Is Keeping it Simple Smart when setting Business Goals?

We've got a whole load of tips we could share with you to help you achieve your business goals but let's start with some fundamentals, which we find really helpful when advising businesses – Keep it SIMPLE and SMART. 

Let's start by keeping it simple... 

Often we use the 90 DAY SPRINT METHODOLOGY. This helps breakdown your big audacious goals into achievable outcomes in a short burst. The sprint should be shared with your team and include improvements in all aspects of your business to help align to your big audacious goal.

The 90 Day Sprint will help you break down your large, long term objectives (or goals), into smaller, highly manageable chunks ie. steps. This often means you are working on your long term objectives regularly and continue to improve your business every quarter bringing closer to your vision.  

The 90 Day Sprint is about staying focused, step by step.

Having a clear understanding of what everyone should focus on is critical to the success of any organisation and 90 days is a measurable and manageable time frame. 

The 90 Day Sprint is about staying focused, step by step. It’s about breaking down large, complex goals into discrete, highly manageable chunks. It’s about identifying milestones that we want to achieve as we complete our daily and weekly steps toward accomplishing our main outcome.

This modern methodology can not only help you evaluate the effectiveness of your strategies from the previous quarter, it can help you set your sights on new goals and objectives for the quarter ahead to help you set yourself up for business success. It will extract your pain points that might linger in your business and bring to light new opportunities.

Each quarter concentrate on one bigger goal through different divisions. While we're not saying a company should only work towards solving one problem at a time, it helps everyone on the team to understand what their main focus is and where they need to be by the end of the quarter.

Don't be surprised if some of the steps can take longer then 90 days. Whilst you are keeping things simple so you can achieve your goals, it's likely that any pain points discovered during the 90 Day Sprint may result in more work to be done in the following period. This is a good thing, it means you're ironing out issues that prevent you from achieving your goals.

Where does smart fit in?

SMART is an ingenious acronym because it is very easy to remember. It stands for:

The reason SMART fits so well with SIMPLE is because you are creating goals that are very achievable in a short period of time. The problem with long-term goals is they are often so far away, that it’s hard to know where to start, and the goal’s pay-off seems distant and unreachable. Short-term goals provide a solution to this problem and that is the main reason why we recommend to play smart and fit your simple goals into your 90 Day Sprint. 

Taking time to check and analyse your progress every 3 months / 90-days is a great way to retain focus. It offers you the opportunity to pat yourself on the back for your efforts so far, and gives you the chance to change or reset any unrealistic goals.

Thinking about whether your goals are realistic....

By now you should be keeping things simple and smart.... you are quite comfortable that your goals are achievable and realistic, but you and/or your team are struggling with kicking goals. 

Completing goals can involve some struggle if you have planned for too much in the one quarter.  Be aware of overload and the capacity of your team to juggle "business as usual" with completing out of scope goals. Take the time to re-assess on a regular basis your 'roadmap to success' in case it's too busy.  Remember this is not a set and forget activity it requires regular input in order to achieve success.