In my previous post I mentioned about planning your year well ahead in time. One of the necessary ingredients of business planning are goals that you want to achieve with your business.
There is no set pattern or guidelines to write business goals.
Given the subjective nature of task it is quite understandable.
We would discuss an overview of goals and why you should be writing goals for your business.
As per dictionary meaning, goal is something that you hope to achieve, especially when much time and effort will be needed.
Wikipedia defines goal as a projected state of affairs that a person or a system plans or intends to achieve—a personal or organizational desired end-point in some sort of assumed development.
In other words, a goal is a statement that clearly describes actions to be taken or tasks to be accomplished by a company, a department or an individual.
Goals are different from desires.
A desire or an intention becomes a goal if and only if one activates an action for achieving it.
Goals can be individual or organizational. Organizational goals can further be divided into departmental and individual goals.
A business can have more than one goal and if the goals are accomplished, then the business should be a success.
As main focus of our discussions are online entrepreneurs who most often work on solo basis, we would concentrate on them here too.
Why Should You Set Goals?
Goal setting has two purposes
- Establish a measure for evaluating the success of the business
- Set activities for managing the goal
Goal setting encourages to put in substantial efforts. It focuses attention towards goal-relevant activities and away from goal-irrelevant activities.
Typically a Business Goal should have following characteristics.
Over All Objective
Your goals should reflect what your business wants to achieve. What is your ultimate objective of your business. It might be modified over time but every business goal should have this. This is also called mission statement and all your other goals are derived from this.
Clear and Precise
Your business goal must tell you what you aim to accomplished as clearly as possible. Get more subscribers is a vague goal whereas get 100 subscribers to newsletter in next two weeks is clear, precise and effective goals.
Divide Long Term Goals Into Short Ones
Write your goals for a year and then divide them into quarterly goals. This division would enable you to gauge your progress in more palpable ways.
If you have a goal of generating $20000 by one year, you may want to subdivide that sum into four parts. You may write to make $2000 in first quarter, $4000 in second quarter, $6000 in third quarter and $8000 in last quarter.
Thus you know how much to expect in which quarter.
Achievable But Challenging
A goal should should bring a challenge to fuel your motivation but should be realistically achievable.
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Tags: accomplishment, Business Goals, online business planning, planning future targets, targets
