Examples of Small Business Goals
As a small business starting out, you have many goals to organize and execute. Below are examples of financial, marketing, operational, and sales goals that will help you jump-start all aspects of your business.
Use our small business goals worksheet to plan your goals for financial, team, and company growth for the short and long term.
Financial Goals for Small Businesses
Small businesses should set financial goals to ensure growth, profitability, and long-term success. These financial goals focus on strategically increasing revenue while minimizing cost.
- Increase Return on Investment: Carefully track the money you spend to ensure that what you invest in your business is increasingly outpaced by sales.
- Improve Cash Flow: Make sure your payables and receivables are balanced and organized such that there is more money coming in from customers than there is going out due to expenses or debts generated elsewhere in the business. Also ensure that the money coming in can be easily liquidated if necessary.
- Increase Profitability: Increasing profitability requires a combination of boosting revenue and reducing operating costs.
Marketing Goals for Small Businesses
Marketing goals help small businesses grow and succeed. These goals should focus on building awareness of your business, improving customer experience, and growing your audience.
- Increase Brand Awareness: Expanding your business into new locations within a certain period can improve brand awareness. Aim to expand into new regions in the first three years of your business.
- Increase Customer Retention: Small businesses looking to grow should aim to build positive customer interactions. Send out a customer survey with each purchase to see where you can improve customer experience.
- Attract New Customers: A digital marketing campaign can attract new clients. Launch a social media marketing campaign on Facebook or Instagram to get new eyes on your business.
Operational Goals for Small Businesses
Operational goals help a business achieve broader strategic objectives by optimizing their processes and improving their resource management. These operational goals highlight operating expenses, productivity, and employee retention.
- Decrease Operating Expenses: Think about where you can cut expenses — for example, administrative costs, maintenance, or personnel — to make your operations leaner and save money that can go back into the business.
- Increase Productivity: You can increase employee productivity by streamlining workflows, giving constructive feedback, offering training, and communicating goals clearly.
- Improve Employee Retention: Improve your employee retention by creating career growth plans with each employee, celebrating your employees’ accomplishments, and encouraging a healthy work-life balance for everyone at the company.
Sales Goals for Small Businesses
Sales goals for small businesses should be focused on increasing sales and market share, while also maintaining profit for slow and steady growth.
- Increase Sales: Grow your sales by hiring skilled salespeople, launching new products, expanding into new markets, strengthening customer relationships, or offering competitive pricing.
- Increase Market Share: Try to capture a greater portion of your competitor’s space in the market to create brand dominance.
- Maintain Profits: Carefully balance how much money you are putting into new ventures, research, and marketing campaigns to make sure you retain a stable profit margin.
Small Business Owner Goals
Small business owner goals center on you as the head of the company and your top role in guiding the business.
- Establish Yourself: Establish authority on a topic related to your business. You can achieve this by posting content, publishing research, sharing expertise on social media, getting featured in industry publications, or speaking at events. Make sure to stay informed and keep growing your industry knowledge.
- Grow Your Business: Focus on perfecting your product, improving customer experience, and stabilizing cash flow. From there, work on establishing business partnerships and investing in a multipronged marketing plan that will expand your reach and market share. Get more detail on growing your business with the sections below on 90-day goals and how to set small business goals.
- Build Your Brand: Research the market you want to target and craft a marketing campaign to reach them. Solidify and sharpen your brand voice and brand story.
Small Business Plan Goals
Small business plan goals are the objectives laid out in a business plan to help guide the business. These small business plan goals emphasize adjusting and perfecting your product and expanding your marketing when making a long-term plan.
- Continuously Improve Your Product: Collect feedback about your product or service from customers, potential customers, employees, and experts, and continuously adjust it to make it the best it can be.
- Expand Your Marketing: Make short- and long-term goals for building brand awareness, finding leads, and growing your online presence.
- Maintain a Business Plan: Once you lay out your business idea, market analysis, and financial projections, set goals and communicate with potential investors, stakeholders, and team members to keep your business plan moving forward.
Long-Term Small Business Goal Examples
Long-term small business goals involve planning for the future, such as the next three to five years, and building a strong foundation for strategic business longevity. Investing in technology, expanding into new markets, increasing sales, building brand reputation, and achieving high search engine ranking will set up your small business for maximum growth years down the road.
- Invest in Technology: Caitlyn Wells, founder of Upwell Strategies, says that “investing in technology that supports scalability” is a crucial long-term goal for small businesses. Analyze your business and determine where you could use technology to automate your business processes for scalability. Examples include a customer relationship management (CRM) system to streamline communication or centralize customer information, or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for accounting or resource management.
