Any experienced business owner will tell you that planning for growth and setting business goals is an essential part of successful business growth. Whether you’re just thinking of starting a business or you’ve got an established and profitable startup enterprise, business goals are key to progression at every stage of business development.
Staying on track
Business goals provide you with a framework for business growth – allowing you to work towards smaller, more manageable targets whilst still keeping on track with the bigger picture. Before any goal setting activity, it’s important to ensure that your overall business aims are perfected and in-line with what you want your organization to deliver and achieve.
Through using these long term aims to develop short-to-medium term goals, you can ensure that your day-to-day activities keep you on the straight and narrow. When goal setting is done badly, you risk the danger of a small misdirection leading your business plan off on a tangent and losing focus.
Work on your goals everyday
The biggest mistake many startups make are in developing a great business plan for the future and ending up getting bogged down with heavy workload – neglecting their grand plans for growth. Setting goals and reporting on their progression needs to be part of your daily operations. Ensure you do something, no matter how small, to contribute towards reaching your goals every day – keeping growth and development at the forefront of your mind.
Adapt to change
Despite the importance of keeping on track towards your long term business goals, there’s no such thing as a static marketplace. It’s equally important to ensure your long term aims aren’t setting you up to fail. So whatever your area of operations, you need to stay on top of shifts in demand or issues causing a change to the marketplace. Use this information to actively adapt both your aims and goals. This is another reason why working on your goals need to be part of your daily activities.
Develop a growth culture
No matter how large or small your business is, goal-setting and development should be ingrained into the minds of employees on all levels. Get each of your employees setting their own goals and reporting on their progression during team meetings, even if you only have two or three members of staff – everyone can benefit from an achievable short-term plan as part of a wider aim. By encouraging target setting with everyone in your business, you’re developing a culture for growth, whereby employees are encouraged to constantly strive for improvement. An unmotivated and disinterested team is a key indicator for businesses which have been taking a passive approach to goal-setting and growth planning.
So what are you waiting for? Set your goal posts and aim high!
