Set Goals for Your Business...Then Decide How to Reach Them

As a business owner, you know how important it is to be constantly thinking of ways to improve your store.  When thinking of all the factors that influence your business, it can be hard to decide what improvements or changes you need to focus on.  But the difficulties don’t stop there either.  Deciding how to go about achieving the success you want and reaching your goals is no easy task either.  Let’s walk through how you can easily set goals for the success of your store and then create plans for achieving them.

1. Decide what success means to YOU –

Some business owners are most concerned with making their existing business profitable, while others have an end goal of selling their store to someone else and making a profit that way.  There are other business owners who want to open as many stores as possible and maybe become a household name.  Your goals do not need to be the same as anyone else’s and really don’t even have to have anything to do with the amount of money you will end up with.  All that matters is that you decide what your business means to you and the impact you’d like to have.

2. Think about the things that may be challenging your store’s success –

Even though you always want to think about the good things, you sometimes need to consider what challenges you have as well.  If you aren’t realistic about what is holding you back from success, you will never know how to reach your goals. Some examples of challenges could be:

• You don’t have a distributor that can help you get the best inventory
• Your competition has an easier parking lot to get in and out of
• Your store is small and you don’t have room to add new features
• You have been robbed before and now customers are afraid to come to your store

Depending on what your goals are, your challenges will be different. Spend a good amount of time deciding which problems you are ready to face.

3. Be creative with your ideas achieving your goals –

Remember, you aren’t the only store owner out there trying to reach success and meet their goals.  Chances are, there’s a store owner that even has the same exact goal and challenges you do.  So that means you really must invest a good amount of energy and time in coming up with ideas for reaching your goals.  The bare minimum isn’t enough.  Want to bring in more customers? What can you do to be DIFFERENT from the stores around you?  Want to open a new location?  How can you get the additional funds to purchase or lease a new building?  Don’t limit your thinking.  There are a lot of opportunities out there.

4. Try and try again –

One of the worst things you can do when owning and operating a business is to think that every idea you have or every new thing you try is going to be magically successful overnight.  You’ll probably have to continuously work at making improvements or changes to the way you run your business to reach your final goals.  Don’t quit if things aren’t going the way you think they should, just step back and find out how you can try in a different way.  Don’t limit yourself to one idea either, consider multiple ways to reach your goals.

5. Don’t limit your goals.

Already reached your business goal and already seeing success?  Why stop there?  There’s probably something else you could be doing.  Consider starting an entirely new business that maybe no one has even heard of.  If it’s interesting to you, it’s worth your time.