Long term plans for your business
Ian Campbell • 16 September 2019
Setting goals
Aspire Accounting Holdings are happy to suggest a number of areas where you might need to consider planning for the future. The key to successful business planning is to set SMART business goals and make a SMART business plan for achieving them. These include:
- Specific - Goals should be straightforward and emphasise what you want to happen. Specifics help us to focus our efforts and clearly define what we are going to do. WHAT are you going to do? Use action words such as direct, organise, coordinate, lead, develop, plan, build etc. Ensure the goals you set are very specific, clear and easy. Instead of setting a goal to improve sales, set a specific goal to improve sales by 20 percent within 12 months.
- Measurable - If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. In the broadest sense, the whole goal statement is a measure for the project; if the goal is accomplished, there is a success. However, there are usually several short-term or small measurements that can be built into the goal. Choose a goal with measurable progress, so you can see the change occur. How will you know when you reach your goal? Be specific! When you measure your progress, you stay on track, reach your target dates, and experience the exhilaration of achievement that spurs you on to the continued effort required to reach your goals.
- Attainable - A goal needs to stretch you slightly so you feel you can do it and it will need a real commitment from you. The feeling of success which this brings helps you to remain motivated. Running a business can sometimes seem like a thankless task and achieving regular milestones can help make the challenge a little more bearable.
- Realistic - This does not mean “easy.” It means that the path is not a vertical slope; that the skills needed to do the work are available; that the project fits with the overall strategy and goals of the organisation. A realistic project may push the skills and knowledge of the people working on it but it shouldn’t break them. Be sure to set goals that you can attain with some effort! Too difficult and you set the stage for failure, but too low sends the message that you aren’t very capable. Set the bar high enough for a satisfying achievement!
- Timely - Set a time frame for the goal: next week, three months, by year end. Putting an end point on your goal gives you a clear target to work towards. If you don’t set a time, the commitment is too vague. It tends not to happen because you feel you can start at any time. Without a time limit, there’s no urgency to start taking action now. Time must be measurable, attainable and realistic.
Many young and growing businesses fail during the early years because the owner is too close to the action – so involved in the day-to-day running of the business that he or she forgets to step back once in a while to see how the business is doing and whether or not the business plan needs updating.
Write about something you know. If you don’t know much about a specific topic, invite an expert to write about it. Having a variety of authors in your blog is a great way to keep visitors engaged. Speak to your audience You know your audience better than anyone else, so keep them in mind as you write your blog posts. Write about things they care about. If you have a company Facebook page that gets lots of comments, you can look here to find topics to write about.
Writing a blog post is easy once you get the hang of it. Posts don’t need to be long or complicated. Just write about what you know, and do your best to write well.
