How are you doing with your goals as an entrepreneur for 2023?
Soon it will be that time of the year again! For some, that means making resolutions for the coming year. As a business owner, you can also use the turn of the year as a good opportunity to reflect, evaluate the past year and draw conclusions for the new year.
Such a moment is always a great occasion to reflect on the goals you had set for this year as an entrepreneur. How far have you come! What was with it and what was against it? And what would you definitely like to accomplish in the new year? Or maybe you haven’t set any goals for yourself at all?
Setting goals is not popular with every entrepreneur because some find it exciting to put something on paper that they then have to work toward. Because what if you’re not going to make it?
But do you know that’s not the point at all! Because usually when you don’t achieve a goal, there’s a good reason for it and then you can just look back and learn from this again.
Write down your goals!
Now we assume that everyone thinks about an overall plan or goals for the upcoming period at some point. Some perhaps a little more concrete than others. There is no right or wrong, do what works for you.
It’s just that if you don’t write down goals, usually 1 year later you don’t remember what you had in mind in the first place and why. Therefore, we really advise you to take some time to think about your goals and plans and try to put that on paper. Then you get to put it away again and in a while you look at it again to see how far you’ve come!
Before you can set goals, it makes sense to think about the following questions:
- What do I want to achieve in the long term?
- Why do I want to achieve the goal?
- Who is involved?
- Where or how will I work on this goal?
- When do I want to achieve the goal and;
- When am I going to work on it?
Also consider whether you can break down a long-term goal into several short-term goals. This will keep you motivated as you achieve several small successes along the way. A short-term goal can be achieved within the next 3 months and is concrete and clear.Often you can’t formulate a long-term goal very concretely because it is an ideal you want to achieve sometime in the next 5 years.
Objective – SMART
To make achieving your goals even easier, it is wise to formulate them SMART. The objective is specific, measurable, acceptable, relevantand time-bound. With this technique, it is a lot simpler to achieve goals because you know exactly what you are working toward and how to check if you have achieved the goal. Moreover, these goals are then relevant and attainable for you, so you stay motivated and can check after a certain time how far you have come and what still needs to be done.
Evaluating yourself
As mentioned earlier, it is important that you write down and visualize both the long-term goal and the short-term goals. When you are fully motivated, create a journal or log. A journal is a great tool for visualizing and achieving your goals and accomplishments. You can write down every day, every week, every month or every quarter what you accomplished, how satisfied you were with your work, whether you did enough to achieve your goals and how you dealt with obstacles. Then you can reflect on what you would like to do better, what didn’t work out so well and which goals may have been easy for you and which were difficult to achieve.
Just as you should write down when you have achieved a goal, you should also write down when you have not achieved a goal. Right then! Then you can analyze why you didn’t make it. What factors influenced you during that time? Have you perhaps set yourself too many goals? Or was the task too big for the time you gave yourself? Or did it have a completely different reason? Maybe it wasn’t very realistic. There can be many reasons, and not reaching a goal within the time set is not a bad thing at all. Most importantly, don’t give up now! Rewrite the goal so you can achieve it next time. Perhaps give yourself more time or split the goal into smaller goals.
You have to take some time to do this regularly, but it pays off. You can see your successes from the past few months and see how you are developing, and that motivates!
Extra tip! Making marketing goals measurable
Whether you use the above goal-setting tips for private goals with your horse or for your professional goals is irrelevant here. What’s important is that you formulate goals, because without a goal you quickly work without focus on nothing concrete. Then you quickly lose motivation, because what are you doing it for? So write down your goals and formulate them concretely and SMART.
You can also use the SMART technique very well for your marketing. For example, for your growth on social media and your website traffic. Check your data now in December and take a look at Google Analytics. What are the points you are satisfied with and what would you like to pay more attention to? And when do you want to reach your next marketing milestones? Maybe you want to improve your SEO or your reach on social media? With Google Analytics, you can measure many parameters and see how you have grown over the past few months. So it is super handy if you have Google Analytics set up for your website and it can give you a lot of insights.
