How to set realistic goals that help your business to flourish
The key to achieving your business goals in 2022 is not in productivity or hustling, as you may think. No, the key lies in setting the right goals in the right way.
Why Is Goal Setting Important?
Setting your goals is the very first step, and in order to achieve your goals, every step needs to be done well. There is so much that can go wrong in goal setting and hamper your ability to achieve your goals. For example, an unrealistic goal can leave you feeling overwhelmed and unmotivated because you feel like you will never achieve it. While the popular saying says, “aim for the moon and reach the stars.” In practice, when you aim for the moon, you will fizzle out in the lower atmosphere because you feel so unmotivated by your struggles to achieve.
Goal setting should also focus not just on the results you want to achieve but the behaviours that will help to achieve them. This will help you to build your business upon a sustainable foundation. One where you gain all the skills and tools you need to create a long-lasting business.
Don’t Just Focus on Profit
While you can and should have goals for your business’s profit, you should also have goals that are not profit-based. Turning a profit may be front of your mind, especially in the first year or so in operation, but there are other things you want for your business. This could be:
- Creating a team of employees who are just as dedicated to your mission and customers
- Solving a problem for your customers
- Building a social media following
- Creating a community
- Reducing your workload as a business owner
- Raising money for charity
Yes, some of these may also have an effect on your profit, but they also relate to your values and reason for starting a business.
Think Long Term AND Short Term
Your business goals for 2022 should absolutely serve you in the short term, but they should also connect with your long term goals for your business. Small businesses and startups should be agile and able to pivot quickly, that’s the one advantage they have over large businesses, but they should still create 3 and 5 year plans. These 3 -5 year plans will create a vision of what you want your company to be and what success will look like for your company. You may be running a blog now, but do you want to create a niche-specific destination for news and advice? If so, you might want to centre your business strategies around that. Instead of creating content around your experience, you may want to pursue guest posts and collaborations in 2022 to make your website feel more like a publication than a personal blog.
This long term vision will help you to create yearly business goals that get you a step closer to where you want to be in 5 years. After all, that is what goals should be, stepping stones to your ideal destination.
Create a Road Map of How You Will Achieve Your Goals
It is easy to say, “I want to make 6 figures in 2022.” Anyone can say that, but most people don’t achieve it. When you set your business goals, you need to sit down and work out HOW you will achieve them. Why do you think businesses take days or even weeks away to create their business goals? It doesn’t take a business a week to figure out they want to make a lot of money. No, they also do the following things:
- Evaluate how to allocate resources to achieve their goals
- Figure out if they need more of specific resources
- Break the goals into monthly and weekly goals and milestones
- Determine how often the review goals to check progress and make changes
- Evaluate how each role can push the business towards its goal
- Create a communication plan to motivate employees
If we look at setting personal goals for a minute, someone who sets a goal, “I want to lose weight in 2022”, is less likely to succeed than someone who says,” I want to lose 20kg in 2022. To do this, I plan to do a 1 hour walk every day and swap my after-dinner snack for a piece of fruit. Every 3 months, I will evaluate my plan and change it to account for my increased fitness levels and willpower. I don’t want to lose the weight quickly; I want to create a lifestyle that is healthier and easily sustains my weight loss.”
Every business has the potential to reach 6 figures and higher, but you do need to be realistic about your current limitations. Let’s say your business sells handcrafted baby blankets. If you only make £10 profit on each baby blanket, then you need to make a whole lot of baby blankets to reach 6 figures! Almost 200 per week! If you are the only person creating your product, that’s not realistic. To actually achieve 6 figures, you need to either hire more people or increase your profit margin significantly. So don’t just figure out what you want to achieve but how you plan to achieve it.
Create Daily Habits That Help You To Achieve Goals
Break your goals down as small as your day to day schedule. Weekly goals are good to have, but as the year goes on, it is easy to leave your weekly goals to a mad rush on Friday or promise yourself you will make up for it next week. Daily habits are bite-sized and therefore so much easier to get done. Plus, over time, they will naturally become part of your day, and therefore easier to do.
To set a daily habit based on your goal, you need to look at what you need to do to move the needle to achieve your goal. If you want to write a book to establish expertise, it could be writing for 30 mins each day. If you want to increase your profits, you might spend 30 minutes per day prospecting. If you find that your CEO duties are constantly being pushed aside in order to schedule client work, then make your daily habit 1 hour of CEO time each morning.
In order to achieve consistency, schedule your daily habit time at the same time every day. Often the morning is the best time before you open your emails and get sucked into the craziness within.