Got Goals???

It’s not enough for a business to stay stable. It has to grow to survive.  Once something stays at “status quo” too long, it starts diminishing and eventually dying. This is why it’s extremely important to set goals for your business. This includes goals for your customer satisfaction reports, revenues, profits, loss prevention and anything else that can be measured numerically.

Here are some ways to help make sure you hit your goals continuously.

1.  Know your target

The last thing you want to do is set your goals like most people make their New Year’s resolutions.

“I am going to try to lose weight.”

“I am going to go to the gym more.”

“I’m going to quit smoking…for good this time!”

The reason why resolutions like this fail is not because people are lazy, as much as they are not setting crystallized goals. For your business, you want to avoid vague objectives like “I will raise our revenues,” or “I will cut inventory losses.”

Instead, make a goal like “I will raise our revenue by $5,000 per month,” or “I will cut monthly shoplifting losses by 20 percent by next year.”

Now the goal is crystallized, so you’ll at least know if you hit it or you don’t. It also makes it more “real,” so you can envision it happening.

2.  Set up action steps

Tony Robbins had a great point in his “Personal Power” set where he said, “Never leave the sight of a goal without taking a step towards its achievement.” As helpful as it is to visualize your achievements and pump yourself up with motivation, you will need to take some action to make your goal happen. In business, a lot of these action steps come down to, “Should I do this myself, delegate it or hire it out?”

You may have to hire a consultant, and that’s perfectly fine. If you run a retail chain, you may be amazed, and almost disappointed, to find out that your 20 percent reduction in shoplifting is completed after a $250 consultation with a former Target loss prevention specialist. He might tell you if you lock your side door and only have one entrance, the thieves will go somewhere else.

“That was it?” you might ask yourself. Some goals will come way easier than you expected, simply by taking action.

For other things, you may need a longer set of action steps. For raising revenues, you might decide to invest in greater sales training for your associates or set up perks for meeting quotas. Maybe the first three things you try won’t work, and that’s fine. You don’t need to have everything from Point A to Point Z lined up—it’s actually better that you don’t. If you were psychic enough to foresee every result, you probably wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. It’s fine to just have a basic outline and initial steps planned out. As you go along the path, new opportunities will arise that may be far better than your original plan.

Read the rest here.