Tips on Business Goal Setting

Just like personal goals and career goals, business goals can help you stay motivated and focused on what you want you achieve in your business. They also provide a great measure of how much progress you have made and how far you are from achieving your dream result. However, it is important to set proper business targets to ensure that they serve their purpose. If your business goal setting is imperfect, you could risk the well being of your business in trying to achieve your goals.

Manageable Goals

Most people agree that it is best to have both long term and short term goals in your business goal strategy. The long term goal is useful in providing you motivation and inspiration, while short term goals provide you with focus on tasks at hand. It is important that you do not only have long term goals in mind. While “I want my business to make a profit of $1 million in a year” is a great goal to have, it is not a manageable goal in itself. Break it up into manageable chunks, say monthly or quarterly. You will find it easier to create a strategy to achieve $100,000 a month than $1 million in a year.

Result Oriented

It is crucial to ensure that the business goal you set is result oriented and not activity oriented. The intended result should decide what activities to pursue and not vice versa. Let us say that to earn $1 million for your business, you need 1000 clients. Getting thousand clients is a result oriented goal. It will lead to creation of various strategies for attracting these 1000 clients. On the other hand, if you decided that your goal is to send out a million direct mailers, there is no guarantee that you will get 1000 clients from this endeavor.

Action Oriented

An important aspect of business goal setting is having an action plan. Without an action plan, the goal is just a set of beautiful and well meaning words, which do not translate into any value for your business. Let’s re-examine the statement- “I want my business to make a profit of $1 million in a year.” This is not an action oriented statement. It is more like a desire or a pipe dream, but not a business goal. On the other hand, if you said, “I will create 1000 clients to earn $1 million,” it is a goal that lends itself to an action plan.

Achievable Goals

This is perhaps the most important aspect of business goal setting. Your goals have to be achievable for them to be effective tools in your hands. If you are in a business where it is possible to get 1000 clients in a year, your goal is certainly achievable. On the other hand, if you are in a niche business like art collection, where the standard in the industry is about 10 clients per month, your goal of 1000 clients in a year is highly unrealistic and you are very likely to fail.