Reviewing the Past/Planning the Future with SMART Goals
It’s the almost the New Year and the perfect time to review what you accomplished in 2021 and plan your goals for 2022. Look at the goals you set this year and see how you did compared to what you hoped would occur. 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 2022 goals.
When determining what you want to accomplish, 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: Relevant - Is the goal you are setting relevant to your meaning it’s going to impact your business? It should not be something that could be considered a side job or a hobby that’s not a core service of your company. This does not mean you can’t add a new service or product that could enhance the company. But if it’s something that’s not really related to the business and its success, you wouldn’t want to consider that as a goal.
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 saying you 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 target. 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 by 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 and reviewing how you actually did compared to how you wanted to do can help you determine your goals for 2022. And when determining your objectives, I hope you set SMART goals.
