As a business owner, you need to keep tabs on your progress in order to see your mistakes, correct them, and ensure that your journey is on the right track. Tracking your goals will also keep you motivated, gives you the drive to do better and to do more, and bring you closer to accomplishing your goals.
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Frameworks like SMART at personal level and OKR at organizational level are extremely helpful approaches:
Those tools help to ensure that your goals are clear and attainable. But there are a few other things that you should consider to ensure that you keep moving forward even when you are using those tools.
Ensure That Your Goals can be Quantified
An immeasurable goal will give no room for evaluation. It is important for your growth and progress that you set goals that you can quantify. This will foster clarity, and you won’t work in darkness, you know what you want to do, and you know how you want to do it. Then you won’t stray away from the focus. Therefore, you will be able to tell if your current progress is quick enough to achieve your goals or if you need to intensify your efforts.
Share Your Goals
As an entrepreneur, you are your own boss. You don’t have any superior to hold you accountable for anything or to penalize you when you are lagging. Hence you work at your pace, you are your own boss, you set all the rules, and you break them all. It is usually very helpful to “employ a boss.”
This means that you should find someone, maybe a fellow entrepreneur, maybe a friend, or family, that you should report yourself to, if it is a fellow business owner, even good. You check in on his progress, and the same is reciprocated to you.
This makes it possible to be accountable to each other, and this will eradicate laxity or laziness; knowing that you need to report to someone and impressing that person will require that you put in more effort to ensure that you do better than the last time, every time. It is commonly said that two heads are better than one.
This is entirely true in this case, and sharing your goals with someone who will work with you to identify your weaknesses and shortcoming is a great move.
It is important to share your goals and their progress with someone who will be honest with you. Family, friends, and employees may want to remain in your good books. Hence, they may just pamper you and not tell you the truth about your failures. The goal is to increase your drive and motivation, not to make you even more relaxed.
Appreciate Your Little Wins
You will get to several milestones if you have set objectives for your goal. If your goal is to get 10,000 new customers in a year, and you have only 4,000 in the sixth month, you will be tempted to scold yourself, beat yourself up, and will even want to return to the drawing board as fast as possible. You should calm yourself down. The fact that you have even set out to achieve a goal and you are working towards it is an extent of success.
Appreciate your efforts, even if you are behind schedule; appreciate the effort that got you 4,000 out of 5,000. Mark the 6th month as successful, reward yourself for a job well done. You have definitely spent money, time, and expended mental efforts. Therefore, taking a few minutes to celebrate these moments won’t hurt. In fact, they will give you a sense of calmness, and you will come back stronger, invigorated for the goal you have set, and you will be spurred to be better. Nobody can show you appreciation the way you will show yourself. Consider yourself important, celebrate your little wins, and they will lay a foundation for more.
tify your major customers as they are your source of income. In my business experience, I have learnt that “all customers are not equal” There will always be a bias and preferential treatment given to premium customers for being premium. Identify the customers that drive more sales for you; if your business is a B2B business, you may need to prioritize who to supply and who you need to remove from your supply chain.
Ensure that you aren’t judging these things with your personal bias. You may be too attached to a product or a customer to tell yourself the truth, work with a team, use facts and figures from the data you have employed; your opinion may be distorted, even without you knowing. Biases are normal for humans.
Read Next: OKR, SMART Goals.
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