 Set the right goals, and you're much more likely to achieve success, outperform competitors, grow faster and generate more profits and cash. Every business leader and manager understands the value of creating business goals to steer the business or team in the right direction. Working out what the right direction is and how to set the right business goals and how to achieve those goals is unfortunately not so straightforward. Then set the wrong goals and you could easily have your team wasting time, energy and business resources in achieving goals that don't really move the business forward. I have a five-step process to make setting the right business goals easier and quicker, which also helps deliver better business outcomes for you and the business. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career at Foster's, Innocent Drinks, EY and Peer Consulting as well as many SMEs and startups. Choosing the right business and team goals helps the teams I worked with generate tens of millions of pounds in additional profits and cash across corporates and SMEs. Choosing the right goals and the right areas to focus on was critical in achieving this success. And as always, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. So let's get started with the first step in how to set the right business goals. Setting long-term goals and direction for your business or organization that makes sense, which the team can easily relate to and which are achievable is one of the toughest tasks for any leader. Think of long-term goals as those to achieve in five years or more. And by setting long-term business goals, your business and team will have a consistency of direction and effort. This will progress the business further than only setting goals one year at a time. And a quick aside, if you have a business growing at, say, 50% plus per year, your long-term may be only, say, two years, for instance. The higher the growth rate, the higher the level of change within the business, and therefore the shorter the timeframes you should consider as long-term. So in thinking about your long-term goals, start with why your business exists. What's its purpose? What is the business there to do for its customers? The business's purpose should not primarily be about making money or growing the business. These are outcomes that help you achieve your purpose. Most businesses want to make profits and grow, so these are too generic and the team members don't really relate to abstract financial numbers nearly as well as concrete real-world goals. For example, enhanced thought training exists to share business knowledge and expertise so our students can improve their personal team and business performance. Once you're clear about the purpose of your business, setting goals is a lot easier and every goal that you set should be linked to helping the business's purpose, either directly or indirectly. So start with setting outcome goals to achieve over the next five years. Before we go further, a quick note about two different types of goals. The first are outcome goals. These are measurable targets often not fully within your control, such as winning new customers or reaching a specific grade of growth. The second are process goals, which are activities that you do to achieve your outcome goals and these activities are usually fully within our control, for example making 20 prospecting sales calls per week to potential customers. So set outcome goals and then work out which process goals are needed to achieve your outcome goals. Set outcome goals for your long-term goals. For example, one of enhanced thought training's five-year outcome goals is to have taught over 20,000 students. Here are 10 examples of long-term goals to start you thinking. Firstly, double the annual number of successful new product launches. Second, increase profitability by 6%. Third, increase market share to 20%. Fourth, create a performance-based culture and consistently deliver the top five company goals each year. Fifth, improve product quality by X as measured by customer feedback and production rejects. Six, invest in IC systems to increase team productivity by 10% and double the availability of performance information. Seven, increase the basket size of our customers by 20%. Eight, improve workplace safety by over 100% as measured by accident rates and severity of accidents. And nine, expand our services revenue so become 40% of our overall revenue. And 10, expand geographically by entering two additional European countries in the next three years. Set out long-term goals that align and support the business's purpose. An exercise that can help you decide on long-term goals is to undertake a competitive benchmarking exercise. You know, compare your business to your direct competitors within your niche, particularly those that you consider ahead of you. Look at a range of metrics such as, you know, financial performance, the products they have, the services they have, their customer service, their innovation, etc. Focus on areas that are key to your business success or the competitors' success and be honest with yourself. Another exercise to help formulate long-term goals is to do a market analysis. You know, four key areas to cover include, you know, industry overview. What is the current state of your industry and where is it headed? Second, you know, what's the target market? Who are your actual customers or ideal customers? Third, you know, what's your competition? Describe your competitors' positioning, its strengths and its weaknesses. Fourth, you know, what is the pricing and market share you have? And how will you use pricing to help determine your position in the market and how will you use it to grow your market share? Pestle