Goal Setting For Business
Love it or hate it, goal setting is part of life and business. Whether we identify with the idea of resolutions or not, as business owners and entrepreneurs we’re always working towards an outcome, objective or goal. When it comes to goal setting for business, there’s a way that sets you up for failure and a way that primes you for having a breakthrough year.
Our mission is to help small business owners shift the way they run their marketing so that they can grow their businesses and still have a life. But, this framework work for everyone. If you stumbled onto our blog and aren’t an entrepreneur – you found the right blog!
In my opinion, the reason why goal setting is so triggering for people is that they’ve tried and failed (usually repeatedly). That’s fair. If you believe that goal setting at the beginning of a new year, a new month, or a new week is just setting yourself up for disappointment and failure, why would you? But, if you had a goal-setting process — a formula (we call it the ANGL method) — for achieving your goals with consistency, would that change things?
5 Goal-Setting Mistakes Smart Business Owners Make
Setting SMART Goals
SMART goals have been in use since 1981 and were developed as a way to make goals easier to understand. The problem with SMART goals is that they don’t account for personal growth and ambitious, long-term endeavours which are key ingredients to achieving game-changing results. And as business owners and entrepreneurs, that doesn’t work for us!
The SMART acronym (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely) has some useful fragments but they stop at “M”. Entrepreneurs and business owners are passionate, ambitious people and we need vision and purpose to get excited. Setting attainable, realistic, and timely goals just sets us up to play small.
In my experience, most entrepreneurs don’t operate that way. Set big, audacious goals that make you nervous and map out a framework for achieving those goals.
If you’re looking for a fail-proof plan for having a breakthrough year, we’ve got you. Join our free 5-day Breakthrough Year Bootcamp and walk away with a business blueprint for setting and getting your biggest goals this year.
Stepping on the Rake
Another goal-setting mistake business owners make is operating as if there’s a clear separation between goal setting for business and goal setting for life. As a small business owner, you’re in your business. Whether that’s as a visionary or as part of the day-to-day operations, you’re not sitting in a corporate office removed from the culture of what you’ve created.
That means that who you are as a leader, as a visionary, and as a person bleeds into your business and affects the outcomes. Stepping on the rake simply means, doing the same thing again and again without learning from it.
Establish a process for learning the lessons from the previous year and create a plan for how you’ll operate differently.
Wishlisting
You might not be familiar with the term “wishlisting” but you definitely know the concept. Wishlisting is the act of creating long (often arbitrary) lists of things you want (like a to-do list) and it’s insidious (like a to-do list).
When someone says “I don’t do resolutions”, it’s usually because they’ve been wishlisting their goals. These goal wishlists are often created without any consideration given to priorities, values, or capacity and generally have no actual plan attached to them.
Wishlisting also fails to identify the leverage points. Leverage points are those things on your list (to-do list, goal list, resolution list, etc) that have the biggest impact. They’re the needle movers. Without identifying what those are, you set yourself up to lose.
Failing to Celebrate the Wins
As much as we can learn lessons from our losses, we can also learn from our wins. Creating space to celebrate both business and personal wins as part of your goal-setting process can create opportunities you would have otherwise missed.
For example, when we build an ad campaign for a client, we are constantly evaluating and testing to see which ad creatives and copy are performing and which aren’t. When something works, we scale it, add budget and double down because we know that particular ad is producing results.
This same principle can be applied to your business and life during the goal-setting process. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we tend to be really good at looking at our failures.
* I see you, beating yourself up *
But we forget to look at what’s been working. The wins can do more than just make us feel good; they can show us where opportunities exist inside our organizations and help us find the leverage points.
Setting Outcome Goals
Strategy. Roadmaps. Blueprints. Step-by-step frameworks. That’s what we do. We run the same operating systems we’ve used to 4x our business in the last 3 years as we do to set our goals.
The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make with goal setting is not having a roadmap or a plan for achieving them. A game is only as good as its playbook and a goal is only as good as its roadmap. Goals should be actionable and based on factors within your control.
This single shift is the difference between finger-crossing and hoping for the best and predictable, positive results. When you set a goal that’s based on something that’s trackable (very different from measurable, by the way) it becomes easy to win.
SMART goal example:
“Grow my website traffic to 25K monthly visitors”
ANGL Goal example:
“Publish 1 piece of long-form content every week” or “pin 20 pins a day to my Pinterest boards for the next 20 weeks”
The SMART goal is measurable, sure, but it’s not trackable. You have no real control over your progress (how many people are visiting your website). By using the ANGL method and focusing on the actions that will impact the result you want instead of the outcome, you put yourself back in the driver’s seat.
To Long, Didn’t Read?
Here’s a quick and dirty list of the 5 mistakes business owners are making with goal setting:
- Setting SMART goals | instead of using the ANGL method to set goals that inspire bold action.
- Stepping on the rake | instead of mining the lessons from the past
- Wishlisting | instead of finding the leverage points
- Ignoring the wins | instead of amplifying what’s working
- Setting outcome goals | instead of gamifying the process
*Want to work with us on your content marketing strategy? Schedule a call to talk about how we can streamline your processes together!