Whether you are starting a business or already running your business, you naturally have a vision for what you will achieve with it. Whether you’re planning total world domination or just increasing your sales, it’s vital that you pinpoint these ambitions through your goals and objectives.
Setting business goals and objectives is critical for many reasons. Firstly, it helps you refine your plans and empower you to reach your goals, ensuring that everything is going in the right direction. Secondly, it enables you to review your progress over time by judging how near or far you are to the objectives you are pursuing.
It’s essential to set the right goals for your business. You want to aim for outcomes that are achievable, realistic, and relevant. Once you’ve set those objectives, you also need to support them with a plan of action that allows you to stay on course and make those ambitions a reality.
We’ve listed our nine top tips for setting business goals and objectives, so you can select suitable ones for your company and put yourself in the best possible position to achieve them.
Be realistic
The first thing to consider when choosing your business goals is making sure that you can achieve them. Even if you are incredibly ambitious, setting goals that are too high may leave you with impossible challenges that you will never be able to meet.
By making attainable objectives with realistic deadlines, you can give yourself a better chance of obtaining them. This will prove helpful in maintaining motivation and morale, enabling you to succeed rather than constantly striving for something unachievable.
Be specific
Next, you need to be specific when goalsetting. By doing this, you will create very clear objectives and represent exactly what you need to do. This will make it easier to stay on track.
Avoid going too broad, as this will make your goals more challenging to achieve and more difficult to create an action plan. Specifying your goals might also include adding numbers, such as ‘grow sales by 10%’ as opposed to just ‘grow sales’. This will give you a benchmark to strive for so that you can monitor your progress against it.
Host a brainstorm
If you are struggling to decide what objectives you should pursue for your business, it may be worth getting input from others in your company to determine what they want to achieve.
Host a brainstorming session and invite those you want to participate. Depending on the size of your business, this might be all colleagues, department heads or just those in leading roles. This is also a great way to identify departmental goals, which can feed into your overall objectives.
Give people free rein to say whatever is on their mind and write down the ideas given. This should leave you with a comprehensive list of potential goals that you can whittle down.
Refine goals by your priorities
It’s advisable to have a select number of goals as opposed to countless objectives that distract you. The easiest way to do this is to consider your priorities and use them to refine your ambitions to those that are the key focus.
Start by asking yourself what you want to do as a business and what matters the most to you. For example, are you most concerned about financial growth, attracting more customers or improving your reputation? Once you have determined what is most important to you, you can start to build out goals and objectives aligned to them and help you make substantial progress in the most significant areas.
Split into short and long-term goals
When planning your goals, it is best to have a mixture of short-term and long-term aims. Your long-term goals are those that tend to be general and far away. The short-term goals are more specific and will take place sooner, acting as stepping stones towards your long-term goals. For example, a long-term goal might be to open five new branches across the country in new areas. The short-term goals should focus on building sales and brand awareness within those areas to warrant the opening of the new branches and fuel demand.
By mapping out short and long-term goals aligned to one another, you can mark out the clear path towards your broader visions and break larger goals into smaller actions.
Set deadlines
When planning your objectives, you need to set deadlines for when you will achieve them by. This will give a sense of momentum to your plans, helping you to undertake timely action.
It will also give you a point to review progress and take stock of what has gone well and what hasn’t. If you miss a deadline, it could be a sign that you’ve either been too ambitious or haven’t got the right strategy in place. On the other hand, if you achieve the goal way ahead of time, it might mean you need to challenge yourself more.
Setting deadlines will enable you to plan, giving an expected timeframe for your growth. Just remember to revisit your planning regularly, especially after a deadline has passed, as this is often a time to consider setting new goals and deadlines that will enable you to keep moving forward.
Commit
Once you have chosen your objectives and created a strategy to realise them, you must commit. If you frequently switch course or change your mind about what goals you are pursuing, it will become tough to secure any kind of progress. It will also lead to confusion as to what the business priorities are and the route your workforce needs to be following.
Having written documentation of your goals is a great way to keep them in sight. Remember to think about the goals of each department and business function as well as your broader goals. While your overall goals may seem a little more abstract, the more specific, area-focused goals will often be more tangible. By recording them, it will be easier to understand the daily action you need to be taking to reach them. This will keep you committed while enabling you to move towards your bigger ambitions.
Be prepared to adapt
Although you should commit to your planned aims, there may be times that new circumstances force things to change. As a business, you need to be flexible and ready to adapt when called for.
Don’t be tempted to stick to goals you’ve previously committed to if it no longer makes sense. Instead, focus on what the priority is for your venture at that time and make them your lead objectives. Of course, you can always return to your initial goals later or adapt the timeline.
Reviewing your goals and strategies regularly will help you to track them against the context of your business. If some become irrelevant or outdated, you can amend your plan and re-focus on the right ambitions.
Communicate with your team
Once you have outlined your goals and set out the path for your business, it is vital to communicate them with the rest of your workforce. This will help them understand their role in your performance and incorporate your objectives in their jobs.
If you are creating departmental goals, the team members in that department must be aware of the aims and feel able to move towards them.
If your goals change, you again need to make sure staff are aware. It’s also a good idea to keep them updated with your progress over time to bring everyone on board and motivate them to carry on with their hard work.
Get advice
By plotting goals and objectives that are attainable, relevant and aligned with your priorities, you can ensure that you move towards whatever vision you have for your business. This means being considerate when selecting your aims, making sure you empower your workers to help you in your mission and setting yourself up for victory.
If you’re unsure of what goals might be achievable for your business or what direction you want to go in, it could be worth talking to a business advisor who can help you understand the possibilities.
At Pegasus Funding, we can discuss your ambitions to help you make a strategy that enables you to achieve them. We will also talk you through the financial options available that will allow your goals to become a reality.
Get in touch today to speak to a member of the team and kickstart your growth journey.