Setting goals for your business is essential to growing your company. It’s important that you’re constantly taking inventory of your business, considering the direction you want to go, and setting benchmarks for how you reach those destinations.
There are few better times than the new year to set business goals. The start of a new business year gives you the chance to reevaluate and refocus. It offers the chance to set new objectives with a fresh understanding of where your business is and where it’s going. As your business rings in the new year, consider the following guidelines for setting business goals for 2017.
Use the New Year to Refocus & Reevaluate
Before you take the time to set new goals for your business, you should spend time evaluating where your business is right now. If you’ve previously set yearly goals, consider the goals you set at the start of 2016. Which have you met? Which have you not? What made the goals you met possible? What got in the way of the goals you did not meet?
Look at your business’s performance and KPI’s across the past year, and use that data to inform the goals you set going forward.
Use the S.M.A.R.T. Strategy
When you’re setting new year business goals, you should be looking at goals that you can achieve in the coming months as well as where you want to be this time next year. When setting short-term and medium term goals of this kind, you should use set those business goals according to S.M.A.R.T. principles.
The S.M.A.R.T. system for setting business goals means making sure that all of your goals are:
- When you’re setting goals, you need to be specific about what your end objectives actually are, along with the path you intend to take to achieve them.
- Making your goals measurable is the only way that you can hold yourself accountable to your objectives long-term.
- Action-Oriented. Setting business goals isn’t just about deciding on objectives, it’s also about deciding which actions you’ll take and who’ll be in charge of each action.
- It’s healthy to be ambitious. But setting unachievable, pie-in-the-sky goals is a surefire way to set yourself up for disappointment and added stress during the year.
- Time-Specific. Make sure that your goals are tied to a timeframe. Leaving dates open-ended is an easy way to put off the work your need to do to achieve your objectives.
Setting business goals is key to taking your company to new heights. Implement these strategies for setting goals in 2017, and see how big a difference it makes to your company’s performance.
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