It’s a new year and we’re feeling fresh and ready for a fantastic year ahead! To make sure that’s exactly how it turns out we’ve got some tips on setting goals and how to plan to ensure you achieve them. Lets get started!
Goals
Setting goals helps you to plan, prioritise and focus your time. Goals also help you to reflect on your success as you see progress on what you’re aiming to achieve. They can be short or long term, and in fact it can be useful and motivating to break down a long term goal into shorter goals or milestones to achieve along the way.
Your vision and strategy
To develop your goals, you first need to determine your overall vision and strategy for what you want to achieve long term. Basically, think of two or three things you’d like to do in the next one, two or five years to improve your business. This will give you direction on how to spend your time.
Set goals
There’s a reason SMART goals are talked about everywhere. This goal setting framework is simple and effective, especially for larger projects.
- Specific: Your goal should be clearly defined and easy to understand. For example, if you want to improve your rebooking rate, do you need to do this across all your services or only some?
- Measurable: You need to know when you’ve achieved your goal or how you’re progressing towards it, i.e. your rebooking rate is 40% and you want it to be 60%.
- Agreed upon: Get agreement on your goal with everyone who needs to be involved in helping to achieve it. This could be your salon manager, your team, and your business coach.
- Realistic: Make sure your goal is achievable with the resources, knowledge and time you have available. Putting unrealistic pressure on yourself to get more done rarely ends in goals being achieved.
- Time-based: Set a realistic timeframe to achieve your goal. This should allow you enough time to achieve the goal but not too much time that it causes you to lose focus on the goal.
Write down your goals
Once you’ve established your goals, write them down and put them on display somewhere prominent. You should have a constant reminder of what you’re working towards. This could be on your wall as a poster, stuck to your fridge or the background on your devices!
Planning
Having your goals in place makes planning much easier. It’s tempting to jump right in and start doing things, however taking the time to organise and plan is a really important part of time management. Research shows that when you have a plan, you’re less likely to procrastinate and more likely to get things done.
Long term planning
Turn your goals into a long term plan of how you’re going to get there. This will help you ensure you’re working on the right things to move you in the right direction. As the saying goes, a goal without a plan is just a dream.
Find your starting point
Look at how you’re currently performing in relation to each of your goals and determine what you’ll need to do to achieve them. Use the reporting tools you have available to you. For instance your salon and spa software should have your key business metrics and social media tools will give you reports on the success of your social media activity. You might have to do some extra research too, for example, talking to your staff, business partners or accountant.
Break it down
Once you know what your starting point is, you can start to see what you need to change, stop or introduce for you to achieve your goals. Turn this into a series of tasks or projects. For example, if your goal is to be able to hire another stylist, you need to ensure you will have the client base, income, and resources such as space to support that stylist.
Put in a timeline
Spread the actions throughout the time frame you have chosen. When it comes to bigger projects, make sure you break them down into individual tasks with shorter time frames. It’ll make the project seem more achievable and allow you to complete part of the project even if you only have half an hour to spare. Now you have a monthly plan so you can work towards your goal over the year, rather than become overwhelmed with how you’ll achieve your big goals.
Daily planning
As well as planning for the long term, it’s important to plan each day to ensure you have time to work on your long term goals. It’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day so having a daily task list or planner is a helpful tool.
So now’s the time to sit down, start setting your goals and plan on how you’ll achieve them. Use this as a guide to help you through the process and we wish you all the best for the year!
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