- Expand to New Markets: Research new regions, industries, or demographics where you can increase brand awareness and revenue. You may have to compete with other businesses in a new area, or you might find an untapped customer base.
- Increase Sales: According to Harvard Business Review, on average most successful businesses grow 11.8 percent a year. As a small business, you want to be in this ballpark. You can achieve this by launching new products and working on the other long-term goals in this list.
- Build Brand Reputation: Building brand reputation as a small business requires a focus on marketing and listening to customer feedback. It’s also important to maintain good relationships with loyal customers who will spread the word about your brand.
- Achieve Search Engine Ranking: Make use of search engine optimization terms and internal links in your online content. This will help your business improve page rank and ideally get you to the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Increase Market Share: Increasing market share by outperforming competitors is an important long-term strategic goal. For example, you can aim to increase market share in your sector by 15 percent in five years.
Short-Term Small Business Goal Examples
Short-term small business goals, such as quarterly goals, are more specific objectives that will help you reach your longer-term business goals. You can aim to achieve your short-term goals within a quarter or two. Goals such as improving customer service, optimizing for efficiency, increasing web traffic, and boosting revenue can be tackled in smaller increments of time and help you achieve healthy growth for your business.
- Improve Customer Service: Collect feedback from customers to understand what would improve their purchasing experience. Then develop a plan to implement this feedback — for example, by training employees, adjusting policies or processes, or improving communication.
- Optimize Processes: According to Cecile Pichon, Executive Coach and Business Strategist at CC Career Coaching, as a short-term SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goal, you can “hire and onboard two to three key employees to enhance operational efficiency within the next two months.” Optimizing process efficiency will help reduce unnecessary costs when starting out and shaping your business.
- Increase Website Traffic: You can increase website traffic through search engine optimization, paid online ads, and promotion on your social media channels. If you don’t have social media channels, create a plan to develop them.
- Increase Revenue: Set quarterly revenue goals that will add up to your annual revenue goal.
How to Set Small Business Goals
Setting small business goals requires a thorough approach to maximize follow-through. Evaluate your business, set SMART goals — goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — and break them down into smaller steps. Make sure to document your progress to be able to check if you are on track or need to tweak the process.
Find the goal setting process best suited for your business with this explainer on SMART goals and objectives and key results.
- Conduct a SWOT Analysis
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Assess your business — evaluate what your business is and isn’t doing well, and identify unconsidered opportunities to grow and factors threatening your business’s success. According to Caitlyn Wells, SWOT analysis helps in “aligning goals with both short-term tactics and long-term vision.”
- Set SMART Goals
“Establish a vision for where you want the business to be in the short and long term,” recommends Pichon. “Your goals should align with this vision.” For example, a small business SMART goal could look like this: Increase the company Instagram follower count by 100 in the next 3 months.
Pichon advises clients to align their SMART goals with their core business values and long-term vision. “This alignment fosters motivation and ensures that daily efforts contribute to overarching objectives,” she says. “Regularly reviewing and adjusting goals is also crucial, as it allows businesses to stay responsive to market changes and internal developments. By combining the SMART framework with value alignment and ongoing evaluation, small businesses can set meaningful goals that drive sustainable growth.
”Improve your goal setting process with this step-by-step guide to writing and choosing the best SMART goals.
- Divide Goals Into Smaller Steps
Next, Pichon suggests, “create an action plan with smaller, manageable tasks that help achieve the larger goal. This makes the process less overwhelming and allows for better tracking.” Divide your goals into bite-sized action items so the work can be spread out over months, weeks, and days in a consistent flow.
- Track Your Goals
Establish a central location where you can monitor all the time, money, and resources you’re spending as you work toward your goals. This data will help you track your goals.
- Assess Your Goals
At the end of a certain time period, such as a quarter or a fiscal year, look at the data you have documented and determine whether you need to update your processes or adjust your business’s goals.
Set and track your goals effectively with this collection of goal setting and goal tracking templates.
Small Business Goal Setting Starter Kit
Download the Small Business Goal Setting Starter Kit
We’ve created a small business goal setting starter kit to help you set, track, and achieve your goals for your business. This kit includes a goal tracking template, a cheat sheet for setting small business goals, and a SWOT analysis template. All of these items will set you on track to growing your business while staying organized and accountable. Download the kit as a whole or each template individually based on your needs.
Included in this starter kit, you’ll find:
- A small business goal setting template for Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word to visualize and lay out your SMART small business goals.
- A small business goal tracking template for Excel to help you organize your data and keep you accountable.
- A small business goals cheat sheet for Adobe PDF to give you a step-by-step visual of how to set your business goals.
- A SWOT analysis strategy template for Excel to help you analyze your business strengths and weaknesses, attack problems, and expand growth.
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