New Year, New Goals
A new year is the perfect time to set new business goals that will help grow your business and focus your activities over the coming 12 months. Goals can help put you on a positive path for the year ahead and also help inspire and motivate team members. In this blog post, we’ll help you to…
- Decide upon your priorities for the year.
- Translate your priorities into meaningful goals that will help your business.
- Plan your goals across the year.
- Explore how to achieve your goals including outsourcing to a VA.
With each step, you’ll find an essential action to help you set your goals and work towards their delivery.
Part 1 – How to set goals for 2023
- Define your priorities for the year
Too many people rush straight in to setting goals without first thinking more broadly about the direction of travel they want for the year. What matters most to you and your business in 2023? Do you want to…
- Make more money
- Have more customers
- Grow your staff base
- Connect with more people in the industry
At this stage, don’t get too caught up in how you are going to achieve these priorities (we’ll come to that later). Simply think about what matters to you most right now in terms of your business; where would you like to be a year from now? It’s also important to consider what you need this year as well. We work with a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners who are struggling with their workloads. So, it’s perfectly reasonable to include priorities that are about rebalancing your own work, such as:
I’d like to reduce my hours this year or I’d like to delegate work so I can spend more time with family.
Action: Make a list of your priorities – these are the big things, so it’s a good idea not to spread yourself too thin. What are the 2 or 3 most important things for your business this year?
- Turn your priorities into meaningful goals
Priorities and goals are different. A priority is something you want to make happen this year, a goal will help you get there. It may take 1 goal to help you achieve a priority or it may take 3 or 4 (or more!).
You’ve probably heard the acronym SMART in relation to goals and that they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. By following the SMART principles, you can set goals that can be quantitatively assessed to see how you’re doing.
For example, for the priority of making more money in 2023, you might translate this into SMART goals of…
- We want to increase online sales by 10% in the first six months of 2023.
- We want to increase spending by existing customers by 20% this year.
- We want to gain 24 new customers this year.
These goals are specific, they can be measured and tracked and if realised will help you to achieve your overall priority of making more money.
Action: Come up with a set of SMART goals that will help you to realise your priorities.
Part 2: How to achieve your 2023 goals
2.1. Plan and segment your goals
A year is a long time and achieving your goals will likely require work throughout this period. Planning and segmenting your goals involves breaking them up and spreading them across the year. For instance, you could take the goal of wanting to gain 24 new customers and split it as follows:
We want to gain 6 new customers per quarter.
(Q1 + 6, Q2 + 6, Q3 + 6, Q4 + 6 = 24 new customers total)
Or you might identify that there will be some lead-in activity required, so, you might decide to break up your goal as follows:
Q1: — (no increase) Q2: + 4 , Q3 + 8, Q4 + 12 = 24 new customers total)
Planning your goals across the year has several benefits:
- You keep goals manageable by not trying to achieve everything at once.
- You can give your goals complementary timelines so that you can allocate time and resources to different goals at different points of the year.
- You can build incrementally towards goals and can track progress as you go.
Action: Plot your goals across the calendar year so that you have a clear action plan of what you want to achieve and when.
2.2. How to deliver on your 2023 goals – identify sub-actions
For more complex goals, you may find it useful to come up with individual action plans. Returning to our goal of gaining 24 new customers, there could be a large number of sub-actions required to achieve these, such as:
- Attending more networking events.
- Increasing referrals from existing customers using a referral discount scheme.
- Advertising and marketing to reach new audiences.
Action: Draw up an action plan for achieving each goal. Again, the more specific you can be with your sub-actions the better and you should consider when each action needs to happen to fit the timeline for your goal’s achievement.
2.3. How to resource achieving your 2023 goals
It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve everything you want to as part of your 2023 goals on your own. By their nature, goals often relate to things we’re not currently achieving and often the reason for this is time. When you’re running a busy business, making time for new projects, initiatives or activities is hard. This is why you may need to consider securing additional resources for your goals.
It could be that your action plan requires recruiting a new social media manager or someone who can update your website regularly or a virtual assistant (VA) who can provide support across a wide range of tasks.
A virtual assistant (VA) can be a valuable resource when it comes to achieving new business goals. VAs are experienced in organisation, continuous improvement and streamlining systems and processes. This unique perspective comes from having worked in lots of businesses and seeing lots of different ways of working and what is effective. A VA can therefore be a targeted asset for helping you with your goals and will be able to focus on them without the distraction of the routine of running your business.
Alternatively, you can use a VA to free up your own time by outsourcing routine admin and process work to them. This way you have the time and space to focus on your goals whilst knowing your day-to-day business activity is in safe hands.
To find out more about working with one of our experienced VAs and how we could help you achieve your 2023 business goals, contact us today.
Action: Assign actions in your action plan to specific resources. If you don’t have the people to resource your plan, look at how you can bring additional capacity in, e.g. via outsourcing to a VA.
2.4. How to track progress and goal success
You should review progress towards your goals monthly as this will help to keep you on track. Each quarter, you should then conduct a fuller analysis as to where you are versus where you want to be. If you’re not making the progress you want to, then you will need to refocus and consider how you can get back on track by allocating more resources or trying different sub-actions. If you are ahead on progress, consider if your goals could be made more stretching by increasing any targets you’ve set.
Final tips for achieving your 2023 goals
- Write your goals down – Commit to your goals and introduce accountability by defining when they will be achieved and by what means.
- Be realistic – Of all the SMART criteria this is probably the most critical, your goals have to be achievable, otherwise, you set yourself up for failure and disappointment.
- Spread the word – Share your goals with colleagues and friends, this increases accountability as you’ll want to achieve them even more when others know about them. If colleagues can help you achieve goals this also helps them to buy-in to the process.
- Don’t neglect resourcing – A lack of time or resources is the reason most goals aren’t met. If you’re serious about achieving your 2023 goals you will need to find time and resources for them.
- Be kind to yourself – You probably won’t achieve all of your goals in 2023. That’s ok and it shows you’re striving to grow your business by setting stretching targets. All progress is good and you should see any improvements as positive. Where goals aren’t met, they can become your focus for 2024.
Virtual Assistant support to help you achieve your goals in 2023
If you would like some support to achieve your new business goals, we can help. Our VAs can help with admin and business support and also provide specialist support in the legal, medical, finance and property sectors.
If you’re interested in hiring a VA this year, we’ll be blogging more about this topic in the spring, so do keep an eye on the blog for new updates. You can also contact us to ask any questions you may have about working with our experienced team.
More on this topic…Six practical steps to help you achieve your goals
For more tips and insights on achieving your goals this year, check out our recent press article in the London Daily News: How I set and plan my goals and visions for 2023. It’s full of helpful tips including how to use business journaling, how to time block and tips for creating a vision board.
