Every long-term goal needs short term setting. We call it ‘short wins’; and it allows you keep tab on measurable outputs that easily and immediately conveys information about how well (or otherwise) you are doing. This is what yearly business goal setting (which can further be broken down to quarterly and monthly) does to help your performance or productivity.
Goals typically represent a business’s bigger purpose and work to establish an end-goal for everyone involved in the business to work toward. It is the outcome that you wish to achieve in a period.
Business goals are an indispensable part of coming up with priorities and setting your business up for success over a determined period of time. They are what you anticipate to achieve over a period of time.
Your objective is to ensure a clearly defined and measurable steps that is to be taken to meet a business’s broader goals. According to business experts, taking time to set goals for your business and create objectives to help you reach each goal can greatly increase your ability to achieve set goals.
If you have been following this page thus far and you have been putting to use the suggestions that are dished out weekly, you should by now be taking steps by thinking about what next to do for your business.
A good way to do this is by setting goals and timelines. For example, a budding entrepreneur will decide on when to attend a business plan writing training or get a business plan consultant to help with some or all intel necessary to get a business going.
The question then is when is he going to do this? If he sets the goals with a specific time that he will do it, he will have taken a huge step toward starting the business.
Proper management of time is a challenge to aspiring, budding and some practising entrepreneurs. Without proper planning, certain things are left undone while those that are remembered are sluggishly attended to after much procrastination.
A checklist and a ‘to-do list’ will help a lot. A checklist helps an entrepreneur to evaluate his or her readiness to launch out by prompting him or her to evaluate his preparedness and readiness; while a to-do list helps you to keep tab on what should be done, who should do it and when it should be done.
As an entrepreneur, it is important that you know how to effectively use a checklist to fight against impediments to your business goal. For instance, when you are about to pursue a task, you need to write down the processes you must pass through for the end-goal to be achieved. If you need to open a new outlet in six months time, for example, what are the things you should do to make this possible? Who should you get in touch with and in respect of what? It is important that you itemise all the tasks, with each of the tasks having a yes and no boxes in front of it.
The tasks identified to be performed in a checklist are more potent if they are framed in question form. If you need to know how many people that are dealing in the same line of business in the area where you want to locate your own, such a task can be framed like, “Have I found out competitors who are selling same product in the area I want to locate my business?” Without any ambiguity, you will be able to tick or check a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. By so doing, you will be able to keep good track of actions that should take you to your goal.
But a ‘to-do list’ is more time-specific. It helps in taking each day at a time and also helps an entrepreneur to fight distractions. When you have your to-do list that captures important tasks that you must carry out in a day, and it is well prepared, it will serve as a guide to help you navigate the day’s activities with good focus and better outcome.
Ola Emmanuel is a business planning and cooperative consultant