Remember the time that you had all those amazing plans to get your house in top shape before your family came over for the holidays, or all the plans to eliminate bad foods from your diet with the goal of losing a few pounds, or perhaps, just like us, plans to create amazing video content in order to build more awareness, build more trust, drive in more business, and become local celebrities in the marketplace. Do you also remember when those plans fell apart because of something else became the priority? We learn over time and experience that the reasons we don’t create any momentum with our amazing ideas is because we lack proper goal creating and tracking.

Importance of Setting Goals

When setting goals, you must keep them realistic and very specific. If you wish to achieve a certain profitability target, you should know how profitable you want it to be, when do you expect to reach that target, and whether you have the required resources to achieve it. An example of setting a goal is “by the end of this year, December 31st, I will have twice as more clients than I have today and have a 15% profit margin, including tax reductions”. 

Setting goals also helps you measure your success. When you look at yourself and the business five years later, you’ll know whether you’ve improved, downgraded or stayed the same. It also helps you engage with your employees and keep them on the same page as yourself. This way, they are motivated to work harder and more efficiently because they know if you achieve the target, they’ll be greatly rewarded at the end.

Take some time off and analyze the state of your business from a broader perspective. You’ll come back confident and will be ready to help your business fly. 

In Regards to Setting Business Goals, keep these things in mind..

1. Department wise: no matter what kind of business you run, you’re bound to hire a few people in different areas of expertise. You’ll have a finance department, marketing, sales etc. What’s important is that you assign goals and objectives to each department accordingly. 

2. The marketers must bring in a certain amount of leads every month. The sales department shall make sure they provide the right service to everyone and as a result, get you the profit numbers you’re looking for. High customer satisfaction is key, so make sure you’ve got polite and courteous people helping the customers. 

3. Commitment is key: often people set goals but get demotivated midway and as a result, fail to achieve those easy goals. This is why when you set a goal, make sure you go far enough to see the end of it. Stop doubting your decisions and delaying your tasks. Enjoy every step and learn from your mistakes.  

4. Go Public: going public with your goals can be very motivating. You’ll know that there are people keeping an eye on you and you must fulfill their expectations if you wish to maintain your reputation. However, it is totally up to you how much of your goals you want to make public; after all, not everything going inside a business must be let out. 

Tracking your goals

Tracking goals may be just as or even more important than setting them. What’s the point of setting goals if you’re not tracking them along the way? Tracking your progress from start to end is motivating, reassuring and highly beneficial. When you track your diet, you know when and what you can and cannot eat.

Tracking your business goals works very similarly. Whenever you track your moves, you can always find room for improvement. You can work on the shortcomings in the future, save time and be more productive. 

Below are 6 simple steps to keep in mind when effectively setting and tracking your goals for anything.

1. Effectively track your goals. One of the most common reasons that people don’t get to accomplish their goals is that we tend to get distracted, and we lose track of important things that need to be done consistently in order to move forward towards our goals. Maybe you have set a perfectly achievable goal and planned every detailed step, but without effectively tracking your goal and knowing your progress, most certainly you will get discouraged when the first obstacle gets in the way and end up giving up on your goal eventually.

2. Discipline yourself to keep on track to really achieve any goal that is worthwhile until it’s accomplished. One of the most effective way to remain disciplined and aligned is to get accountability from a family member, co-worker, a friend, or a coach to keep you on task and dedicated to your goals. If you are more into doing yourself, a good way to remain disciplined is rewarding yourself for accomplishing small goals along the way. For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you can reward yourself with an item or lunch for ever set of pounds you lose. Not the best example, but you get the idea.

3. Review your goals regularly, preferably daily. Keep yourself constantly reminded of your goals by reviewing them at a specific time each day. It can be in the morning, first thing after you get out of the bed. It can be at night just before you go to sleep. Write down all your goals in a notebook, or store them in a computer software. When you review them, envision how accomplishing that goal will make you feel.Check your current progress, understand what you did to move it forward, find out what else you still need to do. By doing this regularly, you train your mind to become alert to things that are related to your goals, and gradually your mind will automatically guide you to do whatever needed to achieve them.

4. Break down a goal into actionable steps. Many people tend to easily get overwhelmed by all the things they need to do to accomplish a goal. The trick is to break down a bigger goal into smaller actionable steps. For example, say your goal is to start your own business. There are many things you will need to do. But before spending too much time on thinking about how difficult or time consuming they will be, first break things down a bit. For instance, obviously first few steps towards your goal could be: decide an overall direction or business model, find a right product/service to sell, list requirements to make this product/service work, etc. If any of these steps still looks big, break it down further. Once you break it down to doable steps, all you need to focus on is just one small step. As long as you keep doing these small steps, the completion of the goal will take care of itself.

5. Break down a goal into quantifiable results. Find a measurable aspect of your goal, and write it down as a number. For example, your goal could be to lose weight, then the number is your body weight. If you want to finish reading or studying a book, the number is the number of pages to read. If your goal is to save money for a dream vocation, the number is the amount of money you put in a bank account. As long as you know what this number is, you will always know your progress. All that’s left is just to keep doing things that help you move that number closer to your goal’s end result, and stop doing what doesn’t change the number.

6. Track a goal by the amount of time you spend on it. There are certain kind of goals that can’t be easily broken down to definitive steps. It is often difficult to find any obvious measurable aspects for their end result. They can be goals, such as, stay in shape, have a peaceful mind, become more fluent in a foreign language, etc. For this type of goals, you can try tracking the amount of time you spend on doing things required by them. For instance, to stay in shape, track how many hours you work out per week. For having a peaceful mind, track how much time you spend meditating, or doing yoga per day. For becoming fluent in a foreign language, track how much time you spend practicing speaking the language per day. So on and so forth.

Need any help?. 

If you are ready to take your business to the next level with video and video marketing, check out our video masterclass that will give you knowledge about video marketing, teach you how to create, produce, implement, and distribute video content, and help keep you accountable with all your social media and video content goals.

You learn more about our Alimond Academy here.