Saving time and energy by ensuring you have set goals that are efficient and productive is critical for continued success as a business. Not only does this ensure that you keep moving forward towards a designated goal, it keeps you from getting stuck in a rut that causes your business to stagnate. In this article, we will explore how setting SMART goals can help small business owners to define and validate their goals.
To help ensure you have the knowledge and mindset needed to achieve your goals as a business, it is important to understand what the acronym SMART actually stands for. With this information, you will have a clear path to creating and achieving actionable and achievable goals. Here’s what the SMART acronym actually means when broken down into its individual pieces:
Specific
Setting specific goals that define what you are trying to accomplish as a business.
Measurable
Taking the time to ensure you have identified milestones or potential achievements that can help monitor progress.
Attainable
Your designated goals are not only manageable but also realistic.
Relevant
The goals that you have created fit within your own business model.
Time-Based
You have created a specific timeline for achieving your goals.
Consistently Reach your Goals
Now that you have determined what SMART goals actually are, how can you ensure you are consistently reaching them? To do this, it is important to break down your goals into segments that can ultimately be validated. Before you start any steps to achieving those goals, review them under the SMART system to see if they align with what you are actually trying to achieve. In most cases, the easiest way to do this is to start at your goal and work backward to see if your starting point actually helps lead to your target point.
With this big picture in mind, you can then start segmenting your primary goals into smaller actions that can help achieve the big picture. This will ultimately align with two distinct segments of the SMART goals plan, measurable and attainable. The smaller you make these steps the easier they will be to follow and efficiently reach your goal. Taking baby steps will show hard data that you are on the right path and if something isn’t working, you can adjust to ensure you are still on target.
Why is it so Important to set Goals?
The primary objective of setting SMART goals is to ensure that you have a clear formula for ensuring your business is hitting the metrics that you are hoping to. Unfortunately, it can be easy to derail your progress if you aren’t actively sticking to a plan. Ensure you are writing everything down and keeping a record of when goals are completed and what you still need to do to reach the end.
One final consideration that is important when setting SMART goals is to ensure that you are defining a clear end date. With open-ended goals, you can lose the sense of urgency to build your business. This is time that you will never get back! Create a designated timeline for your goals and define smaller goals throughout the process to gauge success along the timeline and meet your eventual objective.
Chief Strategist
With over two decades of in-the-trenches marketing experience, Matthew Maennche’s views on developing and supporting a successful business are fundamentally different from the norm. As a developer and strategist, Maennche has helped thousands of businesses of all sizes, both domestic and international, take their organizations to the next level.
Matthew also spends time giving back to the local business community as a volunteer, mentor, and leader for the local chapter of SCORE.
“As a virtual CMO, I am able to provide you the experience of a Fortune 500 for as little as 500 dollars a month.”
To meet with Matthew schedule a free initial consultation.