The new year is an excellent time to explore your business goals for 2022. If you are not sure why you have to set goals, you can start to think about where you want your business to be at the end of 2022. Everyone has their dreams and wishes. If you're going to reach them start to think about how to do it.
There isn't good or bad when choosing your dream and vision for your business, one wishes to make 4X more money than 2021, and the other wants to reduce the working hours while remaining at the same income level.
So after you think about your dream, why do you need to turn this dream into a goal? Well, it's the same as navigation. You want to reach some destination. You better plan how to get there rather than go around without a plan for getting there. In the second approach, you can get to your destination with a lot of luck. You are planning how to get there to increase the chances of succeeding.
How turn the dream into business goals? Let's take the example you aim to do 4X in money withdrawal. You can do this in several ways, increase the number of clients you serve, increase the amount of money each customer is paying you, or decrease the business's spending. A reasonable approach will be a combination of some of the goals. In our example, the first goal increases the number of customers by 70%, and the second goal is the average amount of money clients pay by 30%.
The goals must have a concrete way to measure progress, so you will know you are on track, and also, you will be able to split these goals into quarters and months. From the previous example, increasing the number of customers by 70%, you might need to target more customer segments than you target now. For instance, if you don't have an online presence for your business, the goal yearly might increase the number of customers online from 0 to 40%.
You must watch out that your goals do not cannibalize other aspects of your business, you can reach 40% of the customers by cutting the total number of customers only to 5 and getting 2 of them from the online presence, and at the end of the year you will reach your goals but might lose your business, in this case, it's better to use concrete numbers and not just percentages.
Continue with our example. You set one of the yearly goals to serve 400 customers from an online presence. Now you need to break down these goals into several subgoals. The way to do this is to think about what you need to do to reach that goal. In our case, you need to build the online presence, start with marketing, and increase the number of customers coming through this channel.
Now you can split the subgoals into quarters. In Q1, you will be building your online presence, Q2 start marketing, Q3 will serve 100 customers, and Q4 will serve 300 customers, and by that, you reached your target. At this point, take the Q1 target and split it into milestones. Those milestones might be a live website, business Facebook profile, and business Instagram profile. After achieving all the milestones, you will reach your goals.
Choose on each month on which milestone you want to work. If you decided to have a live website as the first milestone, you need to break down it into tasks, talk with three agencies, get a bid for building the site for you, get a logo, etc. Each of those tasks is related to a milestone. You work only on tasks that belong to a milestone you decided to achieve.
By following this process, you can reach your dreams regarding your business until the end of the year. Happy new year, and good luck with your business.
