10 Ways to Set And Achieve Your Business Goals in 2019

The beginning of any year brings with it the opportunity to establish new goals and project new opportunities for your business. It is an exciting time that can help boost motivation as you target additional methods for growing your company. As you set these business goals though you’ll want to not only set goals but also establish a blueprint for achieving the goals. There’s no reason why you can’t achieve every goal you set in front of yourself. You just need to know the best ways to go about reaching these established destinations. Here are 10 ways to set and achieve your business goals in 2019.

Clearly Define Your Goals

Business goals established at the beginning of the year aren’t too different from New Year’s resolutions. However, as you may already know, New Year’s resolutions rarely come to pass. Many abandon these resolutions and revert back to their old selves sooner or later.

Why is it these resolutions fall by the wayside? Often it is because the goals are not specific. Instead of wanting to drop 15 pounds, it is to just lose weight. The goals are mundane and broad, which makes it difficult to achieve because there isn’t any real specific conclusion to the goal. The same is true with your business goals.

In order to achieve your business goals in 2019, you need to clearly define each goal. If you want to grow your social media following, don’t just list a goal as “growing your social following.” Have specific numbers in mind. Do you want to grow your following numbers by 100? 1,000? 1 million?

By setting something in stone you have a concrete final goal to set your sites on. You need a fixed point in the distance to head for. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself twisting and turning instead of going down a straight path. Established goals with predefined desired outcomes keep you focused and will help improve your ability to achieve these goals.

As Effective Spend points out, when you clearly define your goals it becomes easier to strategize and develop tactics to achieve these goals. Without clear objectives, you’ll get lost along the way.

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Do or do Not

One of the more profound lines to come out of the “Star Wars” franchise was “Do or do not, there is no try.” This means don’t just try to do something. You either go all in or you don’t do it at all, because when you try something it usually means you’re not putting in your full effort.

The line “do or do not” doesn’t mean you won’t fail at times. It doesn’t guarantee success. Instead, it means you need to put forward all of your effort and all of your attention to achieve your goal. That’s exactly what you need to do.

You establish the desired goal you want your business to achieve by the end of the year. To reach the goal you can’t just “try” to reach it. You need to fully commit to it and put everything you have to achieve this goal. So even if for whatever reason, you come up short at the end of the year, at least you’ll know you left everything you had on the table and you’ll never second-guess yourself.

According to Bupa UK, only 12 percent of individuals who establish New Year’s resolutions keep their resolution. This is because those that fail did not have defined goals, lost motivation and were never fully committed to achieving the goals in the first place.

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Tracking Goal Progression

Have you ever seen a fundraiser goal tracker? Perhaps it’s on your local public broadcasting station during the annual telephone, or maybe it’s in the lobby of your office park. Wherever it is the fundraiser goal tracker often appears in the form of a thermometer, and the rising red line is the amount of money donated. At the top of the “thermometer” is the end goal.

The tracker is designed to give you a visual aid as to how close you are to the final goal. It’s there to show the progress the fundraiser is making while showing every donation counts and can help increase the rising red line on the thermometer.

In a similar fashion, you need to track your goals. At the beginning of the year, you set goals to reach by the end of the year. Being so far away it can seem like nothing you do helps reach these goals. That’s why you need to track the progress you’re making.

The progress you make in January will help you reach the goal in December. However, failure to monitor and track your progress can bring about negative feelings and you may even abandon the goal altogether. When it seems like you are not making progress you are more likely to quit, yet in reality, you probably are making progress, it just isn’t completely visible.

Roll with the Punches

Sometimes the world throws you a hook when you were expecting a jab. It isn’t always possible to be prepared for what comes at you. There are times where you’ll take a punch on the chin and other times you deflect and continue on.

The point is, you need to roll with the punches and remain flexible. You can’t account for everything. There will always be variables at play that may throw a wrench into your current plan. Due to this, you need to be able to adapt.

Do not lock every single aspect of your business in place without wiggle room. It doesn’t matter how successful and smoothly your business has run to this point, problems will develop, and you’ll need the slack to correct and to adapt.

