New Year’s means resolutions for people. Resolutions are essentially goals, so that means that businesses can and should have resolutions, too. If you set your business some goals, you will have something to aim for in the new year, which will help you measure your success.
Your franchisor will likely assist you with setting annual goals to reach, but you can also have your own personal business goals, which will help you maintain and grow your franchise location.
Why You Should Set Goals
To use an archery analogy, setting goals is like having a target. You could just shoot arrows off into the distance and that might be fun, but you won’t be able to tell if your archery skills are improving or not. If you set up a target to shoot at, you can then measure how well you’re doing and make adjustments to get better.
Similarly, when you don’t have goals for your business, any marketing or promotional campaigns are going to be difficult to measure because you’re just shooting arrows at nothing. With goals, you’ve set your target and if you run a marketing campaign and it doesn’t bring in any new customers or increase revenue (or whatever the goal for that campaign happens to be), then you’ll know you need to make adjustments in who you’re targeting or what you’re saying with your messaging.
To be able to recalibrate your efforts, you need to make sure your goals are measurable, which means using numbers. Increasing your website visitors by 10 percent over the next six months, increasing walk-in traffic by 20% over the next year, being ranked at the No. 1 position in Google for your industry in your city, etc. All of these have easily measurable numbers, which will help you make the necessary adjustments to your marketing and promotions to be able to get the most out of them.
How to Set Goals
You should have different kinds of goals to try and reach, which can broadly be broken down into three groups:
- Short-term
- Long-Term
- Almost Unreachable
Once you have your goals set, you can then work backwards and figure out how to reach those goals with the tools you have at your disposal. For example, if your goal is to increase website visits by 10 percent over six months, you can decide what tools you will need to use to accomplish this. To reach this goal, you could use a blog, your social media profiles, email, content and video marketing, whatever tool you feel would be useful in getting more people to your website.
Short-Term Goals
These goals are for the coming months and up to a year or so away. They should be fairly reachable so you can gain momentum and motivation as you reach them. It’s always a good feeling when you set a goal and are able to attain what you set out to do and these goals will help you maintain that good feeling and keep pushing you forward to reach more of them.
An example of a short-term goal that should be fairly easy to reach would be the aforementioned increase of website traffic by 10 percent over six months.
Long-Term Goals
These goals look years into the future. Ask yourself where you want your franchise business to be in five to 10 years. More than just increasing website visitors or revenue, these goals speak more to expansion and growth. They should be reachable, but they should also require a lot of effort to reach.
An example of a long-term goal is opening another franchise location in five years.
Almost Unreachable Goals
These are your pie-in-the-sky goals that might seem a little ridiculous when you say them out loud, but you should say them anyway. They are audacious and should be a little unrealistic and be reachable in a best-case-scenario kind of way. They are a far off target that you can aim for and hit if you do everything perfectly. Don’t just have them and dismiss them, though. Have them and strive to reach them.
An example of an almost unreachable goal might be opening five new locations within the next decade or bringing in $5 or $10 million in revenue in one year. What is almost unreachable will depend on your business situation.
The important thing to remember about goals is that while you want to reach them, even not reaching them is useful. If you fall short of a goal, look at what you can adjust and if you reach a goal too easily, set more difficult ones to challenge your business.
If your goal is to become a franchise business owner, FranNet can help you reach that goal easily. Sign up for a free FranNet franchise search and consultation today and we’ll find one for you.