Running your own business can be incredibly stressful and there are moments where it can feel like you are going round and round in circles. This is where having a plan in place can help you and within this plan, it is useful to have SMART goals for your business. If you work with a Tewkesbury Business Advisory specialist they can help you to work through your goals and set plans for your next few years in business.
When working with Tewkesbury Business Advisory Randall and Payne you will be asked to assess where you think your business is currently and where you want it to be in the future. They will also discuss with you what your long term plans are. For example, whether you want to sell the business in the future or whether you are going to pass it down to family members to run.
Once you have your long term business plans in place you can start to plan your business growth and along the way, you will want to have SMART goals that can help you achieve this. By using this method of goal setting you can be sure that your goals are realistic and that you have mechanisms in place to be able to monitor them and to assess their success at the end of your given time period.
The acronym SMART should include the following steps to goal setting:
S – Specific – this means making sure that your goals are clearly stated, giving what is to be achieved along with who is going to carry this out, where and when. This means having more than, ‘increase profits by 20%’. This is not specific enough. You would need to explain when this was to be achieved and how.
M – Measurable – this again means being specific and detailed. There is no point in having a goal that says ‘increase sales’, as it is such as a big open-ended goal that you could argue that you will never achieve. You need to give specific outcomes so that you can measure their success.
A – Achievable – this means not making outlandish goals like ‘increase profits by 200% in 3 months’. There is no point in setting yourself up for failure before you have even begun.
R – Relevant – this means looking at your business long term goals and ensuring that the smaller goals that you are establishing will help to get you closer to this end result.
T – Time based – this is where you give a time-scale for you to achieve the goals by. Again this helps you to measure the successes that you have had and to adjust your goals if you achieve them earl or it looks like you aren’t going to achieve them at all.