Mastering the Art of SMARTER Goals for Exceptional Business Outcomes

Ever wondered how to magnify the impact of your goals and turn them into the engines of your business's growth?  Celebrate with me as we mark the vital leap from entrepreneur to employer, and learn how the enhanced SMARTER framework—adding motivation and contextual relevance—can revolutionize your objectives. 

We'll break down the importance of crafting goals with precision and the necessity of having measurable outcomes, all while ensuring these targets align with your business's overarching storyline. Get ready to reflect on your past wins, set your sights on new horizons, and lay out the stepping stones for a thriving business narrative.

Buckle up for a journey into the world of strategic planning as I highlight the merits of crafting SMART goals that balance both personal and professional development. With a nod to the consistency of our weekly episodes and the invaluable input from you, our listeners, I extend a heartfelt invitation to spread the secret sauce of goal setting. 

Share this episode with fellow founders, entrepreneurs, and CEOs to empower them on their journey of business expansion. Tune in for a treasure trove of actionable advice peppered with relatable stories, all aimed at guiding you to your aspirations for the coming year. 

Let’s kickstart this goal-setting adventure and transform aspirations into tangible achievements.

As a business coach, there are 6 critical mistakes that I see founders and business owners make.

If you nod in agonized agreement to the points below, you’re in a prison cell that many entrepreneurs the world over find themselves in:

• Working endless hours without scaling new heights...
• Working harder to make even less...
• Lying awake, agonizing about your superior competitors...
• Spending more time doused in frustration than sipping the champagne of success...
• Always on the hunt for fresh strategies and new customers...
• Drowning in staff issues when you’d rather focus on business growth…

To help you overcome these 6 critical mistakes, I have written the Six Silver Bullets e-book to guide you through the process. Implementing these Six Silver Bullets are Six Surprisingly Simple and Effective Strategies Smart Entrepreneurs Use to Gain Control of Their Time, Team, and Money and Grow Their Business Profits Fast!

This eBook isn’t just another business manual. It’s your ticket to scaling peaks you’ve only dreamt of. Implementing these strategies isn't optional—it’s a must.

Download your FREE copy today!

https://hub.scaleocityworks.com/ebook

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Employer Podcast. I am your host, brian Montez, founder of Scalosity Works and the Entrepreneur to Employer Coaching and Membership Community. So congratulations is in order. If you've built a successful freelance business that has grown to the point where you need to hire, you have achieved a huge milestone. And if you're already past the point of making your first hire and your team is now growing well, congratulations is in order to you as well. So, regardless of where you are with scaling your team and your business, whether you're at employee number one or employee number 100, this podcast focuses on everything related to people operations. We'll cover best practices, strategies and solutions to help you build a sustainable and scalable business that is fueled by great people and a great culture. So if you're enjoying listening to this Entrepreneur to Employer podcast, please subscribe, give us a like and give us a review. Your feedback will help us grow this podcast and we'll be able to positively impact more employers to help them build better work environments. Welcome back to another episode of the Entrepreneur to Employer podcast. It's hard to believe, as of this recording date, it is December 16th.

Speaker 1: 1:14

2023 is slowly coming to an end, so I hope you all had a great year. Hope you hit your goals and hope you all saw some progress in your businesses. As we get ready to go into 2024, it's that time to start thinking about your strategic plans for 2024 and how you're going to continue growing your business. Today, we're going to talk about five ways to set smarter goals for yourself in 2024. I want to give you some tips to help set targets and hopefully give you some ways to achieve your goals in 2024. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 1:48

I'm sure you're already familiar with smart goals framework smart being the acronym. I like smart goals because it breaks it down into a framework that we can follow when establishing goals and milestones. What are we trying to achieve? We want our goals to be specific, we want to be measurable, we want them to be actionable, we want them to be realistic and we want them to be time bound. Our goals are not time bound and have some type of deadline or due date. They are not a goal, but for some odd reason, your goals don't always excite you and I am the same way right and you may even find that you're not even taking action on tasks related to the goals. I think we can all relate to that. But if this is the case for you, you may just need to adjust your viewpoint, and that's where a smarter goal comes into play. Adding a contextual aspect to your goals can help you, inspire and motivate you to breathe life into those old goals or simply change your work approach. So here's some tips that I'm going to give you to hopefully help you achieve your goals in 2024. And, of course, you're going to have to modify and you're going to have to make them work for you. So this is some suggestions, and then how you apply them to your business and your life will be up to you.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Number one make sure your goal is specific. Right, tied it to the smart goal. Your goal must be specific in order for you to accomplish it. Make it also a smarter goal. Saying that you want to increase revenue in your business is a good start, but stating you want to increase your total number of customers in order to increase revenue is better. What about your goal is uniquely specific to you, your business and your current circumstances? The rest is sure.

