There’s no better time than the New Year to look at setting both personal goals and goals for your business for the year ahead. If you haven’t already done so, this article will give you a guide as to why it’s important to set goals for your business and how you should go about doing so.
Why should I set goals for my business?
Setting goals for your business gives you a sense of direction for the year ahead. It gives you and your team something to work towards. This can lead to an increase in productivity and motivation throughout the business.
Setting goals is also an important part of planning your business activities for the year ahead. When you have an end goal, you can then set plans in motion as to how/what you need to achieve that goal. For example, a business goal may be to ‘increase sales’. You would then be able to plan as to how you are going to achieve that goal such as putting a marketing plan in place or working on returning customer rate etc.
Setting goals also gives you a way to track the progress and success of the business. For example, going back to the goal of increasing sales, if each month your sales are increasing – you know you are on track. However, if they are not, this gives you the chance to review your current strategy and implement changes to help reach that end goal.
Having business goals keeps you and your team motivated as there is an end target to work towards. Therefore, this helps increase the productivity of your team. It is a great feeling when the team achieves a goal, it helps raise the overall morale.
How should I go about setting goals for my business?
1. Start by reviewing the previous year: What were you happy with? What could be improved? A SWOT analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) can be helpful to determine this.
2. You should then prioritise which areas are most important to you to improve.
3. The next step is to review these areas with your team for feedback.
4. Once your top goals are decided, you should work on making them SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely)
5. Work out your KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
6. Put together a plan as to how you’re going to achieve your goals whether that be a marketing plan as mentioned above.
We hope you have a great year and achieve all the goals you set out! If your main goal is to increase sales, speak to one of our team and we will help you towards achieving this.
