Each new year is traditionally a time of resolutions. It’s when you make a pact with yourself to do something you haven’t done before or do it better. These resolutions aren’t limited to our personal lives. Turning over the calendar is also a great time to reassess how your past year has gone for your business and what you’d like to improve upon in the coming year.
You may have made a list of business goals you meant to accomplish in 2021. Maybe you couldn’t address them because of the pandemic or the stress of running your business. Maybe you felt you didn’t have the time to focus on certain areas.
However, you can get a head start on your goals by committing to them now. Share them with us, and together we’ll discover the actions you can take to make sure you achieve those goals.
Ideas for Business Goals in 2022
We’ve recently looked at some topics that might be top-of-mind for you, including expanding your team and buying a building. Others you might want to focus on include:
- Developing and launching a new product or service
- Recruiting new members to your team
- Retaining key members of your team
- Implementing a hybrid workplace
- Improving your sales and marketing efforts so that they efficiently bring in more revenue
- Increasing sales to long-term customers and turning them into advocates of your products and services
- Improving your customer service
- Increasing your company’s visibility
- Preparing for supply chain disruption
- Streamlining your operations
Each of these has at least one thing in common: They require a committed, tactical approach to see them through. Let’s examine some of the processes you can follow to ensure you’re making progress on the goals that matter most to you.
Be Deliberate About Your Goals
What did you learn from 2021 and what do you want to improve upon in 2022? Don’t just say what you’re going to do. Write it down. Plan it out. Be methodical in considering why a project went off the rails last year and what you are going to do to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
You can see the overall scope of your goals as well as their intermediate steps and the tactics it takes to reach them by doing the following:
- Write down your long-term goals as small, manageable projects
- Stick to a timeline
By being methodical and attentive to the details, you:
- Keep yourself and your team on track
- Ensure you aren’t overwhelmed by any one task
It’s one thing to have goals and know that you’re going to take a deliberate approach. You must also identify the ones that are going to be most worth the effort.
Take a SMART Approach
Maybe you want to increase your revenue by a certain percentage by the end of the first quarter. How are you going to get there in that amount of time? Think of everything you would need to do and set them up as tasks.
Let’s assume you want to improve your marketing message so that your target audience takes notice. That requires you to understand your buyer personas, what drives them, how they typically solve the kinds of challenges you address, and where they prefer to be found.
Whatever you focus on, be SMART in your approach. That means focusing on the goals that are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Time-based
By setting SMART goals, you increase your likelihood of achieving the results you want to see in a specified amount of time.
Put the Right Tools in Place
All this talk about planning leads to a necessary conversation about the technology you need. Without the tools to organize your plan and track its progress, you’ll find it difficult to stay committed to any one goal. By using project management tools like Asana, Trello, and ClickUp, you will:
- Be more efficient. Everyone on your team will have one place where they can easily see the status of projects, review what needs to be done, and share their work.
- Easily communicate across teams. You can notify team members when they have a deliverable due, or you can ask for feedback. Team members can also talk to one another in real-time or leave messages and notes as they work separately.
- Have one source of truth for all documents. These include timelines and deliverables. You’ll have one online space to host and share all the official drafts and final versions of your project-related documents.
Here are some more of the online collaboration software tools you can use to stick to your goals and do it effectively. Augment them with virtual team workspaces like Confluence that empower you to collaborate from anywhere in one virtual space.
Flowchart programs like Gliffy are also valuable when you want to plan campaigns, develop products, and wireframe a new website.
Be Accountable
Work with someone who will help you stay on track. This can be a member of your team or a business coach. The tools you are using to make progress are also daily reminders of your need to be accountable to yourself and your business.
As we’ve seen, there is a lot you can work on over the next year to improve your business. The key to starting is to realize you are in control and that you don’t have to feel overwhelmed.
The arrival of a new year serves as a reminder of your challenges. It can also be a powerful motivator. Use that motivation to spur you to action.
Plan Your 2022 with ActionCOACH Tampa Bay
Regardless of the goals that you set for yourself and your business, you want to make sure they are the right goals. As you head into the new year, we will help you find, plan, and stick to the SMART goals that matter most to you and your business.
Give us a call at (727) 786-2900 or contact ActionCOACH Tampa Bay through our online form with your business challenges. Let’s start making your goals for 2022 a reality.