Setting goals can really help you move your business forward, no matter how long you have been operating. Goal setting will help to ensure that you and everyone else know what your objectives are and how you are going to achieve them. It can also help you to evaluate how successful your business has been in the past and where improvements can be made. If you have employees working for you then it is always good to get their perspective on what they believe the goals for the business should be.
When you are setting the goals for your business then the SMART acronym is a good place to start. Goals should always be:
Specific
Having goals that are too vague will not give you the focus need to be able to achieve these goals. If there are lots of things that you want to achieve just pick one or two for now. When these have been achieved then you can look at where you want to go to next.
Measurable
You need to think about the ways that your goal can be measured. There are several ways that you can do this and it will largely depend on what your goal actually is. Measuring goals will help to keep you focused as you work towards it and it will also enable you to recognise when the goal has been achieved.
Achievable
Aiming high is great but you need to make sure that your goals are achievable. If goals are unrealistic then you are just going to feel frustrated if you do not achieve them. You should pick something that is not going to be too easy so that you do have to challenge yourself but not anything that is going to be too difficult. It is all about finding the right balance.
Relevant
Think about whether the goals you have set are actually going to move your business forward. If you are trying to grow your business then every goal you set should be working towards this objective. If you start going off on too much of a tangent then this decreases the effectiveness of setting goals at all.
Timely
You also need to think about the time scale that you are going to set for achieving your goals. Goals can be both long term and short term and so the time scale will need to be relevant to the goal that has been set. Start off by thinking about when you would like the goal to be achieved by. If this is going to be too difficult then you may want to increase the time scale that you set in order to make it more achievable.
When you have these goals in place then you will have a much clearer focus about how you need to move forward. When you know what you want to achieve it is much easier to make plans that will help you reach this achievement. Share the goals with your team so that everyone is working towards the same objective. Using the advice above to set goals could make the world of difference to your business.
