Grow your business: Get SMART in 2024
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Setting goals should be nothing new for the successful business owner or manager. But how you go about achieving those goals can be critical in their success or failure. Consider trying a new approach for goal setting.
In order to grow, your business must be SMART when setting goals. The Kauffman Foundation recommends using the SMART goal technique. George Doran created the acronym in 1981. Doran identified five of them. In short, the SMART acronym stands for goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time based.
Specific: The goal should be ‘clearly defined by those who have the knowledge about their impact.’ This should include, but not be limited to your staff. “Seek input from your employees as you analyze your business and work on your plan. Their insights are valuable and their buy-in is critical.”
Measurable: Specifically, the goal needs to be measurable. ‘Quantifiably defined in such a way as to gauge progress.’ To put it another way, you need to establish a particular target. For example, setting a goal of ‘Increasing Sales’ is not sufficient. ‘Increasing Sales by 15%’ is measurable.
Achievable: The company must be able to reach the stated goal. In other words, it must be ‘challenging and rewarding, but still within reach.’ Setting an unreachable goal can be disheartening and frustrating.
Relevant: The goal needs to relate to the function and purpose of the business. ‘Achieving world peace’ would not be a relevant goal. Kauffman says relevancy is ‘tied to current critical tasks and abilities of the team.’
Time Based: It needs to be achievable within an ‘agreed upon timeline’. Weeks, months, or years is a reasonable timeframe. Centuries are not.
Setting goals is not enough. There must be a concerted effort to strive for achieving them, measuring your progress along the way, until they are reached.
Interestingly, Entrepreneur magazine has suggested using what they call the five “W” questions to be used when creating a SMART goal in addition to the letters of the acronym. “Who is part of the goal? What exactly do you want to accomplish? Where is this goal going to take place and be achieved? When do you want to accomplish this goal? Why do you want to succeed with this goal?”
The “W” questions can help bring clarity to your construction of a SMART goal. Another key point in the creation of a goal is to put it in writing. Research by the magazine yielded results showing seventy-six percent of those who wrote down their goals achieved them. Overall, according to Entrepreneur, that is “33% higher than those who didn’t.”
From a marketing perspective, consider a simple goal being that of ‘increasing traffic to your website’. Using the SMART goal technique you would want to be more specific (S) and provide something that is measurable (M) like ‘increasing traffic by 50% before the end of the year.’
As a case in point, if you want to increase your website traffic by 50% before the end of the year and it is early December, it is doubtful your goal is achievable (A). If that is the situation, then you might want to consider lowering your growth percentage or changing your timeframe. Something like ‘increasing website traffic by 10% for the month of December.’
In the example above, relevancy (R) is not really a problem, but the key point with relevancy is that it does align with your overall business plan. Timeliness (T) establishes an outer bound of time, a specific deadline which you are trying to meet. So, your marketing SMART goal could end up being ‘to increase the traffic to our website by 10% for the month of December 2023.’
Once you have established your goal(s) and write them down, it is important that you also create or assign them to someone, or a team which is identified, who will be responsible for achieving that particular goal. Accountability is another important aspect of the process.
Finally, do not wait until the specific date when the goal is to be accomplished to monitor progress. Establish progress meetings to make everyone aware of how matters are progressing. Regular meetings have a tendency to not only keep everyone in the communication loop, they also provide an opportunity to discuss necessary changes or modifications to a goal, if something has impacted progress toward the goal.
Taking your business from its’ current condition to the next level of growth can be accomplished by using SMART goals.