Business Marketing Magazine Summer 2017 January 2016 Creating Clear Businesses | Page 25

Your goals and the milestones you set on the
path to achieving them will not only help
you set and keep the most effective course
to success, they will also allow both you and
your investors to track your progress to that
success. As the CEO of You, Inc., you must establish and define not only clear, measurable
goals, but also the milestones you will meet
to achieve each of those goals. With the goals
and milestones set, you will easily be able to
not only set effective priorities, but to also
determine both the effectiveness and efficiency of any plan of action you create.

Six Steps to Creating Your Vision
Once you determine where you want your
business to be in five years (note: it is okay
to use shorter range goals, but we find that
visualizing and planning for five years is very
effective), following six simple steps will
enable you to define your objective in the
most effective way possible. Entrepreneurs
we have coached around the world report
that following these steps has helped them to
both clarify and simplify their planning process:
TYour vision / goals must be stated positively. What do you want to achieve, rather
than what do you want to avoid. For example: “I want to offer my company’s products
/ services to X new customers each day.”
[positive]. Instead of, “I want to stop being
so afraid of prospecting for new customers.”
[negative].
TYour vision / goal must be within your
control. For example: wanting to increase
revenues by 20 percent during the next fiscal year is potentially possible. That is under

your control. Wishing to grow six inches
taller is not. Thus, each goal should be challenging, but also realistic. Goals which are
virtually overwhelming become discouraging and will sap your will to continue. At the
other extreme, goals that are too easy are
boring and will quickly lose their ability to
motivate you and your employees.
Select goals you can achieve, but only by
stretching. If you find that you are achieving
a goal too easily, make the next one harder.
If you find yourself becoming too frustrated at the difficulty, consider first if you are
working efficiently towards achieving it. If
you are, move the goal a little further out
or, it is a sufficiently high priority, consider
reallocating resources to achieve it.
Think of your desired long-term result and
work backwards from there to determine
what key resources you lack (e.g., sufficient
funds, specialized knowledge or experience, etc.) needed to get there. These then
become your intermediate and short-term
goals (your milestones).
TEach goal must be testable in some objective manner. For example: if your goal is
to be able to achieve and maintain a certain level of production for a new product,
it is easy to test whether or not you have
achieved it.
TAlways write your goals down. In 1950,
the Ivy League Colleges began a study of
that year’s graduating classes. They asked
the graduates if they had established goals
for their lives. Eighty-seven percent said
that they had not. Ten percent had established mental goals, but had not written
them down. Only three percent had developed written goals for their lives.