Speaker 1: 3:18

This isn't meant to be judgmental, but rather an educational exercise for you to place your new goals in context with your business's past, present and future. So take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Think about the past few years in your business. Then switch things up and think about where you want to be in your business in a few years from now. How will your goal act as a stepping stone for you and your business? How will working on this goal change your attitude and approach? How will it influence how you show up to work every day? Your goal is no longer a solitary goal, but it's part of your bigger business plan. This very well may be the inspiration you need to show how your goal will help you achieve that move into the future. Make your goals smarter. Get more granular. Get more specific about the goal so that goal actually moves you forward, instead of saying I want to grow revenue, that's great, that's a good goal, but how are you going to grow revenue? I'm going to add 15 new customers per month at X amount of dollars per customer. Get specific. Make the goal smart.

Speaker 1: 4:19

Second, make sure your goal is measurable. Your goal must be a quantifiable amount so you can track your progress during the year. Stating get more new customers by the end of the year is way too vague, while gain 20,000 new customers by the end of the year has a specific unit of measurement to it. Make it smarter. It's common to think of quantifiable amounts as units sold, dollars made or number of clients, but why not add an inspirational quality of measurement to your goal as well? What's something you'd like to improve upon in your overall business operation? Satisfied return customers, increasing average lifetime of customers, glowing testimonials from first-time customers, referral from every customer. Think about measuring these items quantifiably as well, through surveys, polls, questionnaires or exit interviews. How many satisfied customers do you want? How many top-notch referrals would you like? It's certainly worth considering, and each of these can actually add revenue to your business.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Third, make sure your goal is actionable. You must be able to physically work towards your goal. Typically, actionable goals are compromised of small tasks that can be completed throughout the year. If you want to increase communication and teamwork in your business, hold weekly team meetings on Mondays. That would be a much more suitable choice than saying I'm just going to talk with my team. Continue to make everything smarter. What's the smallest action you can take every single day to help you reach your goal? Think about ways you can chunk down larger goals into smaller daily tasks. This is the first step, by tackling larger issues and concerns and breaking it down. Taking small actions daily will quickly compound over time. The power of compounding is how you grow your business. For instance, every day you could write down an issue you've personally observed or recorded concerning something that is voiced by a team member. These notations will serve as the basis of your weekly team meetings. It will also serve as the basis for you to drive continuous improvement in your business.

Speaker 1: 6:20

Next, make sure your goal is realistic. Your goal should follow the universal laws of physics, time and space. You must be able to physically be capable of working towards that goal. People handily addressing packaging and mailing out 1,000 samples in one day is not realistic. The same task is more realistic for a team of 20 people. So again, you have to make the task and the goal and the outcome smarter. The thought of making a goal more real makes you yarn with boredom.

Speaker 1: 6:50

How about adding a tangible aspect to your work? Consider including a physical or a visible or a hands-on trigger to show you how progress is being made. Can you mark up a chart? Can you strike out some days on a calendar? Can you drop marbles into a container? Can you make notes in a notebook or simply state out loud that you finish a timely task. When it comes to manufacturing operations, one of the ways we are very visual is that we put up a chart on the production floor that states how many days they've gone without an accident. And every day that they go without an accident, that number increases 20, 21, 22, 23. So every single day, that team can see that they are progressing and getting more days under their belt without having an accident on the floor. Visuals are extremely powerful when making your goals smart.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Last but not least, make sure your goal is time-bound. You need a goal that has a set time limit or a deadline. If you don't set a time limit or a deadline for your goal, it's just going to go on into the future with no real end in sight. You need to have some sort of container so you can stay motivated, you can stay focused and you can devote your time and energy work towards a due date. How do you about making this smarter? You've most likely set a date-based deadline for your goal, but what about a deadline time? In most goals, it's assumed the goal will be reached by the end of the day around midnight. Why not set a deadline time for yourself, when you'll actually be awake. I like to set deadlines of. I'm going to get this done by Thursday by 1pm. Set a time so that you're actually working towards not only a date but a timeframe. What's more, you can place the deadline on your calendar as a live event. You can actually look forward to it, count down and then celebrate the successful completion of that goal.

Speaker 1: 8:32

I hope you've enjoyed this episode where we've talked about how to improve your smart goals for 2024 and make them even smarter with more detail, with getting more granular in the goal and looking at what you can do each and every day to break down that goal and do a little bit towards the compound, towards the end. Very excited as we headed into 2024 and I hope you all have your business goals and your strategic plans ready for the 2024 year and you plan on making it a great year. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Entry into Employer podcast. If you have, I would love for you to subscribe to the podcast.

Speaker 1: 9:06

We do drop an episode every week. Give us an interview. I do read every single review and I do appreciate the feedback and we use it in every episode better and, last but not least, if you got value out of this episode and you think somebody else would learn something from this episode? Grab the link to the show, text it over to them and say hey, I just listened to this episode on how to make my smart goals for 2024 even smarter. I think you'd enjoy this episode. The more you share the interview to employer podcast, the more founders, entrepreneurs and CEOs we can reach and help grow their businesses. Make it a great week and we will talk to you next week.