Establishing and Achieving Goals

A key element of achieving success with your business is finding the path you have to follow to get ahead, establishing the steps along this path and measuring your progress as you take each step. A couple of things are clear right from the start: you're better off taking lots of small steps rather than a few big ones and you have to make sure each step is finished before you go on to the next one.

Setting goals for your business is basically defining these steps. You have an overall goal - perhaps increasing revenue or improving quality - now you have to define how you're going to get there.

It's very important that the steps are both achievable and measurable. While the overall goal defines the direction, the steps define progress and you can only have progress if you complete a step and know you've completed it.

Is your goal to increase revenue. Are you going to get more revenue from your existing customers or from new customers? If from existing customers, are you going to raise prices or sell more product? If you're going to sell more product, why are they going to buy more from you?

Let's say you're going to sell more product to your existing customers by telling them about a new feature you have added. Now you can define your first step. The step has to have two characteristics - what you're going to do and how much of it you're going to do. A good one might be to get orders for ten units by the end of next week. Both the what and the how much are easily verifiable. On Friday you will be able to ask has there been any selling and have I got orders for ten new units? You have achieved the first step of your goal or not.

Now that you know whether you were successful in achieving your first step, you can adjust your second step. If you had the ten orders by Wednesday, perhaps you should go for twelve or even fifteen orders by the end of the next week. Don't get too ambitious though. The idea is that you will continue to be successful in completing the steps.

If you were not successful, you might consider scaling back your next step but, more importantly, evaluate what has happened. If you only sold seven or eight units, perhaps your direction is still valid but if you sold none or only one or two, you have to question whether this strategy is viable. Your overall goal of increasing revenue can remain but you might want to re-evaluate the means of reaching that goal. Perhaps selling to new customers is the way to go.

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