Setting Effective Business Goals
You can have great aspirations for your business but without setting effective business goals, the likelihood of achieving them is low.
A lot of people set goals in their personal life, why? Setting goals gives you long-term and short-term motivation. So why wouldn’t you set goals for your business?
SMART Goals
Setting SMART effective business goals is about setting smaller goals, that will help achieve the bigger goal.
SMART goals are designed to give you structure and support and help clarify what you want to achieve.
But what are SMART goals?
Specific
For a goal to be effective it needs to be specific.
Vague goals won’t be accomplished. Goals have to be specific. If your goal is to make more profit, how are you going to do that?
Once you have your end goal in mind you need to ask yourself some questions in order to make sure you’re setting effective business goals
- What needs to be accomplished for you to achieve your goal?
- Who is responsible for making that happen? Is it you or is it your employees?
- What can you do to be able to achieve it? Can you do smaller tasks that will help to achieve your ultimate goal?
Measurable
Once you have your specific goals you need to make them measurable. Making your goals measurable makes it easy to analyse your progress.
If goals weren’t measurable, how would you know if you’re achieving what you set out to?
Questions to ask yourself
- How do you know you’ve achieved your goal?
- What is your indicator of progress?
Examples of indicators of progress could be more orders, more engagement on social media or more leads. Make sure you clarify what your indicator is and work toward that.
Achievable
Are your goals achievable?
It’s all well and good having really aspirational goals but if they’re not actually achievable with your time and resources, then you won’t achieve them.
You need to look at the size of your team and the time and money you have available to you. Obviously we want to set aspirational goals to work toward that challenge us but can we actually achieve it?
Relevant
Setting relevant goals is a big part of setting effective business goals.
Why are you setting this goal? What is the bigger picture for your business? Is this goal in line with the bigger picture?
Time-Based
A SMART goal must have a start and end date. If there isn’t an end date then you could be working toward your goal forever.
Having a time-based goal, gives everyone in your team incentive to stay on track. If you didn’t have an end date then there would be no sense of urgency which could result in not achieving your goal.
Setting effective business goals will help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve in your business.
Contact Us
When you hire a coach, you’re making a statement that you believe in your business, and it will succeed so, it’s important that you find the right business coach for your business.
If you’re ready to build your dream business then John McHale ActionCOACH can help. We offer a number of services, starting with a complimentary first meeting and free downloads that will benefit your business no matter the size of it.
John is an award-winning coach who has helped his clients grow.
Get in touch with our team to find out how we can help your business.
