2024 Planning: How to set achievable goals
Setting goals for a small business
As business owners, we all know we should be setting goals, so that together with our team, we can focus on getting the right stuff done that makes the difference.
“If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”
The 5 simple steps of goal setting are:
Defining your vision, mission and purpose
Reviewing what the business does well and less well. Understanding the market opportunities and external threats to your business.
Setting and prioritising SMART, short term and long term goals
Evaluating your goals often, to ensure they are still right for the business.
Sounds simple? How difficult can it be? A Google search or Chat GBT tells us why business goal setting is important. Both give a step by step approach to tackling this worthy and important business task.
And yet…we don’t make the time to sit down and think about our business in this way. In a successful small business, there is always a more important task to get done, a customer to see, a staff member to reassure, monthly sales targets to meet.
It is only when business is slow or not showing the sales and profits we expect, that we realise we need to do something differently if we are to grow and thrive.
The goal setting steps above will take time to develop and achieve.
If you only have time for one step this month, I suggest concentrating on vision, mission, and purpose. These terms are often mixed up and get confused. To me and many others, a mission statement is a sentence (or two) that describes what your business does today. A vision statement is a sentence that describes a state that the business is in, in the future. The purpose statement describes why it does what it does.
Having a purpose is, today, the most important of these 3 statements, as it communicates to consumes, buyers and employees ‘why’ your business exists. If, as a business owner, you do not know, it will be difficult to attract and retain staff and for others to give their time and energy to support your business to achieve its vision.
Working out your purpose can be challenging if the business was set up in earlier times, when purpose was less important for a profit making business.
On a practical level, from experience, I find blocking out time in the diary helps tackle this first step. I suggest these 5 actions:
1. Put an hour in the calendar or your diary the same time every week for a month.
2. Decide what you will have produced by the end of 4 weeks.
3. Work backwards from the 4th week and divide up what you need to do in weeks three, two and one.
4. Write into your calendar what you will now do for each of the weeks.
5. Start thinking, reviewing, reading, researching, discussing with colleagues so that you are prepped and ready to work towards your goals in week 1.
And… don’t feel you need to sit in front of a computer. Some of the best ‘sky-blue’ thinking is done on the move, out for a walk, cycling, driving, walking the dog, in the gym or the park.
If you find working alone on this business task daunting, find yourself someone with whom you can bounce off ideas.
Sitting down with an experienced business mentor, who is there solely for you and your business is one powerful way of getting started. By asking those difficult questions of what your core values are, what is driving you and your business, a business mentor helps you unravel what is important to you and what is going well in the business.
For instance, are your values aligned with the rest of the management team? Do the staff know and embody your values through the company’s culture?
A professional business mentor will help you envision your business and see it from the eyes of your staff, you stakeholders, your customers and clients. Mentoring is a tried and tested way to embed change in a business and to create focus around what needs to be done.
Working with someone to whom you are accountable to, will help you prioritise goal setting and other long term business thinking. Try it and see if it works for you and your business. If it works for many other business owners, why wouldn’t if work for you?
