Gemma Hart works remotely from as many coffee shops as she can find. Since graduating many moons ago, Gemma has gained experience in a number of HR roles but now turns her focus towards growing her personal brand and connecting with leading experts in productivity and professional growth. Connect with her on Twitter: @GemmaHartTweets.
In order for your business to grow, you need to have goals.
Perhaps you want to hire another 5 people by the end of the year, or you want to reach that next financial milestone. Whatever your aspirations are, setting goals is a great way to work towards what you want.
Growing a business takes a lot of work. You might feel like you’re balancing everything at once. You know your business needs to grow, but you don’t know how to make it happen, let alone find the time! We get it. Setting business goals is one thing but achieving them is another.
Thankfully, it is more than possible to achieve your business goals – you just need the right tools!
In this article, we are going to share how you can reach your business goals fast.
Choose a Great Goal Tracking Software
To grow your business and achieve goals fast, your employees need to be on board. They need to know what tasks they are responsible for and how they can drive success.
Staples surveyed 300 small businesses to find that 80% fail to track their business goals – while 77% fail to reach their vision. Setting clear objectives, expectations, and updates about ongoing projects is a great way to ensure everyone is on the same page. This is where goal tracking software comes in useful!
ClickUp is one of the best goal tracking apps available. It lets you manage all your business goals, projects, and teams in one place. With everything from chat features and to-do lists to virtual team management and progress tracking, there is no faster way to reach your business goals.
With ClickUp, there is no need to switch between platforms, open multiple calendars, or log in to numerous apps. ClickUp is a one-stop app for all your organizational needs. Plan and create custom views, tasks, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, timelines, goals, and more to ensure you stay on track to meet your goals!
Work from one organized dashboard on your own or with a team. Calendars and reminders can be synced across the app, ensuring everyone is up to date and on track with their assigned tasks. It’s the perfect way to communicate, organize, and reach your goals company-wide.
What’s more, you can also import other work from existing apps so that you have everything you need in one place. ClickUp is the perfect goal-setting app. It’s time-saving, user-friendly, and more productive than ever.
Set SMART Goals
Goal setting is one of the most important things you can do when starting a business.
Setting goals helps you work towards specific targets such as, increasing profits, building brand authority, improving employee retention, and staying on track for long-term business development. Without set goals, you might find that your business lacks direction and focus. We recommend setting SMART goals:
Specific: it is important to be specific! Vague goals aren’t useful for anyone, and they certainly aren’t helpful for driving effective business growth. So, when you set goals for your business, make sure to be as specific as possible.
Measurable: you must be able to measure your goals. We cannot emphasize this point enough. For example: send 50 sales emails or produce 2-3 pieces of content per week. These are all measurable goals that can be tracked and improved upon.
Attainable: sometimes, setting goals can be unmotivating. It might sound counterproductive, but it’s true. And the reason for this is that many people set unattainable goals. If you want to grow your business fast, make sure your goals are attainable. While it’s great to shoot for the stars and have a huge vision for your business, in order to get there, you need short-term goals that are more within reach. This will also help you achieve those quick wins that keep everyone motivated and momentum going.
Relevant: make sure your goals align with your wider business plan and that they are goals worth working towards currently.
Time-based: often, planning meetings happen, goals are set, and then nothing happens. If you want your business to grow fast, you need to get to work. One of the best ways to stay motivated and achieve your business goals is to make them time-based. This helps you meet deadlines more effectively and reach those goals faster than you might have done otherwise.
Break Down Your Goals
Now that you have an outline to work from with SMART goals, it is time to break your goals down into manageable action steps. This can take time and a little extra effort but trust us when we say that it’s worth it in the long run.
A good way to break down your business goals is to create a detailed action plan and/or an executive summary template that includes each of your business goals and the individual steps required to complete them. We like to think of this stage as outlining the baby steps. Sometimes, all it takes to grow your business quickly is to make a little bit of progress every day. Even small, daily accomplishments can make a big difference.
ClickUp lets you visualize your goal progress in a way that works for you.
Track your progress by grouping goals into folders and tracking progress visually via percentage markers. Or create numerical targets, such as “Write 5 blog posts this week” and ClickUp will arrange the goals into numerical targets for easy tracking and organization.
And to keep things super simple, you can use True/False goal tracking where users can click True/False next to various tasks that let others know whether a venue has been paid for or flyers have been made.
Its visual organization at its best!
If you want a simple way to sync all your tasks and work towards your business goals effectively, there is no better app than ClickUp.
Teamwork is the dream work, as the saying goes. But with ClickUp, it’s so easy to sync tasks and collaborate, that working as a team really is the dream!
Commit to Your Goals
Effective goal setting requires commitment and dedication. You can’t just set goals and then not work to achieve them. We recommend involving as many people from your team as possible.
This way, you can delegate specific tasks to specific people and commit to seeing the goal completed as a team.
Seek Out Accountability and Support
A growing business requires you to hire employees, gain customers, manage stock, and take charge of numerous other responsibilities.
For many people, there are times where this can all feel very overwhelming. So, seeking out accountability and support can be extremely helpful.
“We all can find a million excuses to not do what you say you’re going to so […] an accountability partner keeps you on track and helps you move your business forward,” says Galindo, Entrepreneur. Having a mentor, friend, or family member on board can help you stay motivated and focused.
As you can see from the dashboard above, ClickUp offers a great way to visualize goal tracking and keep up to date with the progress of employees. In large companies, it can be difficult to keep up with various teams, let alone individual employees.
Are they meeting their weekly goals? Are they pulling their weight? Is there anything they need help with?
ClickUp lets business owners and managers see the progress of their employees. Not only is this helpful for reaching goals fast, but it also improves accountability and allows managers to allocate tasks and offer help as is required. Whether your team is fully remote or office-based, the ClickUp dashboard is the perfect place to keep your team together and ensure everyone is working towards the same goal.
Re-evaluate Goals and Objectives Regularly
Often, when you have ticked off your first business goals it can be tempting to sit back and relax. But this is the best time to re-evaluate what you have achieved, see what worked well and what didn’t, and update your goals to ensure continued progression.
Regularly challenging and improving your business objectives in this way will ensure your business stays competitive, flexible to the needs of the consumer, and keeps climbing the ladder of success.
ClickUp’s weekly scorecards (shown above) are an easy way to view goal progress. Each scorecard offers data visualization in percentage form that quickly and easily highlights how much progress has been made on a specific goal each week. It’s clear, concise, and a satisfying way to measure the progress of your team!
Set Daily Goals
When you are running a business, it can be easy to get caught up in the busyness of it all and move into survival mode in order to get everything done. This isn’t always the most effective way of working and it can mean that your goals get pushed to the sidelines.
Setting goals for every day is a great way to stay focused, productive, and motivated to get things done. Daily goal setting helps your teams prioritize the tasks that need to be done. There’s no room for putting things off or delaying tricky tasks to the end of the week. With daily goal setting, big company goals can be broken down into small, achievable goals for each day. By committing to these small goals, you reach your bigger goals faster!
With ClickUp, you can create dashboard folders to track sprint cycles, weekly employee scorecards, and numerous team goals. Daily goals can be tracked by linking tasks to a goal. ClickUp will then automatically track your progress as each task is completed. This is a great way to set and track daily goals, monitor progress, and stay motivated and on track throughout the day.
Final Words
Running a successful business that steadily grows takes hard work and patience. Unfortunately, it just isn’t possible to achieve all your goals overnight. However, by setting attainable goals you can realize your dreams faster and achieve long-term growth and success. So, sign up with ClickUp today and take your productivity to the next level!