Why Setting Goals for Your Business is Important
If you are motivated to grow your business, then you will be inclined to set realistic and measurable business goals annually or semi-annually. Well-defined goals give your company a clear focus, motivate employees, and establish targets for your business to meet.
The success of your business rests on regularly setting and meeting goals that are intended to strengthen your position in the marketplace and bolster your bottom line. Your goals serve as landmarks for areas where your business needs to improve and guideposts for your progress in expanding into new markets, for example.
By goal setting, your company can take control of its direction. Establishing objectives also gives you a sense of your business's success.
4 Actions to Take Before Setting Business Goals
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Complete a SWOT Analysis:
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. A SWOT analysis will help you evaluate your strategic challenges and identify growth opportunities before setting targets.
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Run Internal and Competitive Benchmarking:
By doing these benchmarking exercises, you will be able to compare different areas throughout your company and across peers' and your competitors' organizations. You can take this information and apply it to your business goal-setting process so you can determine where your business is strong and where it's weak.
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Perform a Market Analysis:
This will prompt you to think about where your business is headed. It will also lead you to consider what is trending in your industry. A comprehensive market analysis will provide you with answers to these and other important questions.
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Review Your Company's Past Performance:
In order to figure out what your goals will be, it is essential that you know where you've come from. Your company's past performance will likely inform all your future business goals.
7 Tips for Successfully Setting Your Business Goals
1) Come Up with Measurable Goals
You might ask yourself, what good are business goals if you can't measure them? You need to have hard data and reliable information to know how successful your company is at reaching these objectives.
Begin by finding a way to track your goals that is useful to you and your teams. For example, you could use a spreadsheet to keep track of metrics on a weekly or monthly basis. You would then utilize this data to make the necessary adjustments in your goal setting. This enables your business to achieve its goals confidently.
Meet with Your Team
Take advantage of Burbity meeting rooms to plan your next year's goals.
2) Connect Each Goal with Your Vision and Mission Statement
Your mission and vision statements allow your business to generate performance standards and metrics that are based on the goals you want to achieve. They also promote efficiency and increase productivity.
By linking every business goal to your vision and mission, you ensure that each objective is connected to the long-term welfare of your company, as opposed to random thoughts that were recorded at the moment.
3. Create SMART Goals
S.M.A.R.T. stands for:
- (S)pecific
- (M)easurable
- (A)chievable
- (R)elevant
- (T)ime-bound
S.M.A.R.T. gives you five-goal setting criteria that all your employees can get behind. It inspires your workers to devote all of their energies in the same direction. An example goal might be to increase sales for your business by 15 percent during the next two quarters. This is an objective that is specific, measurable, relevant, and it is time-bound.
You could accomplish this goal by asking a particular team to work extra hours for a set period of time. Combine that with focusing on converting more leads into new customers through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and social media campaigns. Be sure to note the "how" part of your goal to ensure that your employees are on the correct path.
4) Establish Clear Milestones
Make sure that for each business goal, you will be able to create a list of project milestones. These milestones are helpful in that they monitor your employees' progress toward the goals they are striving to achieve.
These milestones need to be measurable and come with specific deadlines. In order to make sure your milestones are measurable, you could attach a number to them. For instance, bringing in 25 new customers for the next quarter and increasing sales by 40 percent during the next six months. By doing this, you will know precisely when your team has achieved a milestone that is linked with one of your goals.
5) Include Financing with Goals
In too many instances, businesses create ambitious goals for the new year but fail to identify the financing that is necessary to achieve these objectives. Plan at the outset how you will finance projects, like adding machinery or technology or infrastructure, so you don't consume all your working capital.
It is essential to have a financial plan that supports all of your goal-setting in order to ensure their success. A financial plan serves as a guideline and reminder of what your goals are. They provide the blueprint for what your business is trying to achieve in the short and long term.
When you incorporate the financing with your goal-setting, you keep on top of the expenses better and identify ways to manage these costs.
6) Consider HR Needs
It benefits you to check in with your HR Department as you begin setting your business goals. It is essential that you have the right people in the right positions to carry out these company objectives.
The ideal time to make personnel changes is the beginning of the year.
7) Be Descriptive with Your Business Goals
You want to be extremely clear when setting your business goals. Dig into the details when establishing a goal, such as a precise dollar amount, specific benchmarks, and what it will require to achieve each goal. Also, include how long it will take to attain these objectives.
If you are highly descriptive in your goal setting, it will be much easier to track your company's progress and put each objective into practice.
Hold Your Goal-Setting Sessions at a Burbity Workspaces Meeting Room
At Burbity Workspaces, we have meeting rooms that would serve as a perfect setting to brainstorm ideas and identify goals for your business.
We offer meeting rooms that are fully equipped with all the necessities for you to run highly productive goal-setting sessions. Each meeting room provides you with comfortable seating, a large conference table, lightning-fast WiFi, a Smart TV, and a whiteboard.
If you would rather hold these goal-setting sessions away from the workplace, then we invite you to consider Burbity Workspaces meeting rooms.