The plans that you have for your business might be what excites you about the future, and even perhaps what motivated you to begin your business in the first place. The impatience that this can lead to, however, might lead to a sense of frustration with the early days of your business – or even just times when it feels as though you’re not progressing as quickly as you would like.
Therefore, you might find that it’s worthwhile to find ways of taking your long-term business goals and converting them into more digestible steps – ultimately forming a more actionable plan for your future.
Theory into Practice
If you identify one of your objectives, you can think about whether it’s stated in practical or more theoretical terms. While broad generalizations can be useful for visualizing where you want to be, they aren’t too useful for taking action. So, while you’re converting these plans into smaller chunks, you might also think about specific, measurable milestones that you can work towards. This not only has the advantage of letting you know when you’ve hit them, but it might also motivate you by giving you something more tangible to work towards. This approach is often referred to as writing SMART goals, and it’s a practice that could help you to avoid making plans that are too vague or unattainable in the future.
Plan How to Get There
Alongside the goal itself, it might help to develop a loose plan for how you’re going to achieve it, so that you don’t find yourself struggling with an approaching deadline and no idea how to meet it. If your goal is to increase traffic on your website, or perhaps increase engagement with your marketing on other platforms, you might think about instigating a new strategy to increase your brand awareness. Utilizing Shopify SEO services can be an effective way of doing this, drawing attention to your brand across the internet – leading audiences towards your digital presence and increasing the chance of engagement.
These don’t always have to be fully formed ideas, but if you know that your goals are things that your team is actively working towards, adding potential directions to take as you think of them can help people to get the ball rolling once they start to focus on properly meeting a certain objective.
Timescale
There are many different categories that a ‘long term business goal’ might fall into. Are you talking about an objective that you’re hoping to reach by the end of the year? Or is the goal even longer than that? It might be that the goal is something that you’re hoping to achieve in five years, or even longer. Once they get to this kind of timescale, it’s difficult to think about the goal in anything other than an abstract term. Even if you were to try and plan out each and every step of how your business was going to get there, your plan would lose viability due to the random circumstantial shifts that would inevitably occur to you in that time. Therefore, regardless of what kind of timescale is attached to your plan, it might be best just to focus on one step at a time. Furthermore, even if you identify this first step, it might be that this in itself is a task that will take time, meaning that you can break that down even further to make that more manageable.
While at a point this simply seems like a process that is doomed to spiral down into infinity, the benefit of having a goal that you can finish in one day and realize that it’s brought you one step closer to the overall target is that progress becomes much more tangible.
Be Open to Ideas
You might have a good idea of what your business goals are, and they might align with your personal vision for what your business should be. However, when you’re working in a wider team, being open to other perspectives and ideas can be invaluable to the process. You might feel a sense of protection over what you might deem as the only correct direction, but a more collaborative mindset can lead to a situation where you’re discovering solutions that you would have never thought of on your own.
Being stuck in your own limited perspective might lead to a situation where you perceive the only path ahead as being through a certain process. However, being able to understand the values that different approaches might have means that your whole team can weigh them up together. There isn’t even likely to be a binary right and wrong, just an answer that makes the most sense based on the experience and expertise of this team – even if that means trying something that’s completely new to you.
The post Breaking Long-Term Business Goals into Manageable Targets appeared first on Our Business Ladder.