is another very useful tool to use. Once you've outlined your long-term goals or initiatives, then the second step in how to set the right business goals is to set out your annual goals for the year ahead. You're likely to have many outcome goals that you could choose for your annual targets. When setting annual targets, it is important that you weigh up the goals that you could choose against the business' ability to deliver against them. I've seen so many businesses with ambitious goals who have not put in place the skills, the people, the systems, etc. to deliver against these goals. Don't make their mistake. I suggest that you get your team involved in choosing and setting the goals. If the team has co-written the goals, they are much more likely to own the goals agreed and thus, as a business, you are more likely to achieve those goals. Your team will have a lot of insights to share. If they're closer to customers or the day-to-day operations than you are, make use of their insights. When you write your goals, make them specific and also design for your business specifically. There are a whole range of different tools that you can use to help you do this. For instance, many companies use SWOT analysis or similar types of tools to gain clarity on key strengths and areas that need further attention. As always, keep the goals smart. When you have a list of all the goals that you would like to achieve, I suggest that you prioritize your goals with the most important first. Ask the team to be as realistic as possible about how many of those goals the company can actually deliver in the year. Delivering one goal a quarter really well is nearly always better than partially delivering six goals over the year. So make sure the business has enough resources and the right skills to be able to deliver on the goals that you choose for the year ahead. The third step in how to set the right business goals is once you decide on your annual goals, break these goals down into quarterly outcome goals. These will be your milestones on the way to achieving your annual goals. And against each outcome goal, work out the process goals that you will need the team to complete to ensure that the outcome goal will be hit. For example, an outcome goal could be to win five new customers per month. And you know that your sales meetings to sales conversion ratio is three to one and your prospecting call to sales meeting ratio is 10 to one. Therefore, to win five new customers per month, you need about 150 prospecting calls per month and 15 sales meetings. So your process goal is to make at least 150 prospecting calls per month. The prospecting calls are completely within your control. You just have to ensure they're made. Having only annual goals makes these goals feel quite consistent. Quarterly goals are much closer, usually smaller in size and real in many ways and thus work better in terms of motivating staff, making it clear what they need to do, and of course, tracking performance. And you can take corrective action much more quickly. So break down your goals into quarterly process goals for each team and potentially each staff member. Now you have your outcome and process goals broken down into quarterly or 90-day periods. The fourth step in how to set the right business goals is to decide on the right metrics to track the progress and outcome goals that you have chosen. More than 80% of small business owners surveyed said that they don't keep track of their business goals. And the old saying, you can't manage what you can't measure holds very true. If you're measuring progress and sharing these measurements or results openly with the team, you're constantly reminding the team that these metrics are important to you, which in turn will make them important to the team. And you will also be making use of peer pressure. Both are very useful ways of establishing and maintaining the foundations for accountability and delivery of results. So create metrics that measure the progress of your outcome and process goals and keep these visible to the team. The fifth step in how to set the right business goals is to build into the team culture the right mechanisms to drive accountability at team and individual level. Some key actions that you can take that I've found to work very well are firstly, create visibility of performance through reporting and share this openly and publicly. Having a whiteboard on the wall for instance, works really well or holding a weekly meeting in which each metric is entered into a table, a chart or a KPI sheet by each person or team responsible for that area. Secondly, show performance against progress goals in team meetings and ask the team to plan how to bridge any shortfalls. Third, you know, bring up process goals in one-to-one meetings with your direct reports and coach team members on how they can do even better against them. And fourth, align bonus and public praise and rewards to exceeding outcome goals. As a leader or manager, you must show the team members how to achieve the goals and then consistently follow up with the team members if you want the goals to be achieved. So there you have a five-step process to set the right business goals for your business. The first step is the hardest and the one to make sure you get right. Include the team to challenge thinking, create debates and help set the best direction to fulfill your business's key purpose. And then the following four steps are all very important and flow from your choices in step one. Good luck in setting the right business goals for your business and achieving those goals. And if you like this video, please hit the thumbs up button and subscribe. Thanks for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.