How Do You Set Achievable Yet Ambitious Goals for Your Business?
Small Biz Leader
How Do You Set Achievable Yet Ambitious Goals for Your Business?
Navigating the delicate balance between ambition and practicality, we've gathered insights from eight entrepreneurs, including CEOs and Founders, on setting goals that push the envelope while remaining attainable. From setting leveraged goals for long-term benefits to strategizing ambitious goals with actionable steps, discover how these leaders craft their roadmaps to success.
- Set Leveraged Goals for Long-Term Benefits
- Reverse-Engineer Goals from Failure Points
- Break Down Vision into Actionable Milestones
- Combine Ambition with Practical Monthly Benchmarks
- Focus on Daily Steps for Yearly Goals
- Balance Market Understanding with Internal Capabilities
- Involve Team in Goal-Setting and Execution
- Strategize Ambitious Goals with Actionable Steps
Set Leveraged Goals for Long-Term Benefits
As a CEO and mother of three (including a newborn), I've had to be very intentional about the goals I set. I aim for goals that are ambitious yet sustainable, so I focus on what I call "leveraged goals"—objectives that, once achieved, make my business and life easier and better, not just today but for every week in the future.
Setting leveraged goals is truly the key to advancing my business while effectively balancing my personal and professional lives.
For example, when my husband and I wrote our book, it wasn't just about sharing our insights. We saw it as a strategic move to enhance our credibility and build long-term trust with our audience. Over time, the book has become a powerful tool that continually attracts new clients and opportunities, which allowed me to take time off for maternity leave without sacrificing the growth of our business.
Reverse-Engineer Goals from Failure Points
When setting goals for my business, I don't start with a traditional vision of where I want to be. Instead, I reverse-engineer from a hypothetical failure point. I imagine a scenario five years down the line where the business has collapsed.
I then meticulously analyze the reasons for that failure: Was it due to market saturation, poor customer retention, or operational inefficiencies? This exercise forces me to confront the harshest realities and weakest links in my strategy.
Once I have a detailed map of potential pitfalls, I set goals that directly counteract these failures.
For example, if customer retention is a likely downfall, I set a goal not just to improve retention rates by 10%, but to fundamentally reinvent the customer experience to make it irreplaceable.
This approach ensures that my goals are both ambitious and deeply grounded in reality because they are born from the ashes of potential failure.
By planning backward from failure rather than forward from success, I create goals that are not only ambitious but also vital to the survival and growth of the business.
Break Down Vision into Actionable Milestones
I believe that goals should stretch the boundaries of what’s possible but remain grounded enough to be realistically attainable. This approach ensures that the team remains motivated while also pushing the business forward in meaningful ways.
To achieve this balance, I start by identifying the long-term vision for the company. I ask myself, "Where do we want to be in the next few years?" Once the big picture is clear, I break it down into smaller, actionable milestones that can be measured over shorter periods—typically quarterly or yearly. These milestones serve as stepping stones toward the larger vision, each challenging enough to inspire innovation and effort but also backed by concrete strategies and resources to make them achievable.
For example, when I launched the Bible Chat App, our long-term vision was to become the leading AI-driven Bible study tool, helping millions of users engage with the scriptures in a personalized and meaningful way. This was an ambitious goal, especially considering the competitive landscape of religious apps. To make this goal achievable, we broke it down into specific, measurable targets. In the first year, our focus was on building a robust AI-powered chatbot that could accurately answer user queries about the Bible. We set a goal to have 100,000 active users within the first 12 months—a challenging target, but one that we believed was attainable with the right marketing and development efforts.
We approached this goal by first ensuring the product was built to meet user needs and then leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT to create compelling marketing content. We used data analytics to continuously monitor our progress, allowing us to pivot and adjust our strategies as needed.
This experience reinforced the importance of setting goals that are both visionary and practical. By having a clear long-term vision and breaking it down into smaller, manageable steps, we were able to maintain momentum and stay on track. It’s a method I continue to use, ensuring that each goal serves as a building block toward our broader mission while remaining within the realm of what’s possible with our current resources and capabilities.
Combine Ambition with Practical Monthly Benchmarks
When setting goals for RecurPost, I always start by evaluating our current capabilities and resources, but I push the boundaries of what we think is possible. For example, when we first launched, we set a goal to grow our user base by 300% in the first year. At the time, this seemed incredibly ambitious given our small team and limited marketing budget. However, by focusing on targeted outreach and refining our product based on user feedback, we not only met but exceeded this goal. It taught me that while goals should stretch your limits, they must also be grounded in a clear understanding of your business's strengths and market opportunities.
