Tips for Refocusing on Financial Goals

Do you have goals for your business that are just not being met? Are you having trouble keeping track of your financial goals or just aren’t sure where to start? Today we’re sharing tips for refocusing on financial goals for your business so that you can be successful and see your company grow.

Examine Your Original Goals

One of our first tips for refocusing on financial goals is to review what has happened in your business. Look back on what original goals were set when you first got established. You don’t just set goals and then forget about them. As you begin operating your business you should look back on them to see if you are meeting each milestone or if you need to make changes.

You should examine your goals based on two factors: 1) were they good goals to begin with? If not, maybe they need to go by the wayside. 2) do these goals apply to your business anymore? Maybe you’ve gotten to a certain level and it just doesn’t make sense any longer to have that goal. 

Set New Goals

Reexamining what has happened can set you up for the next of our tips for refocusing on financial goals . Set new goals and identify what things need to happen in your immediate future to reach those goals. Once you’ve identified where you have been, think about what new goals you need to or want to have in place. What is it that you want to accomplish? 

Then it’s time to determine what has to get into place in order to reach those goals. Do you need more customers or more salespeople? Do you need better processes behind the scenes in order to satisfy that growth or to make it more efficient? There’s many different avenues that need to be examined in order to see how each of the components is contributing to that new goal.

Be Realistic With Your Goals

The third of our tips for refocusing on financial goals is to be realistic. Most of the businesses that we talk to, when they start out, make a lot of mistakes. But they learn from those mistakes and are able to better manage their business. You may have a goal and you may have made mistakes in trying to achieve that goal, but that doesn’t mean that that goal is wrong. Moving forward it’s all about how you go about working towards that goal and making the tweaks that need to happen in order to achieve it. Keep fine tuning what you have and change what needs to be changed and while being flexible.

You also need to be realistic about how many goals you set. You can’t accomplish everything all at once. Having a few goals that are really important is more than enough. Let’s say you set a sales goal. That might affect your sales people, the process behind the scenes, or the way you interact with the customers before they even get to the sales person. There’s a lot of work that has to be done in order to meet that one sales goal number. 

It’s not enough to say, “let’s just sell more.” Sure. Sell more. But if you’re spending it all as you’re doing it, you’re not any better. Or if you reach that sales goal, and you saw all that growth, but now you have all these unhappy customers because your process hasn’t improved and it’s clunky, was that the best way to meet your goal? There’s usually multiple components to one goal. So keeping your goals to a few important ones will be important so you don’t overwhelm yourself or your employees.

Stay Accountable to Your Goals

Staying accountable to those goals is really important. This is the final of our tips for refocusing on financial goals . You’ll stay accountable through your key performance indicators (KPIs). You’ll see this a lot in business. KPIs are basically the way that you’re going to measure the thing that you want to measure. A KPI can be financial, it can be something different than financial like customer satisfaction, or it could be your employees and your turnover rate. There’s all kinds of different types of KPIs. You want to identify the right KPI to your goal so that you can stay accountable to how you’re doing and measure how close you are to those goals. 

When doing our consulting and growth planning with our clients, we suggest for them to find a time to examine their goals on a regular basis. That might be at your weekly staff meeting if some of the KPIs are shareable and able to be discussed amongst your staff. It could be that top management discusses them on a monthly basis or a quarterly basis. If you have a big goal that has smaller ones to reach within it, meeting on a yearly basis for that big overarching goal would be good as well.

How to Monitor KPIs

There’s a lot of software out there that allows you to enter your KPIs. You enter your target and then also enter the results as you go. This software can produce graphs and give you charts that basically show whether you’re meeting that goal. Is it meeting that target or are you falling below? Just know that falling below a target isn’t always bad, especially if that target is really high. So not meeting that exact goal might still be better than where you were before.

The key is to put your efforts into monitoring your goals. Because it’s great to set a goal, but you have to follow through in order to find the success you’re looking for. That’s why setting financial goals is important.

Conclusion

In conclusion, these are our top tips for refocusing on financial goals . Review where you are and where you want to go in terms of goals. Then set some new ones and find what things need to change in order to meet them. Finally, find ways to hold yourself accountable going forward on those goals.