Businesses need a sense of direction and keeping its team in tip-top form. Goal setting for anything should never be a one-time event.
As a small business owner, you need to keep tab on your revising your existing strategies or to create and implement new ones and stay in tune to ever-changing market demands. For a business to grow, it is important to have clear objectives.
Having a clear set of business objectives, demonstrates your commitment to developing your company in specific ways. It is also essential for these objectives for your team so that they will have clear goals and areas for improvement to work on.
Let us discuss why it is significant to define business goals and objectives, and why they are critical in creating business growth.
Why Should Business Owners Need to Create Business Goals?
Without mincing words, business goals are an indispensable part in running a successful business. Any business owner who is passionate about growth should create a plan on how to achieve their goals with a clear focus, to motivate their employees, and set realistic targets for the business to work towards.
By creating business goals, it can also provide you, the passionate business owner, with a set of criteria that can determine if you are achieving your set goals. To put it plainly, set goals helps you determine if you and your team are succeeding in your efforts.
Clear and well-defined business goals help you take control of your business direction and increases your chances of achieving larger business targets.
How Business Goals Help Keep Businesses on Target?
As a business owner, it is necessary for you to be passionate about what you do. You need that passion to fuel your business towards goals and direct your team towards achieving those goals.
Not only do you have to be passionate and igniting the same passion in your team, but you also must set SMART goals to help you stay in focus and increase your chances of successfully completing your set goals.
By setting SMART, we mean that your business goals should be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time Bound. These are relevant aspects to consider when creating and setting your goals.
Specific
A goal should always be specific about what it is you want to accomplish. Goals that are specifically outlined have a much higher rate of success. Consider these specifics:
- What it is you want to accomplish.
- The importance of the goal at hand.
- Who are involved?
- Which department/team is directly accountable?
Measurable
There should be guidelines in place to measure your progress. Progress assessment keeps track and measure your rate of success. There are various methods you can employ, depending on what is most important to you and your organisation.
They can either be data based, for example, the number of expenditures or saved financial resources, the number of customers served. It can also be measured based on other factors such as customer feedback, and/or through the conduction of surveys.
The importance of this is that it will tell you if you are accomplishing your goals, by how much. It also tells you what sources of information you will need to determine if you are meeting your set goals.
Achievable
At The Growth Manager, our passion extends to supporting business owners to be successful and to ultimately help them grow along with their communities. Likewise, we also drive your passion for you to be challenged in achieving these goals but help you to define them enough to be attainable.
Let us see is your goal is something that your time can permit, and if your financial and other resources are enough to achieve your goal.
This should be focused on determining how your goal can be achieved. Do you have the resources needed to achieve? Do you have these resources? If not, what can you do to attain these resources?
Relevant
Every business aims to gain online brand awareness, increase profits, and hire more staff as the business grows. Ensure if your goals are relevant to the direction, you want your business to go in.
Ask yourself if your decision matches with all of your other efforts and is it worthwhile for your business in achieving these goals. Timing is also relevant, as well as having the right person in your team to help you achieve this goal.
Time Bound
It is only logical that for every goal to have a target date in which to achieve or work towards a specific goal. A business goal without a timeframe can just as easily be forgotten or pushed aside.
Setting timeframes, even for the small goals, is important as it contributes to the knowledge that things are getting done and goals are being achieved. Set deadlines, what steps or milestones are achieved within a given timeframe? How much time is needed for small tasks? How about for bigger tasks?
As a business owner, it is not uncommon to be bogged down by the daily operation of your business that you simply forget why you created it in the first place. With business goals, it will give you the focus that you will need to stay on track.
How Goal Tracking Can Help Measure a Businesses Growth
After you have clearly defined your business goals, the next indispensable step is to track your goal progress along the way. A business that keeps track of its goals makes it easier to monitor if everything is going according to schedule.
With goal tracking, it can help clarify ideas, focus efforts, and helps in ensuring that time and resources are efficiently being used. The result is the increase in chances of achieving the most important objectives of your business.
Additionally, by tracking goals, the organisation would be able to align everyone’s efforts towards the same high-level objectives. Goal tracking also ensures that your team members are contributing towards the company’s growth and progress.
Furthermore, goal tracking also provides other crucial benefits, such as improving team dynamics, unity, and camaraderie. With this comes increased productivity, clarity of purpose, and fewer mistakes, among many others.
Tracking goal progress is a great way in keeping your team motivated. Even small wins are something that truly is important to us as a business, and we are passionate at being able to make a difference. Without an effective way to measure progress, tackling larger projects can start to feel tedious and overwhelming.
Reach For Your Goals
Witnessing our clients achieve their goals and ignite genuine passion is truly inspiring for us at The Growth Manager. Passion is not something you can easily fake, as people can immediately see right through them.
Nearly every business understands the importance of setting goals to achieve business goals. The Growth Manager is all about helping you realise your passion for growing your business. And this passion is what drives us in helping business owners, who are just as passionate as we are, to step up to the plate.
Reach out to us at The Growth Manager if you want your team members to be motivated by undergoing training outlined in our Business Development Pack. Help your team reach the finish line, while celebrating their accomplishments and your business success along the way.
