Why Set Business Goals? In a study among students at the Harvard School of Business, these questions were asked: “Have you set clear goals for your future? Are they written down? If so, have you made plans to accomplish these goals? The results? Only 3 had written goals and plans to achieve these goals. Another 13 had goals, but they were not written down. The remaining 84 had no specific goals whatsoever. Ten years later, the 13 with goals were making twice as much as the other 84 who had no goals. And the 3 who had the written goals and plans… they were making over ten times as much as the other 97 put together. Do you see the correlation? Okay… you see the importance of writing down your goals. What is the recipe to make this happen? Getting Your Goals Down On Paper Here’s an exercise that will help you develop a plan going forward for your business… Let’s start with defining your long range and short range goals. First, let’s attack this in reverse order. We’ll start looking way out in the future. What is the one thing you want to do someday… something that will drive you to do what most other people will not do… the one thing that will make you give up watching TV to work on your business… the one thing that will make you give up that overpriced cup of fancy coffee every day to have the cash to invest in advertising for your business… the one thing that burns within you to accomplish. We’ll call this your “someday goal”. So, it would read something like this… Someday I would like to _____________. You get the picture. Write that down! Now, let’s specify this in more definite terms… Based on the goal above, what is one thing you could do in the next five years that would enable you to reach your “someday goal”? Write that down! Next, what is one thing you could do in the next year to make that 5 year goal attainable? Write that down! Okay, narrow that down again… what can you do this month to reach that one year goal? You guessed it… write that down! Back it up again… What do you need to do this week to reach the monthly goal? Now you’re at your daily goal… ask yourself ,”What’s the one thing I can do today to reach my weekly goal?” Of course, as you get started on this exercise, understand that you don’t have to limit your tasks and strategies to just one. Your weekly goal, for example, might include 5-7 different tasks or strategies… one for each working day that week. Write those down! Goal Evaluation You might lay down your goals like I suggested above, and then go back through from the bottom to the top, evaluating your goal structure as you go. Let’s say your weekly goal is to build a new WordPress blog site. Your daily goals may be listed to read…
- Day 1 – research and decide on my domain name
- Day 2 – secure hosting, setup domain name servers, and use cPanel to install a new blog
- Day 3 – secure and upload a theme, upload necessary plugins, and install them to setup your site
- Day 4 – create the necessary pages for your site… home page, contact, about us, join, etc.
- Day 5 – write two posts for your blog to get it started
- Day 6 – write another blog post and set up a way to monetize the site
- Day 7 – create a video to post on your blog, and write another blog post
One thing you need to understand… your short term goals must be flexible, and yet, at the same time, they need to be firm. You may need to adjust strategies as you encounter and solve problems, and learn new marketing approaches… but you must not deviate from taking action. Take action every day… ask yourself, “Based on my written goals, what’s the ONE thing I must do right now to build my business?”