When you run a company, setting your business goals and objectives is just as important as meeting them. There are several questions a business owner should ask themselves.
What’s the big picture?
Why am I in this business?
What am I trying to accomplish?
These questions, and many more, can help you establish your goals by defining a clear path to set yourself up for success.
At Home Designer Marketing, we strive to help businesses like yours develop a clear home design business plan. One of the ways we do this is by walking you through how to set and track your business goals.
When setting business goals, it’s essential to look at the big picture. Setting goals and objectives in increments like this provide stepping stones, or as we like to call them, quarterly rocks.
The following information will help you identify your goals, plan them out, and work your way towards achieving them for ultimate business success.
The first and most crucial step in setting and achieving business goals is determining your core values and the focus of your business. This step is where the questions we mentioned above come into play the most.
Why are you running this business, and what is the purpose of it?
In cases of interior design business goals, you’re likely driving an internal passion of yours and reaching out to help others with that gift. But your core values and focus should go deeper than that.
For example, as a marketing business for interior designers, our core purpose and focus is to help clients schedule appointments and expand their business. We want to help you grow your business, and that’s critical to us.
Likewise, you have your own focus for your business. For some, excellent customer service might be one thing that’s extremely important. However, customer service itself is not a unique attribute.
This is an excellent example of how you can use your core values to drive your business goals. If you value customer service, you might set a goal to achieve a particular customer rating by the end of year one. By the end of year three, you may strive to have one of the top customer service ratings in the industry.
And perhaps by year 10, your goal is to rank number one for customer service.
Other core values to identify within your business may include creative problem solving, quality assurance, continually striving to be better, accountability, or mutual respect among team members and clients.
An interior design business plan and landscape design business plan should both always include goals and objectives. Let’s jump back to the 1, 3 and 10-year targets and what that looks like to make things easy.
Making a 10-year plan is intimidating, and ten years seems like it’s forever away. That’s why we break it down like this. In fact, we even break down the 1-year target into quarterly targets - all of which include 1 to 3 rocks.
So after you’ve identified your core values and focus, determine your 10-year target. Then, take a look at your 3-year mark and figure out where you need to be by then to make your 10-year goal.
Finally, think through what you need to accomplish this year to get to your 3-year target.
Once we get to this point, we’re going to break things down even further into your Q1 through Q4 objectives.
Within your Q1 goal, think of 1 to 3 things you need to prioritize to help you reach your quarterly target. Visualize where you want to be by the end of the year, and use that goal to drive your creative and strategic planning processes.
By creating your goals in this step-by-step process, you set yourself up for success. Rather than striving for that 10-year mark with no guidance, no direction, and no set path, you’re taking things one step at a time.
Not only is this much easier to accomplish, but also it keeps you on a straight and narrow path to personal and business success.
Each quarter can contain the same kinds of questions, but with different answers.
What does your business look like?
What does your staff look like?
How is your profit growing?
Regardless of your specific goals, everyone needs to have a clear path directing and keeping them on track.
When setting your goals for the quarter, year, three years, etc., it’s important that they are clear. Meaning you can easily track your progress and see results.
If you simply say, “I want to grow my business,” that’s not a clear goal.
Instead, you should try to be specific by saying, “I want to add three to five more specific services by the end of the year,” or, “I want to increase my customer base by 10% this quarter.”
The easiest way to set measurable goals is to use the SMART method:
The acronym SMART allows you to remember to keep your goals detailed, qualifiable, realistic, mission-focused, and deadline-driven.
At Home Designer Marketing, we pride ourselves on offering proven techniques and valuable marketing solutions to drive your interior design business plan and landscape design business plan. Our group workshops are designed with you in mind to provide a wide array of resources including specific guidance in Marketing, Sales, Operations and Finance.
Sign up for one of our free group workshops today to learn more about marketing your interior design and landscape design business.
You can also book a free 1-hour consultation and to discuss your business goals and objectives and how we might be able to help you achieve them.
