Free Annual Business Goals

It is highly recommended to create annual business goals. In order to do so, you always want to reflect on the previous year first. First year in business? Your first year’s annual goals will be projections. What do you believe your business is capable of doing? Then, you will create a plan to achieve it.

Analyzing the previous year:

1. Success – What are some of your achievements? What areas did you really excel in?
2. Failures – What did you miss that you wanted to achieve? What areas did you not have goals set for in the previous year that you now want to pay attention to?
3. Areas of improvement – What areas could be better? Maybe you hit these areas, but just barely. Or, maybe you hit them but know you can do so much better. It could be areas that weren’t necessarily a failure because you were so close to achieving these areas. But, you didn’t quite succeed. These are those “gray areas”.
4. Overall Year End – Reflected on the year overall. How do you feel about the year in total? Good, ok, not so good?

Setting goals for the new year:

1. Come up with some goals based off your previous year or even new goals you didn’t have the previous year. Some common areas of business goals are sales, social media, operations (shipping, email response time, accounting, organization, hiring, etc), and customer relations (new customers, returning customers, etc.).
2. Once you create the goal, come up with a plan of how you will achieve said goal.
3. At the end of the year, or when you hit the goal if before year end, reflect on the outcome. Did you achieve the goal? Were you close to achieving the goal? Do you still have work to do?