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“Stick to your goals.” “Stick with the business plan.” You might have heard or read about them, but it is not made clear as to why and how they are essential if you want to build your business, writes James Short.
For one thing, not sticking with your business plan or goals can cause chaos within your company. Taking advantage of everything that presents as an opportunity to you is great — but remember, you cannot have it all.
Jumping from one opportunity to another will cause you and your team to lose direction. Taking in too much will cause you to lose sight of your main goal and deviate too far away from your business plan.
Instead of your team working towards a single objective, you might end up going separate directions — each pursuing different opportunities that you’ve decided to take on. This is the exact opposite of what your team should be doing.
You might think that you are progressing when, in fact, you’re in no way closer to your original goal.
As you run your business, it can be so easy and tempting to take on new ideas and trends for a few quick wins. However, those short-term rewards can set you back from accomplishing your main objective.
Deviating from your plan is just as bad as not having a plan at all. If you think about it, it’s even worse as you’ve already spent time and resources to come up with the plan. Deviating from it means that the resources you’ve spent on it amounted to literally nothing. Be efficient by staying focused and on track.
Check and update
Successfully creating a business plan is just the first step. You have to regularly check and update it if necessary. This is to ensure that it remains relevant to the current market environment.
Doing so will allow you to keep track of your company, ensuring that it is hitting all of its key targets.
Another thing that needs to be pointed out is to keep a copy of your business goal in document form. This way, you can easily share it with the team and adjust it if necessary.
Knowing how to track
Coming up with a goal or imagining what you want to achieve is easy.
However, working towards it and keeping track of it is another. When setting a goal, you also need to know how to keep track of it. This not only applies to your business goals but to personal goals as well.
Write down your goal as well as the steps on how you are going to check your progress towards that goal. How much time are you willing to put into it? Which stage should you be in in a certain time frame?
Write them down in a journal or business planner and always keep it with you. Make it a ritual to check on your progress every day.
By James Short, consultant
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