If you are like many small-business owners, you hate the concept of planning. You’d rather be solving problems and working with clients than planning what your business should look like in three years and how you’ll get there.
Yet we plan all the time for major life events such as vacations, weddings, and saving for college and retirement. It’s fun to dream about our next vacation or our wedding (or our children’s weddings). It’s not so fun to think about saving for college or retirement, but we do so anyway to pave the way to a financially stable future.
Running a business is hard work. In your daily activities, you’ll come across all sorts of problems and obstacles – and it’s easy to get focused on short-term goals. But when you are focused on short-term success, you often lose sight of the larger picture.
Set Goals So Everyone Understands Your Vision
We plan so we – and others working with us – understand what we want to accomplish and have an idea of how we’ll go about turning that vision into reality. Planning your goals is the quickest and easiest way to move from Point A – where you are – to Point B – where you want to be.
It’s really difficult to hit a moving target. If you have no idea what Point B should look like, you’ll never get there. It’s like setting out on a road trip and just following the road wherever it takes you. You might end up in Florida, Chicago or California.
But if you know your starting point (like Philadelphia) and your destination point (like Orlando), you can map out your destination fairly easily with Google Maps or your car’s GPS system so you have a step-by-step blueprint of how to get where you want to go.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be problems – online mapping systems and GPS aren’t 100 percent accurate. Sometimes they get the names of roads wrong. Sometimes they have you drive on back roads instead of taking the main highways. Sometimes you run into hellacious traffic jams that slow you down. But for the most part, you can overcome these obstacles – sometimes you can even foresee them – and find your way to your destination if you’re set on doing so.
Set Goals To Map Your Progress
In other words, by planning, you have some type of benchmarks to measure your success. If I’m driving from Philadelphia to Orlando and somehow, I end up in Mississippi, I know I’ve probably taken a detour or wrong turn and have gone a pretty good distance out of my way. It’s not hard to readjust my course, though. I just look up directions from wherever I am or reprogram my GPS to get down to Orlando, my ultimate destination.
Setting goals also allows you to set milestones along the way so you can track your progress. I know that according to Google Maps, it will probably take me about 16 hours of straight driving to get to Orlando from Philly, and I’ll be driving through key cities like D.C., Richmond, Savannah and Jacksonville. Those are my milestones that give me some sense of how close I am to reaching my destination. I can see how far I’ve come from Philly and estimate how much longer it will take to get to Orlando.
Set Goals To Motivate Yourself and Your Employees
Goals also give you a sense of motivation and purpose. I know where I want to go, and I have an idea of how I can get there, so once I decide to get in the car and start driving, I’m motivated to keep going.
Setting goals for your business is the same. If you know right now that you’re making $5000 per month and you want to get to $10,000 per month, it’s not too difficult to plan out how you’re going to get there. You know you’ll need to double your monthly income – so that means either doubling the number of clients you work with each month or working with higher-end clients. Based on your average sales volume, you can figure out pretty easily how many new prospects you’ll have to talk to in order to achieve your goal.
Sit down today and think about where you want your business to be in three months. Look at where you are now and where you want to be. What milestones must you pass in order to achieve that goal? Then, focus on the smaller steps of reaching each milestone. Take action each day, and you’ll quickly find that reaching your goals isn’t so difficult. Learn how to set SMART goals.
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