How To Set Business Goals – Not only will you expand the business enough to justify hiring someone (or many), but you’ll also be working with your new team members to determine the future growth of the business.
However, no matter how experienced you are as a manager or leader, you’ll quickly realize that without proper small business goals, your employees are likely to be workers rather than team members.
How To Set Business Goals
You want them to be as inspired and motivated as you are, and in order to do that, you really need to work on your vision and goals.
How To Properly Set Business Goals For 2021
For most small business owners, when they are working alone, they tend to keep their goals in their head and never think they need to be written down.
However, now that you have more people on your team, it is absolutely critical that you not only write down these small business goals, but you also need to make sure they motivate your team and keep your business on the right path. .
That’s why today we’re going to look at how to set your small business goals to motivate and inspire your team.
One of the most important things to realize is that you actually have two types of goals: long-term and short-term.
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Your long-term goals should be set on a 3-5 year time horizon and should clearly state your company’s mission statement. Here, you need to find a way to articulate your main reason for starting your company.
What is the core purpose of the company? What problem are you trying to solve and who are you solving it for?
It might seem daunting or even mysterious at first, but once you start thinking about it, it becomes concrete.
When you think about your goals in these terms, they become a more natural summary of your business, rather than a lofty, vague idea that doesn’t particularly motivate anyone.
How To Set Goals For Your Business
A profit target is any goal or set of goals aimed at increasing profits by a specific percentage over a specified period of time.
Service objectives are designed to increase customer satisfaction with your customer service and significantly increase customer retention.
Goals can include acquiring new customers faster, making sales, resolving customer issues, and improving service call efficiency.
Social goals include philanthropic initiatives that continually give back to the community. This includes through donations or volunteering.
Goal Setting Set And Achieve Your Goals In Business
The idea of CSR is related to social goals, as businesses focus some or most of their attention on helping others.
Growth goals focus on continually expanding the company. This can be done by hiring new employees, opening branches in various locations, and many other ways.
Like other goals, setting growth goals requires you to understand your current financial and general business conditions in order to formulate and achieve specific goals.
There are actually more than two types of targets. It’s where you set mid-term goals, and the fabled BHAG — a big, bold, bold goal that’s pretty much: win or go home.
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In the book, they look specifically at which types of goals yield the best results. When companies are willing to take a risk with their BHAG, they succeed.
An example is Boeing, which in 1950 devoted all of its resources to becoming the dominant player in commercial aircraft. In fact, Boeing is currently working on its current BHAG, which will impact the aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) market.
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This means that having modest or vague goals is no longer enough. Your goals should be reproducible in a sentence or two by everyone in your business. Anything beyond that is likely to be vague, confusing, or uninspiring.
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Westinghouse’s goals were full of vague, meaningless buzzwords. It’s not a sentence, it’s not memorable, it’s not inspiring.
One important thing to remember about these BHAGs or similar long term goals is that you should always stay focused but flexible enough to change as the market changes.
For example, whatever the goals of housing and construction companies were in 2007, by 2008 those goals had changed dramatically because of the Great Recession.
You and your employees should be focused enough on your long-term goals to give it your all, but also smart enough to recognize when it’s time to adjust or regroup the team to discuss changes in your long-term goals.
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With regards to short-term goals, the most important thing is to achieve BHAGs or long-term small business goals and make them manageable.
For example, if your BHAG goal is to lose 50 pounds by the end of the year, you’ll have to break it down into monthly goals, or even into weekly or daily goals.
This might include going to the gym on certain days, eating a certain number of calories, eating only certain types of food, investing in exercise equipment, etc.
If your BHAG is weight loss, you need to break it down into small goals like going to the gym, eating a specific number of calories, etc.
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To answer this question, let’s turn to the popular SMART goal system, most often associated with Peter Drucker.
As mentioned above, your goals should not be ambiguous, whether they are long-term or short-term goals. There is one specific number you should always keep in mind.
In our weight loss example, the goal is not just to “lose weight,” but actually to lose a very specific 50 pounds (BHAG) or 4 pounds per month.
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You should be able to measure your progress. How do you know how well you’re doing if you can’t measure it? If you just wanted to be a “better leader” (vague goal), how would you measure it?
Make This Year Your Best Year Ever: Set Realistic Goals For Your Business Now
In our example, we can measure it by weighing ourselves. If you lose 50 pounds a year, that’s about 4 pounds per month, or 1 pound per week. You can weigh yourself once a week to see how you are doing.
You need to make sure your goals are not only specific and measurable, but achievable or realistic. If you are thinking of hiring your first employee and your company is only two months old, it may not be realistic to set BHAG at $50 million in annual sales, which equates to a short term of $4 million per month Target.
In our weight loss example, the achievable goal is to lose one pound per week. Losing three will be difficult, and you’re only setting yourself up for failure.
An important aspect is that your objective is relevant – in other words, it is directly related to your core business. For example, Boeing’s past and present BHAGs are very specific and related to their main business.
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However, if my BHAG is to lose 50 pounds and my short-term goal is to start a food blog, then it has nothing to do with my main goal. In a real world example, many small businesses aim to increase their blog visitors, but they should be focusing on better leads and higher conversions.
You also need to have a timeline for your goals. This will give you the pressure necessary to develop tactical steps towards achieving your primary goal through short-term, time-specific goals.
For example, if you’re setting measurable goals, you’re probably also setting timely goals. In my case, 50 pounds a year, 4 pounds a month, or 1 pound a week are specific and timely.
Without that time factor, you’re basically letting yourself do your short-term goals forever, hence your BHAG, which makes it basically pointless.
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One of the best ways to get your employees involved and inspired by your goals is to have them help you set some goals too.
This may not be setting your BHAG goals, as employees still need their bosses to be decisive. This means that in terms of the direction of the company, you need to figure out your big goals on your own or with other partners.
You also shouldn’t expect in-depth input from new hires, as they may still be in the business and lack specific knowledge.
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However, that doesn’t mean you have to go it alone when setting smaller goals.
You should constantly get feedback from your employees or management on key issues that affect them (especially since you are no longer doing everything now, you may be removing some of these tasks).
By asking your employees for their opinion, you are soliciting their expertise based on their experience. This is especially useful for setting more specific and better short-term plans
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