How to Set Smart Goals For Your Business

Woo! Thank you for joining me to learn about setting SMART goals for your business. First, let me start by saying something here. You clicked through to this blog post for a reason. My guess is that you decided to read this post because you:

a) Have no idea what SMART goals are… but you’re curious to find out how to use them, or
b) Sort of have an idea of what SMART goals are… but you haven’t used them before, or
c) Feel tired of setting goals and never achieving them

Regardless of what stage you’re at, I’m here to teach you how to set better goals for your business (and your life!) by showing you some simple goal-setting tricks.

What are SMART goals?

While I touched on them in this post about business mistakes to avoid but to recap, SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

Why are they important for business? Because they give us intentional goals that can be tracked, analyzed, improved upon, and understood by any person who would be so lucky as to see the inner workings of your business.

But before we dive into today’s lesson, let’s get real.

Before setting your goals, I want you to think about why you want a certain outcome (whether it be to make a million dollars, gain thousands of social media followers, or make your first sale).

Ask yourself the following questions:

• If nothing stood in your way, what would your dream business look like?
• How would this dream business change your life?
• What have you gone through or sacrificed already to make it this far? What are you willing to sacrifice some more?

Of course, these questions may not be easy to answer. Truth be told, I’m not here to give you easy answers.

I believe that to be authentic, we must be vulnerable.

So, I’ll go first:

• My dream business would be me working from home, with plenty of space to create my own schedule, workload and tasks.
• This dream business would give extra purpose to my life.
• I’ve spent countless hours perfecting this vision. But I would do it all over again. Sleep is for the weak, anyway.

Why was that exercise necessary? Because it’s crucial to understand why you’re setting goals. If your dream is to work from home, would you set a goal to open & run 3 stores in 3 different cities? By keeping this dream vision at the forefront of your mind, you will prioritize the goals that bring you closer to your vision.

So let’s dive into the content!

Smart goals in action

In this section, I’m going to show you an example of how to set (and how not to set) SMART goals.

First, here is a NOT-SO SMART goal: I want to OWN social media.

Problems with this goal:

• What does the word “own” even mean? You want to literally own social media?

• Which social media accounts are you talking about owning? Just Facebook or do you want to purchase Twitter and Pinterest, too?

• When would you like to acquire the rights to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest?

• I could go on but you’re probably starting to see how ridiculous this goal sounds when you deconstruct it

Now here is the SMART version of that same goal: I want to gain 30 Twitter followers between May 1 to May 30.

HOW IS THAT GOAL SMART?

• Outlines a specific task. I want to increase my Twitter followers.

• Possesses potential for measurable results. At the end of the 30 days, I will be able to count how many followers I gained.

• Sets out an attainable goal. That works out to be 1 Twitter follower a day – totally doable for anyone.

• Maintains realistic expectations. Twitter is a platform that is designed to gain followers. This would be a different story if perhaps I said I wanted to sell 30 used cars on Twitter in 30 days.

• Has a timeline for completion. There is a set time frame, and it even includes dates for extra motivation! I know that starting on May 1, I have to hustle to get my 1 daily follower.