Set Your Goals, Dang It!

A 3 Step Breakdown of Setting Business Goals

The Skinny:

We usually have teachers, coaches, and mentors pounding into our heads the importance of goals setting in our personal lives. Even if it sounds like some lofty self-improvement bologna, the process is the same with your business. You must be setting smart goals for your business all along your journey, no matter if you’re in production or marketing. This lets you identify what success looks like from a specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely lens. It starts with identifying bigger strategic goals, then allows you to work your way down to smaller goals you can tackle on a daily basis. These smallest of goals are the most important to ensuring you are on track to achieve the bigger goals you set forth.

“The first step in achieving goals is to respect the goal and know what it means to achieve it.” — Dwayne Johnson

The Fat:

Long-Term Goals

Once you have the “why” for your business, next comes defining what success looks like in the long-term. Long-term has a wide range of meaning, of course, but usually a couple of years or longer, depending on the circumstance. This goal should describe what you wish to accomplish without outside variables that may interrupt the process. No matter if you have the flu for a week, or there’s a minor downturn in the economy, there shouldn’t be anything in the way of you attaining this goal.

For example, if you are a small carpet cleaning company, a great business goal can be to double your customer base in five years. This should be congruent with your mission, presumably to create cleaner living conditions in your community. The long term business goal provides the foundation to launch your marketing goals.

Mid-Term Goals

With a long-term goal established, it is now time to look at what would help you reach that goal. You guessed it, time for more goals to set out a game plan for your business. You may have a goal of twice as many referrals per year to increase the word of mouth in the community. Additionally, you can increase brand awareness to make your way into the mindset of potential customers. This goal is something like “reach 20,000 people in the next year.” The key characteristics here are that these goals can be tied to increasing customers and the use of budgets. Enter conversion rates and trackable metrics, or talk to community members and customers to show how close you are to reaching those goals.

Short-Term Goals

Your short-term goals are key in linking your daily activities all the way to the business goal you originally established. These goals are like game time statistics on a day-to-day basis. What did you accomplish this week? How many referrals did you get from Facebook this month? What’s the number of reach per advertisement in your current campaign, and the number of readers of your blog this week? The key characteristic with these goals is that they are essentially the data you receive from your daily efforts, much like game time statistics. These are essential pieces to your mid-range goals that are broken into smaller pieces so that you can continually be changing and improving each stat.

The Takeaway:

No matter how badly you would like to simply go about your daily business, it is extremely important to be revisiting your goals frequently. Whether you have a goal for social media posts in a day or a goal for your business five years down the road, you have got to start somewhere to make a significant change for yourself or others.

“Achieving a goal is nothing, getting there is everything” — Jules Michelet