Smart Business Goals For Entrepreneurs

emmadmin January 4, 2019 Careers, Make Money No Comments

As we approach the end of the current year, the time has come when everyone makes goal setting a priority.

The funny thing is, we keep on making these so-called New Year’s Resolutions but keep only a few of them when the year-end comes.

The question is, why do we find goal setting an exciting activity but so hard to actually achieve?

One of the possible culprits is because we set goals that are not SMART.

If you ant 2019 to be the most successful business year yet, then you should start making a list of SMART goals.

You are probably familiar with business acronyms, especially the SMART approach. Your business goals can be summarized as being:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time Bound

We take a look into the details so that you can set SMART goals for the upcoming business year and achieve your targets.

Specific

We need to be precise with our goals so that we can know if we have achieved them, as is the case with the successful sale of the book Possibilities.

We tend to come up with general goals like “I want to increase sales this coming year,” or “I want to get more website traffic.”

Perhaps you want to build a large following on Twitter or Facebook or boost your brand visibility which are all great goals, but they are not specific.

Here are examples of goals that are more defined:

“I will sell $2 million worth of real estate properties for this coming selling season.”
“My target is to become the number 1 real estate broker by year end when it comes to sales revenue for the leisure resort projects.”
“I want to build an audience of 500,000 likes on my Facebook business page.”
“I’m going to sell 150,000 copies of my E-book per month.”

It’s clear how being specific makes a difference.

You should take note however that plucking numbers out of nowhere just to make goals specific is not the purpose here. Being specific with numbers are based on your current business performance and projections.

Specific goals should be relevant to your business or else it won’t do you any good.

For example, your current sales are at $1.3M for a selling season, and your growth rate is at 5% every month then it would be feasible to achieve your goal of selling $2 million worth of properties in the upcoming selling season.

Don’t make goals that are close to impossible to achieve based on current data and forecasts. When goals are specific, you can measure them and know that you can reach them based on current performance.

Setting the bar high is ok as long as you know that it is still within your capabilities to achieve. Impossible targets only stretch you beyond your resources and may cause more stress than excitement.

Measurable

There is no point in setting specific goals if you can’t track your progress and evaluate results. Particular targets give clear metrics, but the real goal is to spot problem areas in your strategies that are not so obvious and improve on them.

Breaking down metrics from a yearly to monthly and weekly statistics can show us if specific tactics are performing well or are falling short of the target.

Achievable

Your business goals and vision should be aligned especially in the beginning.

You may dream of building a multi-million dollar business empire with global reach but the reality for the year is entirely different.

If you are new, look for benchmarks that you can use for goals like using the competition for example.

For those whose businesses are already up and running, using current performance metrics is an excellent way to come up with goals that are achievable.

We can allow pushing the boundaries if you want to so that you can innovate and be focused. There is an allowance for stretching and challenging when making SMART goals.

Relevant

Your goals should be related to your overall business purpose and vision. If your reasons for setting goals is just because everyone else is doing it, then you need to review your mission and vision.

You need to answer your “Why?” so that you can come up with a business goal that is relevant.

Time Bound

The final touch is adding a time element to your goals. Knowing your goals, how to measure them and why they are essential to your business needs a timescale to be complete.

Are you targetting a yearly increase in performance or a monthly goal?

A time element helps in measuring specific goals so that you can plan your time and create the right strategy.