How To Set Your Business Vision, Goals, and Objectives
The second blog in our series of keys to a successful business plan focuses upon goal and objective setting along with the vision which you envision for your company going forward.
First and foremost, make sure that your vision statement does not just parrot your mission statement! Your vision statement should detail what the future of your company would look like if the mission is accomplished. It’s a very common mistake to misstep and combine your vision and mission into one statement. Remember that the mission is about who you are (now), what you offer (now), how you offer it (now), and where you’d like to go. The vision statement, on the other hand, assumes you’ve gotten there. If you achieve the mission, who and what and where are you? That is a vision worth having, right?
We cannot stress enough how important it is to establish goals and objectives that you, your employees, and your clients clearly understand! Every goal and objective must show a specific result which can be easily tracked. An example would be increasing ROI (return on investment) by a stated percentage (let’s say 28%) over the course of a certain time frame (let’s say 3 years) determined by streamlining a particular process which will cut expenses by X percentage in that same 3 year time frame. That might look like this:
Goal: Increase our return on investment by 28% over the next three years through implementing more effective painting processes and technologies that will cut our labor cost by 40% over the same three years.
Your goals and objectives must be succinct! Provide guidelines for items such as employee performance, customer and supplier satisfaction, and marketing your business with targeted measures and standards.
When tracking your goals and objectives, each one must have quantifiable measures with no ambiguity. For example, to make the claim that your company is the “best” at a certain service, be sure to ask yourself: How can your potential clients measure how you are best at that particular service? To further clarify, if you are a technology company, you may state that your company provides a 30 day money back guarantee, if not satisfied, along with unlimited support of a specific service over the next 45 day period. To simply say you have the best customer service in the Tulsa is too ambiguous.
Knowing your goals and objectives and what your vision of the future looks like are necessary steps to designing a plan to get there. Now, we know our mission, our vision, our goals and objectives, and we’re ready to tackle the next steps in our plan. Stay tuned for part three!
Having trouble quantifying your goals and objectives….look no further, we can help!
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