Every business owner wants their company to earn more revenue, capture more market share, and serve more people. But many don’t know how to make these lofty ideas a reality.
They don’t know how to properly set business goals. They think that having a business plan is enough to lead them to success. But it’s not about having a paper document from five years ago that will help you grow your company.
To achieve success, you need to learn how to clearly define success, set goals, and create a plan to help you achieve those goals utilizing tools such as OKR software to streamline and monitor your progress.
It sounds simple, but most people never learn this process. And their companies stagnate as a result.
Want to separate yourself from the crowd, and actually launch your company forward? Read on to learn how to set company goals the right way.
Table of Contents
Define Success
In order to create goals for your business, you need to have a crystal clear picture of what success looks like. Your definition of success provides the ultimate roadmap to the entire goal-setting process.
Does success mean making a certain amount of money per year, or per quarter? Does it mean having a certain number of clients or customers? Does it mean a specific number of locations opened, employees hired, or market share earned?
Once you can answer the question of success, you can start creating goals under that umbrella. If success means making $10 million per year then your specific goals might be to make $1 million in January or $3 million in the first quarter of the year.
Find the Right Framework
There are many goal-setting frameworks out there to help you structure your business goals and track progress. The basic business goal-setting format is the SMART goal system.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. While this basic format works for many people, it’s not the be-all, end-all when it comes to business goals.
If you want to take it a step further, consider the OGSM model. This model helps you to translate complex strategies into simple language, numbers, and actionable steps.
It works well for enterprise-level organizations dealing with multiple, complex strategies at any given moment.
Create Actionable, Trackable Business Goals
Most importantly, regardless of which goal-setting framework you use, you need to ensure your goals are actionable. Every department and member of your team needs to know what their role is when it comes to making progress to the companies goals.
Goals need to be broken down into step-by-step plans. These plans then need to be assigned timeframes, from quarterly to monthly, to weekly, to daily.
Team leaders need to keep each team member accountable for accomplishing their objective within the larger goal. No one on the team should ever feel lost, wondering what they need to be doing.
If there is ever ambiguity, then the goals and action plans haven’t been articulated clearly enough.
Mastering the Basics
There’s a lot that can be said about business goals. That’s why thousands of books have been written about the subject.
Many of those books would be helpful. But it really comes down to the basic steps outlined above. Define success, list out the goals that will lead you to that success, and create an action plan for each one of those goals.
If you can do that, you can build a profitable, successful company.
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