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Setting concrete and achievable goals is a good way to improve most aspects of your life, including your business. These goals can help keep your time and energy focused on success and writing them down in your business plan or on a board in your office can show others that you are committed and how they can help. To learn how goal setting can improve your business, you must first learn how to properly set goals so that they lead you to success.
Define Success
Defining your idea of success can help you determine what your goals should be. For instance, you can set a goal to work more efficiently or to reduce spending. A good tool for seeing where you are versus where you want to be is a dashboard report from your sales platform. So, what is a dashboard report? This is the page you see when you first open your sales dashboard and can be personalized to meet your needs. If you want to increase sales, you can have metrics listed for this point last year compared to this year or a leaderboard for employee sales.
Start Small
Your goals should inspire focus and hard work, not be overwhelming. This means starting with small goals that help you develop strong habits and then scaling up from there. For instance, if you are working sixty hours a week to try and keep your startup going, then your first goal should be to find ways to cut that down to fifty eight hours a week by automating routine tasks, delegating what you can or even outsourcing some services. Once you achieve that number of hours for a couple of weeks in a row, you can set a further goal to trim it down more.
Track Progress
Tracking your progress gives you a concrete way to determine whether your goals are working for motivation and seeing the goals being ticked off one by one is a good way to drive you towards greater success. This can also help you form better goals in the future. For example, if you keep track of how you spend your day at work in half-hour increments for a week, then you can see how much time is spent on each task and which ones need to be worked on more effectively or delegated away.
Redefine Goals
The key to setting and keeping good goals is to redefine them as you go. Sometimes this is because you have met the goal ahead of schedule and sometimes it is because the deadline came and went without the goal being met. For instance, if you have hired new personnel to meet your work hours goals, that might set back your cost-cutting ones. Redefining your goals is a sign that you are working hard and growing as both a business owner and a person, so even when it seems like a set-back, it is important to remember that it is not a failure.
Make a Deadline
It is important to set a concrete deadline for your goals, whether you are working on short-term weekly ones or long-term yearly ones. This gives you an end-date to your efforts and can help you stay on track for other things. For example, a goal of having a better budget built by the end of the quarter will help you break that down into a week of tracking current habits, and plenty of time to make little changes each week before your better budget is due.
It takes more than a healthy bank account to make a business successful and how you define that success is up to you. Maybe you want to work fewer hours with more efficiency or cut costs without sacrificing quality. However you define success, setting the right goals with concrete deadlines can get you there. It is a good idea to reevaluate and redefine your goals as you go to get the best possible outcome and keep motivated to do more.
Related: Five Ways to Create the Right Mindset for Business Success