Goals and measurements have always been a cornerstone of my services. One of my clients was struggling with how to articulate goals and value in the soft skills of communications and leadership. He was adamant that if we couldn’t find a way to measure something it’s just not worth spending time on. This intrigued me. Is this really true? What do you think?
Knowing a little about his life and background, I knew that he had just spent the weekend with a young grandson that he adored. So I asked him, “Do you love your grandson?” “Of course,” he responded. And I dug deeper with, “How much do you love your grandson and how do you measure it?” The silence was deafening.
I believe there are many things worth doing that cannot be specifically measured in dollars and cents or in any numerical way. However, when you are talking about a business, a department, a project or even an event, there will always be critical objectives that CAN be measured, which can act as the focusing microscope to success.
You may call them Objectives or Goals, whichever you like. If you follow the methodology in The One Page Business Plan® they are “Objectives ” which answer the question:
“What results will we measure?”
In most instances, at least one Objective or Goal will be financial and measure income, revenue, cost cutting, spending, or some form of monetary tracking. Here are some examples:
Goals For your business:
- Increase annual revenue from $26,000 to $75,000 by 6/30/2018.
- Reduce Credit Line from $5 million to $3 million within the next 6 months.
- Decrease average shipping time from 5 days to 2 days by year-end 2017.
- Reduce employee turnover from 40% to 10% by December 31, 2018.
Goals For your department:
- Reduce accounts receivable from 90 to 60 days by 12/31/17.
- Operate within budget of $450,000 for 2017.
- Identify and implement $150k in cost saving projects by 6/30/17.
Goals For your project:
- Achieve cost savings in portfolio reduction of at least 10K/month by December 2017.
- Deliver milestones for new product launch by March 10, 2017 under budget of $1.2 M.
And if you’ve been reading the posts in this series, you may be wondering what objectives or goals there would be for an event, or say, a wedding:
- Stay within budget of $20,000 throughout planning and execution phases.
- Save $5,000 for honeymoon by 4/1/2018.
- Spend 2 hours per week planning, phoning and researching throughout 2017.
A good place to look for Objectives or Goals is from the resource developed in the exercise of the post “Assess Your Starting Point”.If you haven’t already completed this exercise, go to the post and ask yourself the four questions to get you started. Some Objectives may become very evident to you from there.
The One Page Business Plan®
The One Page Business Plan® is a very versatile tool. Think about how large an impact this could have if you had a consolidated business plan for your organization, and each department and project had a plan aligned to that consolidated plan. The results could be amazing! Combine that with quarterly updates to all the plans and the synergy could be explosive!
The One Page Business Plan® allows you to have up to nine (9) Objectives or Goals. If you have more than that, you are probably too diluted and chasing too many things. Don’t pressure yourself to come up with nine either. Typically, companies have between 3-7 Objectives depending on their size. If your Objectives are wildly outrageous goals—you may only want two so you’ll be able to have extreme focus.
I’ll share some templates and further tips about Objectives in my next post. In the meantime, start thinking about what you’d like to measure and play with some ideas. You should be able to graph your Objectives in some way and don’t forget a due date for each!
Of course if you can’t wait and are ready to ‘dive all in’ immediately, you can purchase the workbooks HERE or you can send me an email at lzettler@coreimpactcoaching.com to inquire about private planning sessions or sessions for your team.
Next up: Are my Objectives really that intelligent?
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Related posts:
How is a business like a wedding?