First Question – Do you have some goals for this year? If not…
- It will be difficult to track your success.
- Your and your employees (or family, or partners, or…) may be experiencing communication problems and disagreement over priorities.
- You will have difficulty allocating those scarce resources between marketing, administration, etc.
- (You fill in the blank!)
Last week’s post detailed some areas for a “Strategic Assessment.” If you worked through this little “exercise,” you should have noted your Top Three Priorities and been able to identify other areas that need improvement. Have you taken any action steps on those Top Three yet? Perhaps you need to state these in terms of goals: You want to be specific, realistic and indicate a completion date (e.g., Increase revenues by 7% by 12/31. Develop a more effective customer data base by 10/1. Increase customer satisfaction through the use of monthly customer satisfaction surveys).
Buck Rogers – who wrote the book The IBM Way – suggests not having more than five immediate goals on your desk at any one time. Go back through the Strategic Assessment list, develop goals for ALL those areas that need attention, and again, prioritize these in importance order. What really WILL make the most difference in your business?
Take your top five goals and develop strategies (in Excel or a Word table) for these:
- What are the Action Steps it will take to accomplish each goal. List all of them.
- Order these steps in sequential order.
- List a Start Date and an End Date for each step.
- If necessary, list Who is responsible for accomplishing each step.
- List a Projected Cost and leave a column for Actual Cost too.
If YOU don’t establish goals for your business, someone or something else will: competitors, the economy, your employees, the market. Take the initiative and do it now. Then work at accomplishing them. Even if you only make progress on your top three or five, you will see important progress!
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Tags: Goals, priorities, strategic goals, strategies, top priorities
