Research shows that only 5% of small businesses achieved their business goals in the past 12 months! Source: Clutch titled ‘5 Strategy Development Tips for Small Businesses in 2020.’
With this in mind, I wanted to use the blog today to give you 3 tips to achieve your business goals or strategies.
The key reasons people don’t achieve their business goals, and the reasons my clients come to me are always one or more of these 3 things:
- They haven’t set clear enough goals
- They have set too many goals
- They have set goals that they don’t believe are possible
1. Goals that aren’t clear
There is a danger when we set goals that are unclear. It means to even if we manage to achieve something it is likely not going to be the result we wanted.
To set clear business goals you need to answer these 4 key areas:
- Who do I want to work with?
- How to I want to help or serve them?
- What actions will get me close to doing that?
- What support do I need to achieve that?
If you aren’t clear on the direction of the business, it will be increasingly hard to set good goals or strategies. You need to have a clear direction. Once you know exactly where you want to end up, the journey will become much clearer.
2. Setting too many goals
Every single client that I talk to always starts by telling me about their business. Telling me what they do and what they offer. And every client always has multiple “hats”. So when they are goal setting most will focus on a wide range of areas and create goals in all of the areas.
That is dangerous – if you are an entrepreneur or small business owner you need to make sure you are not stretching yourself or your team too thin.
My biggest piece of advice to my clients is to “do one thing really well until it is done, and then move onto the next.” So when clients do my program, we will only build on revenue stream at a time. While they might understand the big picture and know what they want it to look like. We will only ever focus on being one thing at a time.
You want to build one revenue stream to the point where it is automated and fully-functional – so you can press a button to turn it on and it can make you money in the background while you work on something else.
Always focus on one thing at a time.
3. Setting goals you don’t believe in
While it is great to stretch yourself, it is also not good to set unrealistic goals. You won’t even start trying to achieve them. So what are unrealistic goals??
Anything that is too far a stretch in a given timescale – like I will earn £500,000 this year in business when your business last year earnt £15,000 and nothing fundamental has changed.
When you are setting an intention or goal you have to make sure that what you saying to yourself is something you can truly believe in. So you might say I will be earning £500,000 a year within my business in 3 years from creating 5 different revenue streams.
By setting goals you believe are possible, even if current just outside your reach, will help you stay motivated on that journey. So make sure that you sit with your goals and really create a belief that you can achieve them.
If needed get a mentor or community that can help you hold that belief for you when you are struggling to hold it yourself.
Happy goal setting —— and achieving!