Business planning: setting SMART goals for your company

Getting your business off the ground requires a great deal of planning. You cannot reach your destination without the paths you will take being well mapped out. This is the same with your business.

To know where you’d like your business to go, you’ll need to know not only what you want to achieve, but also what steps it will take to get there. In this case, it is prudent to use the SMART goal setting system. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely.

Let’s take a look at these 5 steps to business planning success:

1. Be specific: When you set your goals, you need to be as specific as possible in order to plan for them effectively. Avoid using broad or generic terms when stating your goals. For example, if your goal is to generate more sales, put a number on it. This gives you a much better target to hit. If it is 10% more sales, calculate exactly how many dollars that represents.
2. You have to be able to measure it. Setting a goal for your business is no good if you can’t monitor your progress to see if you’re on target. Using the sales increase example above, you can easily measure month by month if you are reaching your goals or if you need to ramp it up a bit to reach your goal.
3. Can you achieve your goal? Having hope is all very well, but having unrealistic goals is just being a dreamer. If you have a big plan, break it down into possibly smaller increments. You’ll still be on time, but you won’t be overwhelmed in the meantime. Your goals must be realistic, setting the bar too high is setting yourself up for failure. If you set the bar too low, you won’t reach your full potential. Finding the right balance can be difficult, but not impossible. Start small and work hard to meet your own demands. If you find you catch up with them easily, then set the bar a little higher next time.
4. Make it relevant to each person involved. Communicating the goal to the various people who will be involved in implementing the action should be specific to their role within your business. Telling your staff that the company’s goal is a 10% increase in sales will mean absolutely nothing to them. Telling your sales people that they each need to sell 2 more units per month or your production manager that they need to produce an additional 100 units each month is relevant, understandable, and measurable to them. It gives everyone concrete goals that they will have to implement in order for you to achieve the desired result.
5. Establish a timeline. One of the surest ways to fail is to set aside time to achieve your goals. You have a tendency to want to do this because you are not responsible if you have all the time in the world to achieve a goal. Set a date for the realization of your goal. This relates to the measurability of the goal. It also makes you work harder to achieve it if you know you only have a specific amount of time to do it. Another reason you may be tempted not to set a deadline is if you think your goal is unachievable. If you can’t bring yourself to set a completion date, you may want to review the steps above and set more realistic goals.

By having to set a deadline date for completion, you can sit on that date and review if the goal was met or if you missed the mark. If you’ve met it, congratulate yourself on a job well done and start the process over again with your next set of SMART goals.

However, if you didn’t meet your goals, this gives you time to reflect on where you went wrong in the planning process. Did you set your goals too high? What happened during the process that made it unreachable? Is there anything you could have done differently?

It is only through this deadline review process that you can improve your business and take it to the next level. Without this analysis and review, your business will continue to run haphazardly.

This whole process of setting business goals is the only smart way to push your business beyond what it is today. Making sure you set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely will keep you focused on success.