It’s the New Year and the perfect time to review what you accomplished for 2016 and plan your goals for 2017. Look at the goals you set for 2016 and see how you did compares to what you hoped to do. There are multiple factors you can review. Did you increase your customer base by the number/percentage you planned to reach? Did your net profit increase over the previous year? See what you did well and some things you want to improve to help set your 2017 goals.
When determining what you want to accomplish in 2017, it’s helpful to use the acronym SMART to set your goals.
- S: Specific – When planning what you want to do, it’s important to not be vague such as I want to increase the number of customers served or raising net profit. How will you know if you reach your goal? Instead, state how many customers you want to serve or how much of an increase you want in profit (either dollars or percent over the prior year(s)). Who will be involved in attaining the goals, and why do you want to meet these objectives?
- M: Measurable – Ruth Henderson is quoted as having said, “What gets measured gets done.” If you want to reach your goal, you must track how you are doing. How will you know you have attained your objective? Determine how you’ll measure your success and look at your goals often to see if you are making progress.
- A: Attainable – It’s important to set a stretch goal that isn’t easy to accomplish to drive you toward success. But if you make it so big that it’s not feasible, you’ll set yourself up for disappointment. Plan the steps you’ll need to do to reach your goal and determine how to implement them so to make sure what you set as the objective can, in fact, be reached.
- R: Realistic – Is the goal you are setting something you really want to do? Will you work hard to accomplish it? If you set a goal to increase your clients but you are not willing to go to networking events or business meetings that allow you to develop relationships, is it realistic to assume your website and/or social media will bring them in the door? Set goals that require steps to accomplish them that you are willing to do to accomplish what you hope.
- T: Time-Based – Set a period (or periods) of time to use as a yardstick to measure your success. Are you setting your goals on a weekly/monthly/quarterly/annual basis? Just saying I want to increase sales, but not giving a time period to compare isn’t helpful. But I want to increase sales 5% in the first quarter of the year is something that can be looked at to make sure you are hitting your goals. If setting up a goal for the year, break it down into smaller pieces so that if you aren’t on track, you can make changes early enough to affect the results at the end of the year. For instance, if you want to increase sales 15% by year-end, that is an average of 1.25% each month. If you look at your progress after the first quarter, hopefully, you are about 3.75% of the way there. If not, what can you do to affect your results?
Using your financial reports from 2016 and comparing how you actually did compares to how you wanted to do can help you determine your goals for 2017. And when determining your 2017 objectives, I hope you set SMART goals.
