In business as in life, it’s important to come up with realistic goals and make plans to achieve them. Fortunately, if you have the intelligence and wherewithal to run a small business, you already have the mental tools to set realistic goals and sketch a road map for that business’s future. The key is to get clear about why setting realistic business goals matters so much in the first place.
1. Realistic Business Goals Bring Your Company’s Mission to Life
For one thing, setting realistic business goals can help your organization reinforce its mission statement. Your mission statement articulates what your company exists to accomplish and likely hints at other goals and the answers to other questions along the way: What are your company’s values? Where is your company headed in five years? In ten years? What distinguishes your company’s purpose from that of your competition? Setting clear, realistic business goals allows you to make sure your organization’s activities always reflect its reason for being.
2. Realistic Business Goals Help You Evaluate the Past and Plan for the Future
Only through a clear evaluation of the past can we sketch the context necessary to predict (or at least intelligently guess at) the future. But evaluating the past requires your business to distinguish its successes from its failures. Indeed, this is one of the key functions of setting realistic, measurable goals. The point isn’t to accomplish every goal your business sets for itself. The point is to always know what your business has and has not accomplished.
3. Realistic Business Goals Inspire
Most of us have had jobs at which we couldn’t measure our productivity because the management lacked clear goals. We knew we were busy. We knew we worked hard. But we couldn’t be sure what we really accomplished. Indeed, the day to day activities of any business often seem chaotic, and it’s easy to get bogged down in filing government reports, paying taxes, managing personnel issues, negotiating with vendors, and the like, until no one action seems connected to any other. Here setting specific and realistic business goals functions as an island of refuge—a source of meaning and inspiration through good times and bad—for both you and your employees.
What Makes A Business’s Goals Realistic?
For your business’s goals to be realistic, they don’t need to be merely practical or short term, but they should be as concrete and achievable as you can make them. Trying to “provide the best customer service in the world,” for instance, is a lot like trying to be the nicest person in the world. You can certainly try, and trying would probably improve your behavior in daily life, but you would never truly know if you achieved your goal.
Realistic business goals, on the other hand, are measurable. If one of your business’s goals this year is to “improve customer service”—a goal worthy of any business and usually realistic—you can actually measure and evaluate your company’s progress on that front. Redesigning your website to cut down on the steps between selecting a product and checking out, for instance, might be one way to improve your customer’s online experiences and meet your goal of improving customer service. Soliciting feedback about this change from your customers by introducing a comment feature on your company’s website or online questionnaire, moreover, could be a way to evaluate if your company’s actions served the goal they were meant to serve.
The important thing, in the end, is that your business goals are concrete enough to translate into specific, measurable actions, and that each action reflects your business’s larger purpose. The more specific and realistic your business goals are, the easier it is to make equally realistic plans to achieve them.