Setting Goals for your Business

When you start your business, you will have so many ideas of where it should go and what it will be come. That is great! However, it is important that you also begin the process of setting goals for your business so that you can eventually reach your targets! Take a half hour to sit and decide on the goals that will help you achieve your objectives. But, you’ll also want to make sure they have a few key characteristics. These together can be known by the acronym SMART. Keep reading to ensure that your goals are SMART!

Specific

Your goals should be specific. This means you need to say EXACTLY what you want out of them. You goal may be “Gain an audience” right now. That is not an example of a specific goal. Instead, add something like what type of audience: “Gain YouTube subscribers.” Now we know exactly what your audience is and can focus our efforts on gaining YouTube subscribers. Be sure to make your goals as specific as possible. You can add more goals that meet other criteria as well (Twitter and Facebook followers in addition to YouTube subscribers.)

Measurable

You should also add a measurable component to your goals. This will help you because you will be able to know when you have met your goal. In our example from before, we don’t know if we want to gain 2 subscribers or 2,000! How will we know when we’re successful?! Make sure you add a metric to your goal. We can change our example goal to “Gain 5,000 YouTube subscribers” to make it more measurable.

Attainable

The attainable component makes sure that your goal is realistic. Is it realistic for me to gain 5,000 YouTube subscribers overnight? Probably not. I need to alter my goal a little bit to clarify. It might make more sense to say “Gain 200 YouTube Subscribers.” I think I could eventually accomplish this with some hard work. Again, just make sure your goal is attainable. Otherwise, you will get frustrated trying to reach an impossible goal.

Relevant

Another key aspect of setting goals is to make sure they are relevant to what you want to accomplish. I don’t have a YouTube channel that is related to Open Prospects. Should I really be making a goal to “Gain 200 YouTube Subscribers?” Probably not. It would be more relevant for me to have a goal related to email subscribers, right? Setting a goal such as “Gain 200 email subscribers” is a lot more relevant than one about gaining YouTube subscribers.

Time-Bound

The final aspect you should pay attention to when setting goals is if they are time-bound. Basically, set a deadline of when you want to accomplish your goal by. When setting this deadline, make sure it is attainable as mentioned earlier. You should be able to make your deadline, but also be a little challenged by it. For example, I could alter my goal to be “Gain 200 email subscribers within 3 months.” This goal is now time-bound.

You can (and should) set multiple goals for your business. They can focus on many different aspects from building an audience to sales to professional development. Setting SMART goals will allow you to accomplish what you want better than with no goals at all. Take some time each week to reevaluate your goals and your progress towards them. Then let us know what they are so we can help you along!

(And if you want to help me reach my email subscriber goal, check out the form on the right panel of your screen!)