Just like New Year’s resolutions (but much more important), sometimes we can lose track or give up on business goals during the year. If you’re finding this more often than not, this might be a result of the goals themselves. This is why most experts recommend setting SMART goals. Read below to get a better understanding of what SMART goals are and why they are so important for your business.

Specific:

Define your desired outcome in clear, specific terms. You should be able to answer the five W questions: Who, what, when, where, and why?

Issues with goal setting can often come from setting goals that are far too broad. Goals like “Increase flat pack orders” won’t offer much value to you when it comes to achieving actual success. Something more specific like “Increase monthly revenue from flat pack orders by 20% within a year”. This is giving you an exact target to reach that can be measured along the way.

Measurable:

Your goal should be easily quantifiable with target metrics to track your progress.

A goal isn’t very useful if it can’t be measured. How will you know if you were successful or not, or be able to attribute overall business success to that goal? You want to make sure you’re target isn’t just something that CAN be measured, but something that YOU CAN measure.

For our previous example, revenue is definitely something that can be and likely is being measured continually by your business already. In regards to the specifics of “flat pack orders”, you would need to be marking whether any job is a flat pack project or not, as well as calculate the revenue from each of those jobs.

Achievable:

Your goal can be ambitious, while still being achievable. Consider the time and resources you have available and set high, realistic standards within scope.

It’s perfectly fine to set a high target for your business, but it needs to be something that is realistically achievable. For example, if your business usually generated $100,000 a month in revenue, it would be greatly unrealistic to set a short-term goal of $1,000,000 a month.
While the above is an exaggerated example of an unrealistic goal, it’s not unusual for many businesses to set goals that they know are unachievable as a form of “motivation” or aspiration. While this method might suit your personal vision board, for a business, it’s highly important that your goals are realistic as this is the base of your upcoming tasks, milestones and more. An unrealistic goal can throw off your entire plan and direction.

Apart from the obvious, another way to consider if a goal is realistic or not is to look into what resources you have available, and what tasks/ changes you can actually put in place to cause improvement. For example, if you’re already running a CNC machine 24/7 and working at full capacity then it may be a bit more difficult to achieve a goal related to increasing output. Outside of purchasing additional machinery, it would be worthwhile looking into areas of efficiency that can help you streamline or speed up other areas of the business.

Relevant:

Your goal should make sense for your specific needs and also align with other, big-picture goals.

It’s important that your goals tie into the bigger picture of your organisation and help you to reach your overall mission. This one can either be the easiest or the hardest for some to follow. Sometimes you can see a clear area of improvement and a goal that just makes sense, but even though it would be beneficial to spend time on that change if it doesn’t align with your overall business direction, then it may not be worthwhile following through.

Time-Bound:

All goals should have clear dates of completion attached to hold yourself accountable.

Setting a firm deadline will help keep everyday tasks from taking priority over your goal. In our earlier example about increasing flat pack orders, we set a deadline of “within a year”. It’s important to also set intermittent deadlines leading up to this point (quarterly, midway, etc). This makes sure that you’re progressing towards actually achieving that goal.