Startup Planning Is Important…Here’s How to Create Quarterly Goals

Did you complete a startup planning process before you launched your business? Startup planning is very important, even if what you have is just a short list or chart based on your general goals. You need to be able to see where your company will be after at least the first year. And you need to see clearly how you’re going to get there. Your startup planning is all about how to build up during this first year so that you have a strong young company that is learning to stand on its own and hold its own.

Why You Need Startup Planning Goals

Building a startup is no easy task, as any entrepreneur knows. As an entrepreneur, you have to have those goals because this is what keeps you focused. Your goals are your concrete achievables that remind you where you are now and tell you what you need to do. They give you a sense of the distance you need to travel and the steps you need to take to get to where you want to be.

We all want to see past the first, rough, year and focus on the grand time when our business is shining bright. This usually doesn’t happen until year five or six, and it can be even longer than that. There is no better feeling than imagining your business thriving, having grown into the magnificent beast that you always dreamed it would be. But these are just dreams and will never be more than that if there are no solid steps taken.

If you want to reach these golden years, you need to keep your nose to the grindstone in year one. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of determined steps to go the distance. You need solid startup planning to know when and where to place the next building block – and even what to make them out of in the first place. If you don’t know these things well enough to make confident decisions for your business, the results can be disastrous. The concrete goals that you create during startup planning are what will bring you close to realizing your dreams, one solid step at a time.

Where Do I Start?

Do you want to cover X percentage of your startup costs in the first quarter? Do you want to pull in X amount of sales in the fourth? You need to get more detailed with your startup planning to get on track. Your one-year vision will guide you as you plan to structure your business in that first year. Now it’s time to take that vision and draw from it the blocks that will build it out as each quarter unfolds.

Take out your one-year vision statement and set it prominently in front of you. Read through it a few times, remembering what you were aiming for when you went through the process of creating it. This is where you will gather inspiration for this expanded startup planning session. The stuff of your vision is what will guide you in identifying a few specific goals that you should set for each quarter of the year ahead.

How to Create Your Quarterly Goals

Do you need help outlining your startup plan? Below you’ll find a simple template that you can use to translate your vision into more concrete goals. You can download it here and print it out for convenience. Following the chart is a guide to give you some idea of how to use this template to translate your vision into your startup planning goals.

Your Vision into Points

If you are working with a founding partner, talk about who is best suited to take the lead on this exercise. When you have a draft ready, go over it together to bounce ideas off of one another. This is one great advantage of having a partner because it helps you to see a different perspective. You can avoid negative conflict by designating a lead and come up with a better overall plan by having the co-founder evaluate it.

If you haven’t printed out your Startup Planning Quarterly Goals Template, you can do that now. Set it in front of you, next to your vision statement. Take the essence of your vision and create bullet points of what it represents. The bullet points should reflect the concrete elements of your vision that you are committed to making a reality. Put these action points for your first year into the top row of your template.

Click here and read the column to the end! Find out about 4 Big Goals- ensure your business stability.