With the ringing in of the New Year fast approaching NOW is the time to plan for the next 12 months to set fresh intentions and goals for your business that you want to achieve.
Taking some time to establish your business goals gives you something to aim for. It also gives you a ‘yard stick’ to measure against and make the planning process for the next 12 months much more meaningful as you will have some hard data to base your decision making from as the year progresses; providing you with visibility on how things are going, so you can adjust or change tack if required.
So, if you haven’t traditionally set clear objectives for your business you may be wondering where do I start?
Firstly, by setting the overarching Business objectives you want to achieve for the year. Business objectives are the specific and measurable results a business owner wants to achieve (i.e. a sales or revenue goal), acting as a compass and helping business owners make informed decisions on how to reach those targets. The objectives you set then ladder down into the strategies and tactics you undertake to achieve those objectives.
Setting business objectives is designed to help you simplify where to put your focus in running your business so once you establish what you would like to achieve across the next 12 months it’s a good idea to break things down into quarterly then monthly milestones with the tactics and actions defined on how you will get there. By breaking things down into more manageable ‘chunks’ this allows you to keep your focus and avoid becoming overwhelmed.
Here are my top 5 tips for setting successful Business Objectives
1. Your goals need to be SMART
Use this mnemonic to define your objectives:
Specific: State exactly what it is you want to do with the goal using action type words and ‘Who, What, Where, When, Why and Which’ statement language.
Measurable: Make sure you provide a way to track and evaluate what it is you are doing, using data and / or metrics.
Achievable: The goal needs to be feasible, and within reach otherwise you are just going to set yourself up for failure and disappointment but also shouldn’t be too easy to reach otherwise you won’t push yourself to try new tactics to achieve growth.
Relevant: Ask yourself, does this goal ladder up into the overall business objectives you are trying to achieve?
Time Bound: Putting a set date in place keeps you accountable and challenges you to take action to meet the goals set.
2. Set a regular time to take action on achieving your planned business objectives
A plan on paper will remain just that if you don’t take time to action it! Taking consistent action is what will drive growth in your business, so it is crucial you structure this time into your working week. Block the time out regularly in your calendar and protect it, taking into consideration how you best work. Whether you prefer to block out an hour per day or a whole day per week doesn’t matter so long as you mitigate any potential distractions that will lose momentum on taking action consistently in your business to reach your goals.
3. Set a consistent routine to track, measure and evaluate your goals
Bit of a theme brewing here… As a business owner, you need to get comfortable with understanding your numbers and looking for insights from your business data so you can make informed decisions. If you aren’t tracking regularly against your measures of success you could find you are spending precious time and energy in the wrong areas with no idea on what you are doing that is working vs what is not! Taking time each at the start of each week or month to look back at your progress provides you with visibility on how you will proceed ahead with your plans for the next month. Over time you will be able to develop learnings and benchmarks using your historical data that you can then set more informed measures of success from.
4. Use your data to make informed decisions and recalibrate if required
No matter what type of business you have you can learn a huge amount by taking time to analyse your data points. Sources of information can come from your website statistics, your CRM, your customers and the analytics tools from the software and platforms you are using. Looking at your data holistically gives you a much bigger picture of what is going on and can provide further context around why something that was working suddenly isn’t. i.e. if you have been running a Facebook campaign and suddenly see a drop off in sales – a great place to start would be your Facebook analytics to review the quality of your ads or perhaps whether there has been an increase in advertiser competition that may require you to adjust your budget but you will also want to look at your Website analytics to check you aren’t sending users to a broken link or the wrong page and to view their site behaviour to look at where they may be dropping off in their user journey on your website for example.
5. Make sure you CELEBRATE what you have achieved!
So often, as business owners we get trapped in the cycle of running the hamster wheel to keep business turning but you have to take time to stop and smell the roses and celebrate the wins. Remember to take a positive view that if something hasn’t worked that at the very least you tried it and you know now to either ditch the idea or take it back to the drawing board to try a different way – nothing ventured is nothing gained after all.
