Big Dreams, Little Steps: Setting Manageable Business Goals

Your dreams keep you going all day, every day. They’re the motivation behind your hustle, the fuel in your tank. These big dreams are essential to the creation and success of businesses everywhere.

That said, no matter how hard you work, you’re not going to easily be able to achieve your biggest goals right off the bat. Meeting ambitious business goals can take years of work.

It’s easy to get discouraged when partnerships fall through, production hits a snag, and the rewards for all of your hard work get delayed.

That’s why it’s essential to set manageable business goals alongside your most ambitious ones.

With the big dreams resting at a comfortable distance, you can focus on your business’s more immediate needs without feeling as though you’re failing your initial ambition.

What does the process of assessing and achieving your ambitions look like? Consider the following and see if you can’t remove some of your ambitions’ stress from your day-to-day life.

Brainstorm Your Grand Aspirations

First, indulge yourself. What is it that you want to achieve through your business?

Some starter CEOs want to make their first million dollars by age 30. Some want to create a product that helps people live more responsible or effective lives. Other people want to challenge themselves in a business environment, taking on new developments in their industry while providing their consumer audience with stellar solutions to their problems.

Whether your ambition is financial, intellectual, or moral, let yourself enjoy that core idea.

This ambition is as essential a part of your business’s day-to-day operations as any employee. If you keep this ambition in mind, you can better set a direction for your business’s growth and content development over the next month, six months, or five years.

Break Your Aspirations Down

Once you have your big dream in mind, it’s time to break it down.

Say you want to start a prop-making business, having been inspired by some of the swords and shields you saw in the latest blockbuster fantasy movie. Your ambitious goal may be to one day create the prop weapons for a film of similar popularity.

In the meanwhile, though, you have to get your business off the ground. You’ll need to ask yourself a few questions in order to begin identifying the smaller goals that’ll lead you – in this hypothetical, at least – straight to Hollywood. These questions can look something like:

• What audience will I be marketing my services to?
• What physical materials do I need for my business to operate?
• How can I network myself?
• How can I advertise my business?
• What will my budget look like?

From here, you can start setting goalposts for your business to reach. Following the prop-making example, you could make those smart goals any of the following:

• Within the first six months of operations, I want to have started a content marketing campaign that’s allowed me to network with my peers and reach out to a theater audience.
• By the end of my first year in business, I want to have contributed props to a local theater performance.
• I want to dedicate myself to my prop-making business full-time within a year and a half of its initiation.
• Three years into business operations, I want to be attending conferences across my nation in order to sell my props to cosplayers, actors, and other professionals in my field.

Goals will vary by industry, of course. Setting them, though, will make your eventual ambition all the more achievable.

Delegate Your Ambitions

You may also find that, in setting smaller goal posts for yourself, you need to delegate your achievements to your business’s employees. Relying on other people in order to see your ambition fulfilled is never a bad thing.

Delegation, in fact, can help you achieve your dreams faster.

Continuing with the prop-making example, you could have one cluster of employees start reaching out to theatres in your area that are looking for prop-makers. Another cluster could research maker fairs, festivals, or conferences that people in your industry attend.

Delegation means that you can gather information and connections all the faster without burning yourself out on your dream.

Schedule Your Progress

Finally, be prepared to run into set-backs while trying to chase your goals. You’ll need, while setting smaller goal posts for yourself, to plan for obstacles while creating a timeline for your business’s progress.

Here, a time tracking tool can come in handy. You can use it to monitor how much time you’re giving a particular goal of yours. If you notice that you’re focusing too heavily on one project or another, you can reschedule yourself and make sure that all of your projects are receiving their due attention.

So don’t think that you have to set your big business goals aside in favor of practicality. Instead, keep those goals at the core of your business and push yourself to achieve them in stages.

So long as you plan, schedule, and work carefully with your peers, you’ll find that even the biggest dreams of yours are more than achievable.