Prioritizing Goals And Tasks – Small Business Development 3 of 6
Now that you have goals for your small business in 2017…we can move on to the next step! Prioritizing goals and tasks to achieve your small business’s initiatives according to your plan is so important.
Right now in our company, we are extremely excited about all of our plans for this year. Even though we have made a timeline and are going to track our progress, it can be hard to decide which to tackle first! Here is our simple advice for putting things in order of priority.
An example of some goals may be:
- Creating a new recruitment campaign
- Growing sales by 10%
- Coaching employees on a weekly or monthly basis
- Changing a procedure for accounting
Which Goal Solves Your Biggest Challenge? – Prioritizing Goals
As an example, let’s say that your biggest challenge is that you can’t read your P & L accurately due to the way you label your accounting. This is the biggest challenge because it makes it hard to manage your costs and know what your numbers are. When you don’t know your numbers, it is impossible to make accurate budgets or spending decisions. In this case, changing your accounting procedure (or timeline, software, or coding) may be the first thing to start on.
Which Goal Is Easiest To Accomplish? – Prioritizing Goals
This may sound like taking the easy route, but that’s only one way to look at. So many times something in our company could be improved if we spent one afternoon on it. Given our examples above, I would determine that beginning to coach employees could be started out easily. Set up 30 minutes or a working lunch and get it going! If you set aside just one hour to make a schedule of when you can meet with individuals, you will be on your way in no time! If you focus on your most time-consuming goal first, you may not meet with your first employee until June.
Which Goal Are You Dreading The Most? – Prioritizing Goals
Just because you are excited about the goal, doesn’t mean you don’t dread the process or the subject matter. When I look at the list above, creating a new recruitment campaign sounds the most daunting. Not only because some aspects aren’t creative and fun, but because there are a lot of tasks and collaboration involved. From brain storming, typing up rough drafts, getting testimonials, putting together brochures or video…the list goes on and on! It may be a good idea to start with this one, not only because it will take up time, but also because if you are dreading it, it may end up not happening!
In closing, there are many ways to go about things. The important thing is getting started and following your timeline.
