The seven steps small-business owners need to take to set their goals and intentions for 2024.
Have you set your business goals for 2024 yet? Don’t worry if you haven’t. We don’t all have to have the plan set in stone by the first week of January.
Before you set your goals and intentions for the year, it is important to have a big dream in business. We’ve been raised in a culture where it is often said that we are not allowed to share our wishes or dreams, as then they may not happen. Let’s reframe this myth and start sharing your dreams, intentions and goals. Declare your dreams.
Career counsellor and author Barbara Sher says we have to change our common understanding that we so often fail to make our dreams reality because of bad attitude, negative thinking or lack of effort. It is isolation that is killing dreams. As isolation and division grow in our more and more online world, commit to your dreams by sharing them with friends, peers, family, mentors – everybody!
Three tips for setting your goals
There are so many ways to set goals and intentions, and there are no right or wrong ways.
Three tips for setting your business goals and intentions are:
- Make sure that you believe in your goals and intentions.
- Use your senses to anchor your dream in your day to day. Identify the senses that work best for you. If you are more visual, create your vision board. If you are more auditory, record your goals and intentions or record or listen to affirmations.
- Be specific, so you can guide yourself towards what you want. Like Google Maps: Intuitively, it will redirect you through traffic etc., but you’ll know where you are going.
Seven steps for setting goals and intentions for 2024
This is the process hundreds of people in business use to set goals and intentions yearly, with great success.
Step 1: Reflect and celebrate
If you haven’t done it yet, write down everything your business has achieved in the past 12 months. Here are a few prompts to help you reflect and identify where your business is now:
- What are you most proud of from the last year? What were some highs and lows of your business from this last year?
- What did you learn from this last year?
- What should you celebrate?
- What worked and what didn’t work last year in your business? Review your branding, your offerings, your products and services and write down your findings. This is a diagnostic, an audit like the one that is done in strategy consulting.
Step 2: Make space
Embrace the Marie Kondo principle of removing what’s not sparking joy, what’s not working, what’s not aligned. What are you letting go that is not aligned with your business? You need to make space as you enter a New Year and set new intentions. You can’t start from a full cup.
Step 3: Pause and remember your vision
We tend to get caught up in comparison syndrome, but taking a step back to pause and reconnect with the vision of our business is essential. Remember what matters.
Some prompts to help you:
- What is your overarching vision?
- What is your why, purpose, mission?
- What do you love about what you do?
Step 4: Identify a word or words guiding your intentions and goals
Focus on where you would like to see your business go in the next 12 months. Where would you like to be a year from now when you are writing your 2025 goals and intentions? Can you think of a word or words to represent this?
Step 5: List your intentions for key areas of your business
The eight areas of business that you need to consider are:
- Profit model: How do you make money?
- Network: How do you connect with others in creating value for your business?
- Structure: How do you organise and align your business, assets and talents?
- Process: How is the work done?
- Offering: What are you selling, what products and functionality are you offering?
- Channel: How do you go to market and deliver your offerings to customers and users?
- Brand: How do you represent your business and offerings?
- Customer engagement: How do you create and maintain compelling interactions?
Take a moment to write down intentions in each area of your life. Sitting in a quiet and sacred space for it could be powerful.
Step 6: Formulate goals, tangible aligned actions, and steps
For each area, I’d encourage you to write down a maximum of five objectives – tangible and actionable aligned actions – so you can measure whether you are doing and being each one.
For every goal, please take the time to reconnect with why you are committing to it and add specific key performance indicators (KPIs), answering the question, ‘What does success look like?’, to help you review during the year. Some goals and action steps are interdependent.
For instance, if in 2024, you’d like to create a subscription profit model for your business to grow whilst working less and being more present with your family, then in your goal write how many subscriptions you’d like to sell and by when. Then your actionable steps can be:
- Modelling this new profit model.
- Developing this offering and testing it (linked to offering areas).
- Recruiting a dedicated resource to lead this new offering (linked to structure).
Step 7: Synthesise your three most important priorities for the year
Take time to read everything you’ve written before and synthesise it all in the three most important things that will make your year. It is about simplifying your goals and intentions in a few words. Keep it simple, don’t overthink it.
Final thoughts
Your 2024 goals and intentions make up a living document. It is essential to review it regularly, whether it is weekly, monthly or quarterly. We are navigating in an uncertain world so it is essential that we regularly adjust our goals and intentions.
This article first appeared in issue 43 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
