On Setting Goals For Your Business

Right now, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what the next several months or even years might look like.  You may find setting goals difficult.  I’d like to walk you through some of my tips and advice for setting goals in your business. 

A goal is basically a bridge between your vision--the dreams you have for the business--and a plan. Setting goals requires that you keep one part of your mind in dreamland, and another part connected to reality. 

Goals are nothing more than your vision or dream attached to a metric. I find the best way to get there is to start working back toward the present from your furthest picture of what you want. I advocate that you do a 3-year vision to bring your desires into focus. Then we can set a one-year goal from which to plan.

Here are a couple of examples. Let’s say you want to take more vacation--that’s a dream. In your 3-year vision, you might wish you had 8 weeks of vacation. You might then decide that a good goal is to take 3 weeks of vacation this year. Or let’s say you are a company with $1M in revenue and you wish you could get to $10M in revenue. In your 3-year vision, you might wish for sales of $2.5M and a good 1-year goal could be sales of $1.4M. It’s a lot easier to plan for an increase of $400K per year than it is to figure out how you are going to get an additional $9M.

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A vision is a general idea or a guide. A goal is that idea expressed with the metrics of amount and time.

There is an art to setting goals. There are many different approaches. What works for some of us might not work so well for others. It requires a bit of intuition or gut feeling to figure out the right size of goals and the number of goals you can work on at once. I find that a one-year goal is good for most business planning. And for me, I have learned that I can handle about 5 goals at any given time--a couple of big ones that require constant and long term effort, a couple of little ones that I can bang out, and a medium-sized goal. 

Your large goals may need to be cut up into smaller pieces to get your arms around them. If you have a one-year goal of an increase of $400K in sales, you might divide the goal into quarters and focus on the increase for just 3 months. Too big goals can have a paralyzing effect. It does you no good to sit around thinking that you want a lot more sales, but you don’t know where to start. If I find it hard to get going with a plan for reaching a goal, I routinely will cut the goal in half and cut it in half again until I can feel confident about taking the next step.

Setting goals should be a grounding exercise for you. Take the time to examine your business, find out what you really want from it, and prioritize those goals for action. This is an important part of working ON your business as well as IN your business. Use this time to make a clear goal statement of what you hope to accomplish.