Clearly identifying your goals doesn’t mean you shouldn’t remain flexible. If your goal is to drop 15 pounds, yet all the treadmills are full when you go to the gym you don’t just go home, do you? No, you use the rowing machine or elliptical. So, stay flexible and roll with the punches your professional life throws in your direction.

Don’t Go at It Alone

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If you run a business with employees, you’ll have your workers to rely on and to help achieve the set goals. However, if you run your own business you may believe you need to go at it on your own. That is not the case.

Instead, it is critical to building a support team. Different members of your support team will be there to assist you when you need it. Each individual can help you in varying ways.

For example, if you’re feeling stressed and just need to decompress and vent, it helps to have someone you can talk to. Sometimes just clearing your head of all the clutter and verbalize your frustrations can be enough to help see answers to questions you have. It also helps to have a mentor who you can pose business questions to or who may offer guidance.

Hopefully, you already have some of these individuals in place. Running your own business is stressful, not to mention difficult. Many people will never understand the kind of pressure you’re under, both from sales numbers you need to reach and from the pressure you put on yourself to succeed. So, having a strong support system at your disposal is critical.

Don’t Let Distractions Pull Your Attention

It’s easy to become distracted at some point during the year. Perhaps a new trend pops up and you’d like to shift gears. Doing so might pull your attention from the end game, which will derail your goals without giving you anything to show for it.

You need to tune out unnecessary distractions and stay focused. Sometimes this is harder than other times, but you’ll find the more distractions you avoid the easier it becomes to sidestep more complex distractions the closer you are to your goals.

Ridiculously Efficient points out there are a number of distractions. In fact, nearly 45 percent of all daily distractions occur on the Internet, while over socializing at work and personal business entering the office all pull time away from the actual task at hand.

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Accept That Problems Happen

When establishing goals many people have a predetermined idea of what will happen. They want everything to play out as it does in the imaginary story they’ve created. But when a problem happens, they become completely unraveled and the goal ends up crumbling. You need to avoid this.

While there’s nothing wrong with envisioning your end game goal, you need to accept that problems happen and that the path to this goal might change, or it may evolve over the course of the year. The better you are at accepting imperfections the easier it becomes to continue on with reaching your goal. Don’t become hooked up on the imperfections. Instead, stay focused on the final outcome.

Stay Positive

When problems pop up it’s easy to grow cynical and negative. At these times it seems as if everything is against you and nothing will go right. You need to avoid this mentality as once you go down this negative mental path it becomes difficult to get out. So, do everything in your power to stay positive.

Remaining positive also has a positive influence on others around you. As Pew Global Attitudes points out, having a positive attitude helps beneficially influence everything from the business to educational relationships.

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If You’re Not Moving Forward Your Falling Behind

Baby steps have a way of adding up. Instant gratification is great, but business goals rarely happen this way. You just need to make sure you remain focused and continue moving. If you stop you may not physically fall behind your goals, but the competition will pass you up (or make up ground) because you have stopped. So, no matter how small the steps, always remain moving.

Set Milestones and Celebrate These Milestones

Progress is often hard to come by. And 2019 is a still 12 months. While you need to celebrate at the end of the year when you achieve your goal, it is important to set milestones along the way. This way you know you’re on the right path and you can feel good about what the business is doing and what it’s done so far in the year. This is also helpful when you have employees as celebrating success helps keep them motivated.

According to Interact Intranet, by celebrating milestones within the business and praising employees with their work it helps boost future employee output by 40 percent, multiplies financial success by more than four times over, and decreases employee turnover by 14 percent.

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In Conclusion

When creating goals, it is important to remain grounded and to set your sights on realistic destinations. Each goal is a stepping-stone to something bigger and better. By taking everything one step at a time, tracking your progress and clearly defining your goals you’ll discover obtaining the success you’ve set out to achieve is not only plausible but easier than you may have believed at the start of the year. So, keep your head up and focused on the goal at hand. By doing so you’ll reach a new level of success even you didn’t believe possible.