Do you ever feel like you’re busy working in your business but you’re not accomplishing anything meaningful? Setting and working toward goals can help you look beyond the daily grind and keep moving in the right direction.
Company goals don’t necessarily need to relate to profits. They could deal with product offerings, value-added services, employee development, efficiency, customer retention or anything else that would improve your business. What makes goals the most valuable is the thought and planning that goes into setting them and determining what needs to be done to achieve them.
Start by thinking about your company’s strengths and weaknesses and define what action steps you need to take to achieve your objective. This will take more than a few minutes to do if you want it to be effective, but the payback is worth it. This critical thinking process can help you realize what tasks are actually beneficial and what are just time-killers. This allows you to stay focused on important things and help prioritize how you use your time and resources. Everything you do should be part of a larger purpose. If a task does not move you closer to accomplishing a goal, it should be moved to the bottom of your list of priorities.
The first goal that comes to mind may be something that seems large and intimidating. It’s easy for small business owners to become overwhelmed by the size of their dream and think that it is unattainable. But if you work backwards from your ultimate objective, looking at what and when you need to accomplish things in order to reach that end objective, you can create a series of smaller goals that break long-term dreams into manageable steps spaced out over time. Setting tiered goals that lead to a larger goal has multiple benefits.
• It allows you to see if your long-term goal is something that can be done if given enough time and effort or if it is unrealistic and needs to be rethought.
• It helps you keep the big picture in mind, but focus time and resources on what you can actually do about it right now.
• It allows you to see measurable progress as you go. This both ensures that you do actually make progress and gives you a way to assess if you are on the right track to achieve long-term goals in the desired time-frame.
• It provides multiple opportunities for a sense of achievement along the way. This is especially helpful when you are trying to rally a team of people around your objectives. Having goals that they know they can achieve in the short-term can help them catch the vision and motivate everyone on your team.
• It helps employees remain aware of the direction the company is heading. This makes their daily tasks more meaningful as they can see how they are contributing to goals, clarifies the rationale behind management decisions and provides an overall sense of unity within your team.
Despite all these benefits of working toward goals, many small business owners feel too busy doing what needs to be done today to have time to think about next month or next year. But research has shown that companies that set goals perform better in the long run. When set wisely, goals provide direction, motivation and a straightforward way to measure your company’s progress.
