As every business owner knows, goal setting is a key part of your ongoing strategy – what targets do you need to meet? How many sales are you aiming to make this month? What is your revenue goal for the quarter?
Both short and long term goals are essential to ensure you’re moving forward, but too many businesses are content with just working toward achievable goals when they could be pushing themselves further.
If you’re a business in growth-mode, you want to be looking at not only what’s achievable, but also what’s audacious – how far could you reach if you pulled out all the stops and really chased that ambition?
You may have heard the concept of the “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (BHAG) before – it was coined in the 90’s by Jim Collins, and describes a big goal that:
Chasing an audacious goal can be the difference between taking one year and taking five years to get to where you want to be.
Sprocket Digital works with growth-hungry businesses who want to make this kind of difference for themselves. If that’s you this year, here’s where to begin with setting your goals.
The achievable goals you set for your business are exactly what they sound like – achievable targets that you know you can hit during the year, as indicators that you’re on track toward your larger long-term goals.
These are your sales KPI’s and revenue targets, they’re what you report to stakeholders or investors to give them confidence that you’re making good progress each month and quarter.
Your achievable goals should not be easy, but they should be within a reachable range and designed using the SMART system.
SMART goals are:
You can think of these types of goals as a conservative investment – you’re still comfortably growing your capital year on year, but big growth will take longer to get to unless you’re willing to take some risks or do something wildly different.
When you’re ready to grow faster, to start doing things differently, it’s time to get audacious.
Your audacious goals go a few steps beyond the achievable, to lay out what you could achieve if nothing was standing in your way.
Take each of your SMART achievable goals and ask “What’s the next step up from this? If we aren’t held back by budget, staffing, reach or any other obstacle, what could we really achieve?”
This may be a matter of bringing your 5-year goals into the now – by setting out a plan to make them happen in one year, you’re making them audacious.
It’s important to remember that audacious doesn’t mean unattainable. They’re there to push you, to propel your business forward. They’re the equivalent of a growth-fund investment – helping you reach your goals faster, as soon as you’re willing to take the leap and change the status quo.
“Like the moon mission, a true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort. A BHAG engages people – it reaches out and grabs them in the gut. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused … BHAGs are bold, falling in that grey area where reason and prudence might say ‘This is unreasonable’, but the drive for progress says ‘We believe we can do it nonetheless’.” Jim Collins, Built To Last, 1994
Between your achievable goals and your audacious goals there’ll be a gap – the gap of “But we haven’t got the manpower to achieve that” and “That’s impossible at our current success rate”.
To close the gap and make your ambitious goals a reality for your business, you need to get clear on what those obstacles are, and how you can solve each one.
Scaling up your business for the long-run means finding ways to work smarter, not harder, and – most importantly – finding the right people to support you as you grow.
At Sprocket Digital, we work with ambitious, audacious business owners to scale their business using digital marketing strategies. They know where they want to be, they trust us to help them figure out how to get there.
Our insight and expertise in the digital realm have enabled us to help dozens of businesses to scale up and expand their operations over the years. We don’t just deliver lead generation, we work on an omnichannel digital strategy that delivers sustainable revenue growth now and into the future.
Are you ready to reach your audacious goal this year? What could you achieve if nothing stood in your way?
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