Setting SMART goals for your small business

As a business owner or manager, your life is plenty busy. Do you have time for long term goals? For that matter, do you have time to set long term goals for your staff? From revenue goals to goals for improving your business’s reputation, it’s always possible to set effective and attainable goals for your team!

It just takes the right strategy.

Long term goals are critical to your business, but their importance is not always clear. For many business owners, focusing on the short term, urgent goals and tasks seems more important. But it’s essential that you understand the difference between urgent vs important, while realizing that they are not the same.

For example, in your personal life, exercise is important but not urgent. If you don’t workout today, you won’t be automatically unhealthy tomorrow. But, as everyone knows, you should still exercise regularly for long term health.

The same goes for goals for your employees. Certain tasks, such as learning a new skill, may not be urgent, but they are important. Teaching all employees how to take phone orders is not urgent when business is slow, but when a busy weekend or holiday season comes around, it will be beneficial to have versatile employees who can handle virtually anything, including taking phone orders.

But what makes a good goal for your employees, and how can you ensure these goals are met?

SMART goal setting

Setting goals is one thing, but in order for them to be effective, you need to set the right goals in the right manner. One of the best strategies is to use the SMART goal system.

Specific: The goal should not be broad, but should focus on one specific aspect.

Measurable: There should be some sort of measurable number attached to the goal.

Attainable: Goals can be challenging, but they should also attainable, not unreasonable.

Relevant: The goals should be relevant to the job or the workplace.

Time: Set a due date for all goals to keep everyone accountable. 

Example of a SMART goal for restaurant servers:

“Increase appetizer sales by 20% by the end of the year.”

This goal has all the SMART elements. It is specific (just appetizers, nothing else) and perfectly measurable (20% increase). It is not a huge jump, which seems attainable. It’s obviously relevant to a server’s job, and comes with a completion time for the end of the year.

SMART goals in action

Goals can come in many forms. They can be directly related to sales, revenue and profit, or they can be long term goals that enhance your business, like an improvement to the customer experience or the happiness and loyalty of employees.

Many goals, of course, will be money driven. For example, HotelTechReport suggests the goal of increasing “average non-rooms revenue per guest by $37 by end of Q4.” This goal has clear advantages to the revenue of a business.

For restaurants, a long term goal might include “increase net sales by 5% month over month,” as suggested by Toast, a POS software provider. For retail, one of the main goals, as suggested by Reinvent Your Hustle, should focus on the customer experience, which is more important than ever before.

There are, as we mentioned, goals that are not directly tied to sales and revenue. Setup My Hotel, a hospitality web portal, discusses a variety of hotel goals. Included in their list of examples is a reduction in check-in and check-out time by two minutes. (They don’t establish a deadline for this goal, however!) Reducing these times would not improve cash flow, at least not immediately. But it could improve the overall guest experience and make lines move much faster during busy check-in and check-out periods.

Certain goals can apply to all businesses regardless of the industry. MYVA360 suggests goals that improve the customer experience. They suggest “answering messages faster,” as a possible goal, but to make the goal fit with the SMART system, a better wording would be to “reduce message-response time by 50% by  the end of October.” 

To ensure that most goals are met, be strategic with your presentation and delivery. Giving employees some say over their goals will help, as it gives them personal responsibility. Sticking to the SMART systems will also help, as it ensures goals are attainable, which is critical if you want buy-in from your staff. 

Meet your hiring goals with Snagajob!

If you have personal goals for hiring, visit snagajob.com. We can help increase your hiring efficiency and retention, allowing you to focus on the important tasks of running your day-to-day operations and the long term tasks that are critical to your business.