Setting business goals for 2013

While everyone else is setting goals to get to the gym and to read more, you should be setting goals for your business. Without proper goals, you’re just going to be moving along aimlessly, without a distinct direction that you’re trying to work toward. When trying to plan out your 2013 goals, you should be thinking of it like this:

Where do you want (or need) to be in 5 years? Think about that, then work backwards.

What does your business need to do in the next year to get you on track for that five year goal? What do you need to do in the next six months? The next three?

Thinking about your goals this way will let you do a couple things:

1) It will let you think long term. You need to have some major goal that you’re working toward to keep everyone focused. Maybe your goal is to reach $1 million in sales. Perhaps it’s to open up a second location. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s realistic (but still big) and is concrete.

2) By thinking five years out, but also having short term goals, it will make it more manageable. Saying that you want to reach $1 million in sales in five years is very vague. But if you know how many customers that means you need to get this year, then next year and the following years, you can begin to see the path to get to that goal.

Regardless of the business, you need to have goals. Ideally, they shouldn’t be like most people’s personal goals for the new year—where their plan of working out every day is forgotten after the third week of January because they felt like they were coming down with a cold. Do whatever you need to do to hold yourself accountable—post them on the wall, schedule update meetings—whatever you need to do to ensure that you’re staying on track, or at the very least trying to stay on track. Goals don’t mean much if you don’t try to follow them.