the rhythm of letting your calendar & email inbox manage your priorities each week, with little regard to those visionary goals you were hoping to achieve.

This is where an accountability buddy comes in. It’s about finding someone who will show up either on your calendar, in your inbox, or both on a weekly basis… Basically, putting your goals inside your weekly routines won’t be able to avoid your goals.

One of the reasons an accountability buddy works is we’re competitive by nature - in Simon Sinek’s book The Infinite Game, he defines a "worthy rival" not as a competitor you aim to defeat, but as a respected peer whose superior strengths reveal your own weaknesses and inspire you to continuously improve your own “game”. Choosing a worthy rival as your accountability buddy makes you want to show up and make progress each week, not to be outdone by your buddy.

Pro tip: have some form of weekly check-in with your accountability buddy, even if it’s just texting each other on a certain day of the week with 1) progress you’ve made & 2) the next small step you’re taking.

Leverage Public Accountability to Reach Your Business Goals

You have a network, peers, & customers that are paying attention to your business. And one of the easiest ways to stay on track with your goals is telling those people, because you know that when you have a conversation with them, they’ll be curious about the progress that you’re making towards those goals.

There are also secondary benefits, such as gaining collaborators towards your goals and positioning your business as one that’s continuously improving.

Pro tip: for this to work well, your goals have to be simple & quantifiable so that you can share about progress you’re making. For example, “I’m going to become more knowledgeable about sales” is a lot harder for people to see progress than if you say “I’m going to read 5 books about sales.”

Create Immediate Consequences for Missed Deadlines

Many parents say things like, “If you don’t get your homework done before dinner, you won’t be able to watch TV this evening,” as a way of creating urgency to get something done.

When I was in college, you could buy an alarm clock that suspended a $100 bill above a paper shredder, and if you didn’t wake up to turn off your alarm in time, it would shred your hard-earned money.

This method is very similar. Place some form of consequence for yourself behind your goals, so that if you don’t complete the goal, you suffer the consequence.

A few weeks ago, I saw a great example of this with a group of friends who signed a 75 Hard “contract” where if they didn’t complete the fitness challenge, they owed the group $1000 that would be split between everyone who did complete the challenge.

Pro tip: this only works if there’s no way to get out of the consequence, this could mean finding a group of people with something to gain by enforcing your consequence, or even scheduling your course to automatically publish & the announcement emails to go out on a certain date no matter if you actually finish it in time or not (consequence being embarrassment).

Establish Rewards and Celebrations for Key Milestones

If a whip is the “consequence” that’s used in horse racing to make the horse run faster, catching a fake rabbit is the celebration that's used in dog racing to get them to run faster. They’re running because the possibility of catching the rabbit makes them excited.

Even though the dogs know that the rabbit is fake, that makes no difference to their desire to chase it.

Intentionally choosing your celebrations at milestones towards achieving your goals is just as important. What are the things that will motivate you to show up for your goals on the days that you’d rather be in bed watching Netflix? For most people, they don’t have to be expensive or time-consuming - one thing that Jo and I have had for years is that any time we book a new client, we go out for dinner. It’s a way of no-backing-out marking that a milestone was met & worth celebrating.

Pro tip: the closer the celebration is to the milestone achievement, the better - setting a reward of “taking a weekend trip 6 months in the future” isn’t as motivating as a “spa day same week”.

Join a Community of Like-Minded Creative Service Providers

In the early 2000s, before we were all connected on the internet, a theoretical physicist was doing research on what happens as cities grow in size, and realized a crazy thing about how proximity to more people affects creativity:

“a creative professional living in a city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more creative; they were seventeen times more creative. This is known as superlinear scaling. A person collaborating with 50 people is exponentially more creative than a person collaborating with 5. Not figuratively. Literally.” (source)

Many creative service providers are solo-preneurs who spend most of their time alone or with clients and don’t connect with peers. This is why right now memberships & communities are growing so fast, because people are starting to see many of the benefits of just being in the right rooms with other people trying to solve the same problems & achieve the same goals as they are.

If you’re a creative service provider, we’d love to have you inside The Breakroom, but you can also post a question on socials for recommendations to find other online groups or start with your local chamber of commerce for networking groups in your area.

Focus on Small, Consistent Steps for Long-Term Success

This could be as simple as scheduling a recurring 15-minute slot on your calendar each week to check in with yourself on how your goals are going. Or dividing it into small monthly sub-goals that are much more manageable.

The biggest thing is to just make a little progress so that you’re at least doing something. It’s so much harder to restart after you stop making progress, rather than making a little bit of progress consistently. For example, if you have a book reading goal, something as small as “read one page a day” is a simple way to ensure you keep making progress even on the days when you’re really busy.

If you need help finding an accountability buddy, building your celebration ladder, or finding the right community for you, don’t hesitate to shoot us a DM on IG @joandlyndon. Even if it’s not one of our offers, we’d love to help you find the best option to help you achieve your goals this year!