How to Set Goals in Your Business

Chances are, you’re not new to goal setting, even if the only experience you have with it is setting the ever-popular yet rarely successful New Year’s resolutions.

Even if your experience with goal setting hasn’t always delivered the life-changing results you’d hoped for, don’t let that discourage you from the possibilities goal setting offers.

All the evidence shows that, when done right, goal setting is a required activity if you want to have what you want to have in your life.

Aside from your personal goals, having goals specific to the growth and performance of your business will motivate you to action, keep you accountable, and warn you when you’ve gotten off track.

So, whether you’re just thinking about starting a business, already have a business that’s struggling, or just want your business to soar to even higher levels, here’s a blueprint for structuring goals that will help you build a business that makes you happy and makes you money.

When you set your goals, you’ll want to set them based on what you commit to doing over the next 90 days. 

90 days gives you enough time to accomplish a lot, but not so much time that you procrastinate because the deadline seems so far away.

Basically, there are four areas in which you should be setting goals: Money, Marketing, Products, and People.

Your goals will grow and expand from here, but let’s look at good starting points.

Money Goals

This one’s pretty straight-forward — How much money do you want to make?

But it’s not quite that easy to figure out.

Obviously, how much money you want to make today will be different than how much money you’ll want to make in a year or five years, and beyond.

The trick here is to be realistic, yet not too limiting.

And, often when you’re starting out, your answer is, “I don’t know, as much as I can,” because you really don’t know what a good number is.

If you have an amount you need to make, that’s a good place to start. 

If you need to pay the mortgage and certain bills from your business right out the gate, that number will become your initial money goal.

If you have a little more flexibility, start with how much your product or service costs and how many you’d like to sell per month. 

The number should be a little scary, but not something you can’t in a million years realistically imagine achieving over the next 90 days.

Marketing Goals

How are you going to sell your product or service?

The good news and the bad news is that there are a hundred different ways to market your business.

In the beginning, you’ll want to do them all and feel like you have to do them all to grow a successful business.

But in reality, that’s the quickest path to failure.

Don’t spread yourself or your money too thin.

Pick one or two ways you want to market your business in the beginning.

Maybe money is tight and you’ll choose to do a lot of in-person networking and referrals for your first marketing goals.

After you’ve mastered that and some money is coming in, having a website designed and doing some paid advertising may be the focus of your next goal setting period.

Start with what you can and want to do, and make all your goals around that marketing strategy.

If you’re doing networking for the next 90 days, set goals for how many groups you’ll join, how many people you’ll talk to each day, how many events you’ll attend each week, what kinds of things you’ll share with people about your business and how those conversations will go.

Product Goals

What products and services do you want to offer in your business?

Starting out, most people have one, and maybe that’s all you can imagine for now.

If you’re just going to focus on your one product or service over the next 90 days, that’s fine, just make your goals around how you’re going to improve upon that product or how you’ll package it for marketing, or how you’ll talk to people about it.

As you become a more experienced and savvy business owner, you’ll get new product ideas or find affiliate products you’ll want to sell.

If you offer a service, you’ll come up with ways to package that service and offer it to groups or as some type of a home study course.

Even if your goals focus on one product or service right now, maybe in the next 90 days you want to develop an outline for a second offering, or make a list a people in your market you’d like to do a joint venture with.

In other words, even if you aren’t rolling out something new over the next 90 days, you could have the beginnings of it in the works.

People Goals

Here’s something you may not fully understand yet.

Even though you are the sole owner of your own business and have no employees, you cannot, will not, and should not try to do this entrepreneurship thing on your own.

It doesn’t work.

Your people goals should be two-fold: Who do you want to connect with, and who do you want to hire.

First, who do you want to connect with?

This may be others in your market you admire, or have noticed are farther along than you and you’d like to see how you can help them in exchange for hanging out with them and soaking up some of their knowledge.

If may be a group of peers you want to meet up with virtually or in real life for support and brainstorming, or it may be a paid mastermind you want to join, or it could be as simple as reaching out to some of your LinkedIn connections.

Whatever the case, there should always be people on your radar who you’re looking to connect with for the mutual benefit of both of you.

Second, who do you want to hire?

And this doesn’t mean you have to bring on employees. You can go your whole business life just outsourcing to independent contractors and not having any employees.

Whatever the case, you want to be constantly looking at your business and figuring out what you could pay someone else to do so that you don’t have to do it.

Start with your weaknesses, what’s hard for you and what do you not enjoy doing? 

If you don’t like the tech side of your business (most of us don’t!) outsource all of your website, and landing page, and autoresponder, and setting anything up online duties to someone who gets great joy out of such activities.

Yes, those people do exist, and they can make your life SO much easier!

If you’re thinking it will be forever before you have enough money to do this, know that you can start small.

You can spend $100 having a VA do some busy work for you, or even $20 having someone on Fiverr create some graphics for you.

And if all of this is sounding foreign to you right now, don’t worry. Within your first 90 days it will all make sense and you’ll be excited at the possibility of paying someone to do these things for you.

Need Help?

As you likely know, one of the best ways to ensure your business success is to work with a mentor.

The experience your mentor brings to the table helps you set better goals, reach them faster, and readjust course when things aren’t going right.

Kids Party Characters owner Cheryl Jacobs has started 10 businesses, and successfully operates three of them today.

Because she started as a single mom with two young children and no resources, and had to work her way to success through trial and error, Cheryl has a soft spot for other moms who stay home with their children but would like to either create some extra income, or need to create some income to provide for their families.

Cheryl’s created a unique opportunity to have your very own membership to KidsPartyCharacters.com.

Membership basically hands you a business that you can start generating income with very quickly, without all the setup and struggles most business owners face.

With your KidsPartyCharacters.com membership, you’ll receive an exclusive territory in which to book parties, the right to use our 200 plus costumes, access to our casting director and acting coach, and business training and support from Cheryl and the team at Kids Party Characters.

If this seems like an opportunity that could be the answer to your entrepreneurial callings, or if you simply have more questions, book a call with Cheryl today and she’ll help you figure it all out. The call is free, there’s no pressure or sales pitch, it’s simply Cheryl’s way of extending a helping hand to fellow moms and entrepreneurs. 

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