5 blunt questions you should ask yourself before setting your small business goals

You have a dream. An idea perhaps.

You want to be a successful entrepreneur. Congratulations! And welcome to the club!

As you start your small business, people will tell you that you need to build a business plan, set some goals and objectives.

Now when I started off, just like many of you, I had an approach of “let’s just try my best, and see how it goes”. For a small business, that’s not so bad, is it? Turns out, that approach is not so great either.

Why is goal-setting important for your small business? Even when you're just starting out?

To answer that, let me start with a favorite quote of mine:

So simply put, having a sort-of idea about where you want to reach, has the following key advantages:

Provides you focus

When you start off as a small business owner, there seems a ton of things you can do, and you try to do everything, to get the results you want.

While it’s good to experiment and even fail, I learnt it the hard way that some of the things I did could have waited till later. When you have a goal, before you do anything, you can ask yourself if it’s really going to help you to get what you want.

Helps you manage time and priorities

Given the explanation above, this is self-explanatory, because as a small business owner you’re wearing many hats, have a lot of tasks, besides trying to juggle a personal life, and you only have 24 hours a day.

Gives you a measure of success

You can track as often as you want, where you are, compared to where you want to be! So you’re always moving forward.

Helps you manage others

If you have employees or partners, when the goal is clear, there is no confusion. You’re all on the same page about where to go, and all you can debate about is how to get there!

Now if you’re convinced you should have some sort of goals, just have to start setting them, you can Google “how to set goals for my business” and you will have about 300,000,000 results ;)

You will get plenty of valuable information about the actual process of setting goals. So that’s not just what this blog is about. It’s a bit more behind the scenes. About one factor that you know more about than any of those websites. YOU. Your dreams, motivation, and ambitions, and how that fits in with your goals.

And then, of course, this blog is about how to figure all that out!

So let’s get started with the 5 questions. Prepared to be brutally honest with yourself? Here goes then.

Q1. What is YOUR definition of success?

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