How Do I Set Goals?

You've come up with an incredible vision of what your dream will look like, but how are you going to get there? Many business brands fail every month through doing something as simple as not setting goals.

Proper planning helps us bring our problems to the surface, address the gaps in our current solutions, helps us build a roadmap towards a better future, and also helps us measure the success of what we delivered.

Typically, many people and brands around the globe use the 'SMART' methodology to align their goals. A goal should be:

Specific: choose a goal that is significant.

Measurable: you should be able to track the progress and / or success of your goal.

Attainable: make sure your goal is realistic.

Relevant: the goal should align with your company's purpose / mission / vision.

Time-bound: every goal should have a deadline to be completed by.

At Craftsmiths Consulting we prefer to use OKR's to map out and set our goals. This stands for 'Objectives, and Key Results', and this is how to use them:

First, define your Objective; this could be something like:

"Where is our business brand going?"

Next, set in place 1 to 3 (max) Key Results, which will show whether the Objective was met and you are / were successful. For example:

"How do we know our business brand has got to our destination?"

Let's put this into practice, and let's show you how we set proper goals if we want to increase sales for a clothing brand and their online store. This is how we would use SMART goals inside our OKR framework:

Start by setting a Specific Objective:

"Increase sales for hoodies and t-shirts."

Define the Key Result(s) which should be Measurable, Relevant and Attainable:

"Sell 25 hoodies."

"Sell 50 t-shirts."

Remember, all our goals should be Time-bound, and what you find in most businesses is that they set their OKR's a quarter at a time. For our example above, we could suggest that this Objective should:

"Be completed by Q3 2022".

Sticking to the plan, you can see that our Key Results are our way to check if we have met the requirements of our Objective, and how we will fundamentally define our levels of success.

If we sell 25 hoodies and 50 t-shirts in Q3 2022, then we will have increased our sales of hoodies and t-shirts and will have achieved our goal.

This was us sharing with you how we like to set and stick to our goals, you may have another method which works and we would love to know if so, but if you're doing neither you will be on the back foot.

Grab a pen, and get goal setting!

If you need help with your goal setting we're here to listen and guide you with a plan, and you can book a FREE session here.

Thanks for reading!