Home » Blog » Here’s how to set your goals, the smart way!

In our last blog, we talked about the New Year being a great time to set goals for your business and employees to help you and your employees understand where to focus time and energy.

We said that individual goals should be linked to Company goals and that you should involve your employees in the process, to ensure they understand both what the Company wants to achieve and allow them some freedom to determine how they can contribute to the Company’s success.

There’s a lot of information around about goals and how to set them, but one of the most popular methods is to base them around the SMART acronym.

SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

SPECIFIC: What will you do? Why and by when?

MEASURABLE: How will you measure your goal?

ACHIEVABLE: Can you realistically accomplish this goal within a certain timeline?

RELEVANT: Does this goal align with your values and the Company objectives?

TIME-BOUND: By when do you want to accomplish this goal? How long will it take?

Here’s an example

Specific – I want to increase my profit

Measurable – I will increase sales over the next 12 months, by acquiring 8 more clients and reducing operational costs by 5%.

Attainable – I will engage my current customers to grow my business through referrals, networking and attendance at business networking meetings.  I will draw up a budget and stick to it

Relevant – My Company Business Plan outlines that our Company will increase overall revenue by 10% this year

Time-Bound – I will have increased my profit in 12 months’ time.

Only with goals formulated in this way can you reliably measure success or failure (or the degree to which goals have been achieved).

Want to know more or struggling to set them?  Then call us on 01483 697 076.

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