How to Set Goals for Your Small Business
When you begin your company, you have some lofty dreams in mind. Your imagination takes charge and you feel that you could become a huge success. However, when you actually start the business and things get “real”, you see that it’s going to be difficult to reach those end goals. Instead of being like those who are willing to settle for mediocrity, you should reevaluate your goals and implement them into your business.
What Are Your Long-Term Goals?
Think about what your end goals are for the company across several different areas. These include your growth goals, profit goals, social goals, and service goals. By separating your goals into these four categories, you will be able to work toward each separately. It can provide you with more focus.
Growth refers to the expansion of your company, profit to the amount of money you make, social to how you give back to the community or your industry, and service refers to improving the happiness of your customers. Once you have your end goals written down for each of those categories, it is time to develop some sub-goals, which are steps along the path to reaching your main goal.
You will find that by improving in each of these areas, even in small increments, it will help to push the other categories along. For example, when you increase your service goals, it makes your customers happier. In turn, they buy more of your product, which increases your profits and allows your company to grow.
One of the benefits of separating your company goals into these different areas is that it becomes much easier to work on them. It will not seem as overwhelming as having some large, overarching goal hanging over your head.
Create Milestones
When you are crafting your goals, you should make sure to put in milestones for each of them. Once you reach those milestones, you will want to do two things. First, you will want to celebrate. For example, if you want to grow the company to the point where you can open up another store in a neighboring city, that’s a milestone. When you hit it, it’s time to celebrate. It is also a time to reassess. What is the new goal?
The goals that you create need to be specific and concrete in your mind. You need to be able to measure them, and you need to know the actions that you will have to take to make them a reality. To help you focus on your goals, make sure that you set a time frame in which to accomplish them.
Make the Goals Realistic
For all of your sub-goals and milestones, they should be realistic to where your business is currently. For example, if you currently have 100 subscribers to your marketing emails, you can’t have a goal of increasing that number to ten million in the next six months. It’s highly unlikely it will happen.
You can reach your goals for your business. It just takes focus and hard work to get there.