Goals!!! I love setting goals. I love giving myself a challenge, and I encourage you to start setting goals for you and your business even without a storefront.
I use S.M.A.R.T. goals every month to keep my self focused and motivated, and as a team, we set S.M.A.R.T. goals to help all of us stay focused during the month. By nature, my team is competitive. We like to set challenging goals for ourselves and see which of us meets the most goals.
Of course, this is just us, racing each other to achieve the highest number of goals is not part of the S.M.A.R.T. goal process. It’s mainly just to have some fun each month while working hard to grow our business.
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For us, right now, my team consists of my mom, my sister, and I. We are all really close and by nature, very competitive. We love to goad each other about goals and slacking. We like to call it a little family bonding ;)!!
But I digress, the underlying importance is that each month we set S.M.A.R.T. goals for ourselves and our company. These goals provide us with guidance and direction for growing our business. So I keep using the buzz words S.M.A.R.T. goals, but what does that mean?! Well, let’s start by talking about why we need goals in our business even without a storefront.
Why Set Goals
Why do you want to set goals? We all want our business to grow, and that is great, but what does that mean. How do we want it to grow? Where do we want it to grow? The goal of growing a business does not have any real shape to it. It is more like a statement or an end focus. When you set up S.M.A.R.T. goals, you want to break this main goal into smaller, actionable goals.
These smaller, actionable goals will help propel you and your business to reach that bigger goal of growth even without a storefront. Setting goals gives you a plan-of-action. It gives you steps to take. It helps to motivate you to keep going. It helps to point you in the right direction towards your final goal of growth.
Big and small goals
Now, as I mentioned earlier, business growth is your larger end focus, but to get there, we break it down to smaller pieces. These smaller pieces are called our “big goals.” Yeah, I know it seems like an oxymoron, but keep reading. These big goals are also referred to as long term goals. Long term goals will allow you to shape your end focus and define your growth.
Long term goals are just that. How do you see your self in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? What will your business look like at each of these benchmarks? What will your role look like at each of these benchmarks? What do you want to happen at each of these benchmarks?
This is defining your long-term goals. Once you have your long-term goals, then you want to break those goals down into even smaller, more manageable short-term goals. These smaller goals will help you stay focused in your day-to-day activities in your business even without a storefront.
Here is an example of our this will work.
Final Goal- Business Growth
Long-term Goals: Have a storefront and run a seasonal food-truck.
Short-term Goals: Increase monthly sales by $1000, Growth social media following by 50
To reach your end goal of business growth, you will need to know what your long-term goals will be. Then you will need to break your long-term goals down even further into small, actionable goals. When you break your long-term goals, down into short- term goals, this is when you need to focus on creating S.M.A.R.T. goals.
Defining S.M.A.R.T. goals.
The S.M.A.R.T. part of S.M.A.R.T. goals is actually an acronym for creating your goals for your business. S.M.A.R.T. stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely. When you create a goal, you will want to create S.M.A.R.T. goals to help you keep yourself and your business focused even without a storefront.
You want to be as specific as possible with your goal to help you stay focused. You want the goal to be measurable so you can determine if your actions have made progress. You want it to be attainable. No one wants to put effort into something that cannot be done.
There is a difference between doing the impossible and chasing dreams and doing the impossible by chasing nothing. Relevance means that you want your efforts actually to move your company towards the final goal of growth, and timely means that you have added a time expectation for yourself and your goal.
Writing a specific goal
Because S.M.A.R.T. goals are short- term goals, they are smaller, more actionable goals. This means you can no longer leave them broad. Just like in the image above, as the blocks get smaller, we have to be more specific with our expectations.
Here is a goal that is not specific:
Get more viewers to my website in the next 30 days.
Here is a specific goal:
Grow my monthly viewers on my website by 100 views in the next 30 days.
As you can see, the second goal is giving specifics on how I want to meet my goal. I am specifically telling you that not only do I want to increase my number of viewers, but I want to grow them by a very precise number on a particular platform.
Writing a measurable goal
Next, you need to make sure your goals are measurable. No one wants to work hard on something only to discover there really is no measure to see how successful with actions are.
Sure, this may be enough to keep people motivated for small periods of time, but eventually, you will need something more tangible. If you never see the fruit of your hard work, you are going to give up easier. Instead of setting goals that can‘t be measured, think about how you can measure your goals.
Here is a goal that is not measurable:
Get more viewers to my website.
Here is a measurable goal:
Grow my monthly viewers on my website by 100 views in the next 30 days.
In the first goal, there is no defined measure. I just say I want to grow. To make this a S.M.A.R.T goal, I need to add the measurement of 100 views. This tells me exactly the number of viewers I need to grow my views to count this as a successful goal.
Writing attainable goals
Ok, I don’t know why this one tends to be so hard for people. I think it is because we want to succeed so bad in our business, but setting goals we could never attain is not going to help you.
So if you are a new company with a new website, it is unrealistic to think you can go your monthly viewers by 1 million in your first month. Now maybe some people have truly done this, but it is for a few. Don’t set yourself up for complete failure. By nature, humans want to win. If we only fail all the time, we eventually give up.
The point of setting goals is to challenge yourself and not to defeat yourself. So, do yourself and your business a favor and keep your goals realistic and attainable even without a storefront.
Here is a goal that is not attainable:
Get more 1 million new viewers to my website in 30 days.
Here is an attainable goal:
Grow my monthly viewers on my website by 100 views in the next 30 days.
In the first example, the goal is unrealistic unless I have come close to this in the past. Instead, make 1 million a long-term goal. Set up your short-term (S.M.A.R.T. goal) to be something more attainable like growing your viewers by 100.
Writing relevant goals
Relevant goals mean that the goals you set for yourself, your business, and your team members to move your company towards your end focus of overall business growth even without a storefront.
In other words, don’t waste time, money, and effort on goals that do not move the company towards growth.
Here is a goal that is not relevant:
Research how to raise gerbils.
Here is a relevant goal:
Grow my monthly viewers on my website by 100 views in the next 30 days.
Unless you are in the gerbil business or another closely related business, gerbils have no business being in your business. Your time is the most valuable assets you can give your business, don’t waste it on relevant goals.
Writing timely goals
I think most of us are probably procrastinators, and without an expiration on a goal, we will put it off as long as possible. Also, as entrepreneurs, we are pretty busy. Without a time factor, we do not give value to our goals.
By setting a time limit for our goal, we force ourselves to prioritize that goal in our schedule. We tell ourselves, “okay, I now have to stop procrastinating and make time to meet this goal because I now only have 5 days left to see it come to fruition.”
Here is a goal that is not timely:
Get more viewers to my website.
Here is a timely goal:
Grow my monthly viewers on my website by 100 views in the next 30 days.
In the first goal, we do not set up value and urgency. As entrepreneurs, we will see this goal as not important, but when we rewrite it into a S.M.A.R.T. goal by adding time, we tell ourselves that this goal is important. We tell ourselves that only is it important, but also we have a time limit, so chop chop.
Writing S.M.A.R.T. goals should not be a hard and tedious task. Instead, you should use S.M.A.R.T. goals as a way to stay focused and motivated to grow your business even without a storefront.
I want to challenge you this month to grab our FREE S.M.A.R.T. goals template here. Once you have the template, sit down and fill it out. Then work on meeting as many goals as possible. At the end of the month, see where you were with your goals.
As a matter of fact, I encourage you to do this every month. Set up a challenge and reward system for you and/or team. If you accomplish so many of the goals, then reward yourself. After a few months, you will be surprised by how productive you have been. Good luck out there 😁
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