Day 13: Business Goals – Improve Your Business in 77 Days

business goals setting mistakes

Let’s continue with the thirteenth day in the challenge to improve your business in 77 days. Still, we are in the business planning improvements as a part of your overall improvement process.

You already have worked on your previous business planning experience, forecasting, knowledge and business model.

Now, we can continue with the more specific tasks when it comes when you prepare your business plan. Today, your task will be to work on improvements of your business goals.

You need to remember that your business goals are the first specific things on which everything else will be depended in your business planning process.

If you screw up with your goals, your overall business planning process will also be screwed.

Business Goals

Your goals are something that your business should achieve or accomplish in a certain period of time in the future. They are composed from:

  • Something that should be achieved. For example, increasing sales is something that should be achieved.
  • Something that will indicate the measure. For example, the goal increasing sales didn’t tell us something worth. It is not worth goal because it doesn’t tell us how much we need to increase our sales. So, now our goal will be increasing sales for 10% more from previous year. That is a better goal.
  • Period of time in which it must be achieved. For example, the goal is increasing sales for 10% compared with last year in the next year.

Where You Need to Focus on Improvements?

When we talk about possible improvements of business goals you need to focus your attention on the following things.

#1 You need to be objective when you set up your goals

Yes, you can start with what you want to accomplish, but you need to check it out. Are your goals something that can be reality? Sometimes it is better to set lower but achievable goals instead of high unachievable goals.

#2 Commitment

The second thing is your own commitment to the business goals that you just set up.

Imagine a goal of an entrepreneur where he/she is not obligated to achieve. Does this have a logic? Do you find yourself in such a situation?

If an entrepreneur is not obligated to achieve the goals, then how he/she can expect their employees to be obligated to achieve it? Probably, they will do the same as an entrepreneur. They will ignore the goals. Why you need to lose your time of setting up the goals in such a situation when nobody cares?

Your written business plan can be the first step of your own commitment to the goals.

More important, is that you need to know that if the goals are written on paper, they will be in a category with a more commitment than the goals which remains only in your head.

#3 SMART

And yes your goals need to be SMART goals that mean:

  • They are specific,
  • They are measurable,
  • They are achievable,
  • They are realistic, and
  • They are time-Limited.

Questions That Need Your Answers

Use following questions that will lead you through the process when you want to make improvements on your business goals:

  1. How can I be objective setting up my business goals?
  2. What is my vision?
  3. What I want to accomplish in the future?
  4. Where I want to see my company in the future?
  5. What are the trends in my industry, market or related business environment?
  6. What’s going on in the industry where my company operates?
  7. What is the industry average in the last several years?
  8. What is the quantity limit of the market?
  9. Is the quality of my offer in the line with the market’s needs?
  10. What about your resources? Do I have them to accomplish what I want to accomplish?
  11. Where is now my company in terms of customers, sales, revenue and profit?
  12. What’re the results from the past? Why I have achieved and why I haven’t achieved my objectives from the past?
  13. What I need to improve in my goal-setting process learned from the previous two answers?
  14. Where I want to be my company in terms of customers, sales, revenue and profit after five years from now?
  15. What’re my targets for the next five years?
  16. Do I have any type of obstacles to achieve my targets?
  17. How can I overcome obstacles if there are some of them?
  18. What will happen in the future?
  19. What type of changes I would like to see in my company in the next five years?
  20. What type of changes I would like to see outside my company in the next five years? Is it possible, and how much?
  21. What will be my goals dependent on the answers of all previous questions?
  22. Are my business goals specific?
  23. Are my business goals measurable?
  24. Are my business goals achievable?
  25.  Are my business goals realistic?
  26. Are my business goals time-limited?
  27. Do I allocate responsibilities for each goal?
  28. What actions I need to take to accomplish each of the defined goals?
  29. Is this that I want to accomplish? Can I improve something?