One of the key lessons I've learned is the importance of breaking down these ambitious goals into smaller, actionable steps. For instance, to achieve our growth target, we set monthly benchmarks for new sign-ups, customer retention, and feature rollouts. This approach keeps the team focused and motivated, ensuring that we're consistently moving towards the larger goal. Each small win builds momentum, making the ultimate objective not just a target, but an inevitable outcome.
Focus on Daily Steps for Yearly Goals
My approach to setting goals stems from a strong dissatisfaction with how most people typically handle them. Often, goals are set out of a place of shame, anxiety, or guilt—reactions to not achieving similar goals in the past. We tend to hastily choose new goals without fully considering the steps required to reach them. My process, on the other hand, emphasizes discipline and strategic planning.
I start with the end in mind. If it's a yearly goal, I first set a specific date for when I want to achieve it. Then, I work backward, breaking that goal down into manageable chunks. What does the goal look like in September? In June? In March? What milestones should I hit by the end of January, just one month from now? I continue breaking it down all the way to the daily level, asking myself: What needs to happen today to ensure I'm on track tomorrow?
This method accomplishes a few key things:
Clarity Along the Way: By breaking down the goal into smaller steps, I maintain a clear path forward at every stage.
Reliance on Consistency and Discipline: I focus on micro-habits that build on each other over time, ensuring steady progress.
Focus on the Immediate: Instead of obsessing over the finish line, I concentrate on what’s immediately ahead, which keeps me from feeling overwhelmed and helps me stay on track.
In the past, I fell into the trap of only focusing on the big picture—the ultimate goal—and lost sight of the necessary steps to get there. This often led to falling off course. Now, by breaking my goals down into actionable, short-term tasks, I ensure that I'm consistently making progress, which ultimately leads to achieving even the most ambitious objectives. This approach has been a game-changer in my entrepreneurial journey, keeping me disciplined and focused while moving toward success.
Balance Market Understanding with Internal Capabilities
Setting achievable yet ambitious goals for a business is about striking a balance between pushing the boundaries and staying grounded in reality. As an entrepreneur, I've found that the key to this balance lies in a clear understanding of both the market and the internal capabilities of the business. For example, at SpeakWrite, when we were aiming to scale our services to a broader range of industries, we set a goal to increase our client base by 25% within a year. This was ambitious, given our current resources at the time, but achievable because we had just invested in process improvements and team expansions that would support this growth.
To ensure the goal was both ambitious and within reach, we broke it down into smaller, actionable steps. We started by analyzing our current operations to identify areas where we could increase efficiency without sacrificing quality. This involved optimizing our transcription processes and implementing new technology to handle larger volumes of work more effectively. We also focused on targeted marketing efforts to reach industries that were aligned with our strengths, such as the legal and law enforcement sectors, where our quick turnaround and accuracy were highly valued.
We then set milestones along the way—such as securing a certain number of new contracts per quarter—to monitor our progress and make adjustments as needed. This approach allowed us to stay focused and motivated, while also being flexible enough to pivot if something wasn’t working as planned.
By the end of the year, not only did we meet our 25% growth target, but we also laid a stronger foundation for continued expansion. The lesson here is that setting goals should involve a deep dive into both the external market conditions and the internal resources available, ensuring that your goals stretch your capabilities without overextending them. Ambitious goals keep the team motivated and drive innovation, but they need to be rooted in a solid understanding of what is realistically achievable given the current business landscape.
Involve Team in Goal-Setting and Execution
I set ambitious yet achievable goals by communicating clearly and involving my team. Everyone feels more invested and understands our direction. Last year, we aimed to grow our customer base. Instead of just announcing this, I held a meeting where we talked about our challenges and planned steps, like better marketing and improved customer service.
Strategize Ambitious Goals with Actionable Steps
Setting achievable yet ambitious goals for my business is like planting seeds. Just like a seed needs the right conditions to grow, our goals need the right mindset and strategy to flourish. A few years ago, when my business was struggling to gain traction and I felt overwhelmed, I focused on a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), doubling my revenue in 12 months. And to achieve it, instead of aiming for the moon right away, I broke my vision into smaller, actionable steps (increase my customer base by 25% in three months).
I focused on what I could realistically achieve in the next quarter while still pushing the boundaries of my ambition. This approach transformed my mindset. It shifted my focus from fear of failure to excitement about progress. Each small win fueled my motivation and built momentum. Ambition is effective when it is strategic. When you set goals that challenge you but are still within reach, you create a roadmap to success. You celebrate milestones along the way, which keeps you engaged and inspired.
