Business goals are precise articulations of what your business will achieve within a particular time frame. They are more specific than your overall mission statement and fall under the umbrella of your business plan. Whether you're a massive corporation or a small business, having clear business goals that are time-bound and attainable allows you to orient your company in the right direction as you grow. But in order to grow you need to establish where you are now, where you were last year to determine your growth and goal settings.
· Analysis where you came from, how did your business preform last year?
· Set goals that are clearly defined and not overly complicated.
· Set goals that establish both a short-term and long-term strategy for your business.
· Set goals are ambitious but achievable.
· Set goals that help your team see the overall company vision and require teamwork to attain.
· How to Use SWOT Analysis to Measure Your Business’s Health
In order to set business goals, you have to know where your business stands, and one way to evaluate your business status is to conduct an analysis of your company’s SWOT—an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. A SWOT analysis enables you to assess where you need to improve and how you need to grow.
· Strengths: The things about your business that are working.
· Weaknesses: The things about your business that need fixing.
· Opportunities: The markets, processes, products, and other factors where your business has the potential to grow.
· Threats: Challenges to your business success from competitors, shifting demand, etc.
Business goals are typically broad and lofty whereas business objectives are more precise. Objectives should be incorporated into your goals as a means of attaining them.
Business goals are generalized and long-term. Once you've established your company’s business goals, you can break them down into individual business objectives.
Business objectives are specific and short-term. They are milestones that help you track your progress toward your business goals. If one of your business goals is a certain rate of customer retention, perhaps you'll set the objective of rolling out a new product once every six months as a way of keeping customers interested.
As you work to achieve your business goals, you’ll need to develop business objectives in a way that is workable for your staff. Business objectives provide a concrete gameplan that allows your team to achieve the company goals.
Know who will be involved. Implement a performance management system for doling out assignments. Build the company objectives into your staff performance reviews and reward those who achieve objectives.
Create action plans. These should include specific tasks for specific people. Make sure individuals have ownership of particular pieces of the plan.
Establish a timeline. Set deadlines for reaching the company’s goals and individual objectives.
Provide sufficient resources. Ensure that your team is equipped to do what they’re asked. Build your business objectives into your budgeting process.
Be a leader. Clearly communicate your business goals and business objectives. Describe the final destination so that your employees know what they're working towards. Keep them updated. Be transparent. Be honest. Inspire your team.
1. Freedom of Time. You want to spend your working life doing what you really enjoy doing, and you also want the freedom to spend time not working too, so you can have a full life and pursue your other interests.
2. Freedom of Money. You don’t want a ceiling on how much money you can make for doing a great job, for coming up with valuable new solutions or inventions. And if your efforts generate money, you don’t want anyone dictating how much of that money you can keep.
3. Freedom of Relationship. There are certain people you love working with—both inside and outside your business—and you want to spend more and more of your time surrounded just by these people you click with, whom you appreciate and who appreciate you.
4. Freedom of Purpose. This entrepreneurial company you’ve created is not just a job or a career; it’s actually a vehicle to all sorts of things that relate to your fundamental values and ideals in life. This allows you to have a tremendous sense of purpose for being on this planet. Entrepreneurs are the greatest contributors of money, opportunity, and capability to communities all over the world, in every field of human activity.
When you lose sight of these four freedoms, that’s when you start to hit barriers and encounter complexity. At any time, though, you can bring your focus back to expanding these freedoms and find that your life immediately gets simpler; your decisions, actions, and communication become clearer; and you experience continual growth.
