Setting Good Business Goals

27 April, 2009, 7:09 am

Setting goals is one of the hardest things a new business owner can do.  It is my goal to help you set good goals and then even more importantly, acheive those goals.

Start with the Mission

What is your mission statement.  By this point you should have one.  If not go review the other posts in this series and develop a good mission statement.

If you have written a good mission statement, then you will be able to develop goals that spring out of it.  I interact with a lot of folks who tell me their goals are to earn a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time.  And if we are truthful, thats really the wway we all think.  But I want you to be thinking a bit more broadly than that.

Remember I told you that your mission should be outward focused.  How to you plan to serve your market?  How will you go about accomplishing that?

A Case Study

I think it is time to have a case study.  Lets say you are in the business of selling golf supplies.  Lets assume your mission statement is to help novice golfers improve their game by providing them the information tools and products they need to become better golfers.

Before I go any further, I need to point out that I know absolutely nothing about golf.  But that isn’t really the point here is it?

If we start with your mission statement and spring from there a few goals might be:

Post 3 posts per week on your blog

Write one per month on driving.

Sell 20 training drivers per week. (keep in mind i dont know if there is such a a thing, but if there is it will demonstrate that you are accomplishing the part of your mission statement the refers to products)

Get 10 newsletter signups per day.

Notice that some of these goals are simply self motivating.  In other words, all you really need to do to accomplish these is to sit down and do it (ie. write 3 blog posts per week).  Others are accomplished by the action of others (like selling drivers).

You will need to evaluate what you need to do to accomplish each of these.  If you need to sell 20 drivers that probably means you need to get 200 people to look at the drivers, assuming a ten percent conversion (which might actualy be high).  In order to get 200 people to look at your drivers you might need to run adwords campaigns that get 150 click throughs and depend on your SEO for the rest.

The point is you need to think through what it is going to take on your part to accomplish each of these things and then you need to set out to accomplish that.

Reevaluate

Are you starting to see a trend?

You need to keep these goals on your desk, on a whiteboard on your wall, or even tatoo them to your forearm but you always need to keep these goals in mind.

How is it going?  Are you meeting these goals?  Are they unrealistic?  Are you just not doing the things you need to do to reach them.

Don’t be afraid to change them if you need to, but at the same time, don’t change them so you can be lazy.  Change them so you can meet them.

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