5 Questions For Your Goals for the Next Year

smart goals questions - business goals

The new year is coming close to all of us. It’s the new year, the new beginning for new achievements. It’s time to set up our goals as entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial success in large part is based on the motivation of entrepreneurs to achieve what they want to achieve. But, how they can be motivated and what they want to achieve?

Setting up SMART goals for the year that is coming is one of the biggest motivators for everyone, so it is also for you. If you have specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time limited goals you will be on the right way of running your own business.

Even, in the last several years I have written several blog posts related to business goals as „improvements related to business goals” and „guide to set up your business goals,” today I want to share with you five questions I am using to help entrepreneurs in setting up their own goals.

5 Goals Questions

1. What do you want to achieve?

Start with your vision and where you see your company at the end of the next year. Do you want to introduce new products or services, increase your profitability, improve quality, and so on? Make a list about what you want to achieve next year. For example, one thing that I want to achieve is to improve the quality of my products.

5 questions goals

2. How do you make it happen?

Now, when you know how you want your company to look at the end of next year, start thinking about things that you will need to do in order to achieve these wanted achievements. For example, because I want to improve quality of my products to fully satisfy my customers, I will need to research my current and potential customers, analyze my current products, develop improvement projects, and implement improvement project.

3. How do you know it is the right thing for you?

The next question is something that will increase my level of commitment in the goals I want to achieve. Answering this question you will have the reasons why you need to achieve this thing. If we continue with the example for improving quality of current products, I can start researching current customers satisfaction, their complaints about my products and the reasons why my products aren’t with the level of quality that my customers want to be.

4. How do you know that it is the best way of doing it?

So, you know what goals you want to achieve, you know what you need to do to achieve them and you know why you need to achieve them to increase your company’s commitment. The purpose of this question is to increase your level of commitment and check again is what you need to do the right way of doing it. For example, is the steps of doing things from the answer on the second question the best possible way, or there can be something more.

5. How do you know that you are doing the right thing?

In this question, we are talking about measures, or checking points that will tell you does you are still on the right way to achieve your goals. What you will measure? When you will measure? How you will measure what you need to measure? What you can do if something goes wrong? This additional question will help you from the start to create small achievements if you want to achieve your big achievement. For example in quality improvement, I will probably measure the number of customers interviewed, number of focus groups, number of improvement ideas generated and so on.

As you can see, here I go with one step further when it comes to setting up goals. But, the purpose of this way, through this questions is to increase your commitment to invest your efforts in achieving the goals.

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