5 Common Small Business Goal Mistakes

Every small business owner wants their business to succeed, and setting goals is an integral part of achieving your business's potential. 

Without clear goals, it's challenging to identify the path your business needs to take to grow, develop, and move forward toward continued success.

The best advice I can offer you is to look at what you shouldn't be doing. This will help you avoid unfortunate mistakes, which could cost a significant amount of time and valuable effort down the line. Here are my five common goal mistakes you should avoid when setting goals for your small business.

 1. Waiting for the perfect time to start

Setting goals can be very overwhelming. It's such a broad process, and working out what you want to achieve can be more complicated than you think. When we get overwhelmed by what seems to be an impossible task, it effortless to delay or postpone taking action, especially if we don't feel prepared to tackle what appears to be a huge process.

My advice would be to start setting your goals now, this week, today… as soon as possible. By not setting your goals and waiting for the perfect opportunity until you have enough free time or any other elusive marker could lead you to waste months or even years that could have been spent growing your business.

The best way to avoid this is simple… just start today. You don't need to take giant leaps forward, just baby steps, and once you have started, you will always be one step closer to reaching your goal.

2. NOT checking if your goals SMART?

A SMART goal is something specific, measurable, relevant, attainable and time-based. If you fail to check if your goals are SMART or NOT, you may find that you're chasing an unrealistic dream, which is not entirely feasible.

SMART Goal:

Specific - You have clearly defined what you want to accomplish.

Measurable - You have identified targets and milestones to track your progress.

Relevant - You have identified a goal that fits with your business model.

Attainable - Your goal is realistic and manageable.

Time-Based - You have identified a specific time for the goal.

To make sure that your goals are SMART, you can receive our SMART goals checklist before you dive in so you can avoid wasting time and energy. Enter your email address at the bottom of the page, and we'll email you our SMART goals checklist.

3. Not working on your goals frequently.

As a small business owner myself, I know how notoriously busy we all are. There are always many different tasks we need to complete every single day. While people set goals with good intentions on achieving them, many of us simply forget about them and get caught in the day to day running of our businesses.

Setting goals and achieving them is an organic process that requires constant attention and regular adjustments. If you place your goal at the beginning of the year and don't look at it again until June, the goal is unlikely to be successful.

Working on a goal daily may be impossible, but you should always work on your goal at least once a week and review / Measure the success of your goal so far. This will give you an indication if you are on target to achieve your end of year goal.

 TIP: Create a schedule planner (I use Google Calendar) and set one day aside to work on your goals. I will be writing a future blog post on this subject in the coming weeks. To be notified when this blog post is released, please sign up for my newsletter below.

4. Not being Flexible with your goals.

Structure and consistency are essential elements for setting your goals, but you need to be flexible. This will allow you to take advantage of significant opportunities to further your achievement and help you reach your goal more quickly or to a better end result than you imagined.

 You still want to create an action-oriented system that pushes you forward, making progress toward your goals every single day, you still need to be open to changes that may work in your favour.

5. Not Celebrating Your Milestones

When setting our goals, more often than not, we focus on the end result. Putting milestones and celebrating each achievement along the way will help you build momentum and confidence to push on to the big finale.

 I hope you found this post helpful and informative. If you have any goal tips you would like to share with other readers, please leave them in the comments below.