Happy 2017! With the start of a new year, now is your chance to bring your goals into focus. Start defining clear business aims now, and meet your new-year targets with our 7 Steps to Epic Goal Setting for 2017.
1. Stay Loose!
Draft some quick bullet points, spitball with colleagues, or just jot ideas down on a notepad. Whatever you do, keep your goal setting informal. Try not to overanalyze: you can always save the spreadsheets for later.
2. Narrow Your Focus
Dream big and capture your every whim, just make sure you can narrow your focus to three major goals. Anything beyond three goals is unlikely to get done. A few sub-areas and points are fine, but do your best to narrow it down and avoid creating one of those dreaded, too-long to-do lists. And don’t forget to consider when you want to achieve these goals. Get specific and put deadlines on each of your goals.
3. Find Role Models
Look for businesses in your industry that are a year or two ahead of yours. Read interviews with their founders, and research their marketing strategies. Figure out what they did—so you can do it too, then set your goals against their earlier benchmarks.
4. Aim High
Stretch the possibilities of your business. Pick a point to start, but aim high. You’re going to want to think about your history: what worked? What didn’t? Pick out the best, most strategic ways to move up with minimal friction.
5. Stay Accountable
Goals don’t work if we keep them to ourselves, so share them around! Make your goals public and others will keep you accountable. For fairness sake, here’s some of BLANKSLATE’s goals: 1) Start a podcast by Feb/17, 2) extend our client network by 50% by Jun/17, and 3) have 4 clients refer us to 8 new clients by Jul/17.
6. Keep, Stop, Replace
Mitchell Harper at Seeking Wisdom offers a simple way to set goals with his Keep/Stop/Replace method. He advises looking at each habit you perform, and choosing one of three options:
Keep: Do I want to keep this action for my business?
Stop: Do I want to stop this action?
Replace: Do I want to replace this action with a new one?
7. Goal Setting: Enjoy the Journey
Have you ever heard the saying, “The years are short, but the days are long”? It’s easy to make broad sweeping goals for the year, then lose your focus once the days begin. That’s why rather than focusing on the numbers at the end of your goal, we’ve found the best way to achieve goals is to focus on the daily tasks. Keep the numbers in the back of your mind for sure, but remember to give yourself a breaks along the way.