5-Steps to Creating Effective Business Goals
Mission Statement & Goals -these are the two fundamentals required for a business to grow. While the mission defines the overall purpose of the company, goals tell the things that should get achieved to fulfill the overall purpose.
Let’s take a nonprofit organization, for example. The nonprofit mission statement will explain the value it delivers, whom it serves, and how it serves. Meanwhile, the business goals will determine what action the organization should take to achieve the mission. Both of these are interdependent.
It’s highly important to have well-planned business goals to move forward and accomplish the purpose. Since every business is different, there’s no set formula to the best goals. You will have to conduct research and analysis to create effective goals for your business.
In this post, we’ll walk you through the process in 5-simple steps. So, let’s dive in!
Conduct a SWOT Analysis
The SWOT analysis refers to the situational assessment of a business. It assesses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Hence, the first step is getting this comprehensive overview to use as the foundation of your business goals.
Here’s how to conduct a SWOT analysis:
1. Strengths
Identify the strengths of your business by finding out what it does the best. These may include customer satisfaction, the skills of the staff, and much more. Having competitive advantages also counts as a strength since you can use them to grow.
2. Weaknesses
Next, survey the target audience and research competition to find the weaknesses. In which areas does your business fall short of the set success standards? It may include low cash flow, lack of experience, or innovation.
3. Opportunities
These are the low-competition areas in the market that you can use to your business’s advantage and thrive. You can identify them by evaluating current industry trends, product features, customer response, etc. A new trend that has become popular is starting a subscription box company.
4. Threats
Challenges presented to your business by external forces classify as threats. When left unnoticed, these challenges can put business growth and stability at risk. And so, you must identify them and ways to resolve them before it’s too late.
Decide Business Direction
The next step is to use the collected information to find a thriving point. Go through the SWOT analysis and find opportunities/problems to solve that will provide the most return to your business. These points are what will decide the business direction for a specific timeframe.
Please note that by return, we mean an outcome supporting the overall purpose of your business. Some examples include increased revenue generation, better customer service, more market share, etc.
Make SMART Goals
Now, you need to use the thriving points to create achievable goals. For this, we will use the SMART goal-setting method. It ensures your business goals have the qualities required to be achievable. These include:
· Specific; provides the focus for the plan, like increasing product sales by 25%.
· Measurable; offers a quantifiable factor that you can use to track success and ensure the business reaches the benchmarks.
· Actionable; lays out the steps towards the goal completion, such as a feature in XYZ magazine.
· Relevant; direct business-related goals that ensure improvement.
· Time-based; sets a deadline for the goals and increases the urgency.
Create a Strategic Plan
Once you have the goals ready, use them to create a precise and detailed plan to achieve them. Begin by breaking down the goals into further small and achievable goals that follow the SMART structure. Then, make a plan around them. Using this plan, you will be able to accomplish the goals within the set timeframe easily.
Review & Improve
Creating a flawless plan without prior experience is impossible. You may get 90% success by being vigilant and strategic. But, complete success remains a challenge if you’re a beginner. So, when you put the plan into action, do not forget about it. Instead, keep evaluating it every stage to identify flaws. Then, use these errors to rectify and improvise the plan.