January is a time when many professionals and businesses set goals and company resolutions for the year ahead. However, even the most well-intentioned may lose sight of their goals as the year goes on.
The key to following through with your business’s big annual goals is measuring your progress each week, month and quarter. To help you do this, nine members of Young Entrepreneur Council each provided an effective solution for tracking progress on your department-specific goals over the next 12 months.
Young Entrepreneur Council members offer goal tracking tips for the new year.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Break Down Goals
When our team sets yearly goals, the key to success is to build plans around them—not just set lofty goals that are a year out. We start with breaking the year’s goals into quarterly, monthly and sometimes weekly milestones. This allows for attainable and trackable checkpoints along the way to ensure success. – Torrey Tayenaka, Sparkhouse
2. Utilize A Task App
On Asana or any task app, come up with daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly goals that will help you and the whole team in reaching them. It is very hard to track goals, and that is why it’s important to use sheets or apps to keep track of where you’re going and what you should prioritize along the way. – Daisy Jing, Banish
3. Consider Three Perspectives
There is no point in setting up goals that you will then ignore for the rest of the year. The cure for this is to use the magic number three. Set targets for the business from a profit perspective, a client service perspective and then an internal employee perspective. This way, you have hit upon the major areas, and all are attended to in a holistic way. – Maria Thimothy, OneIMS
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4. Display Your Goals
One tactic that’s been effective at our company is writing our goals for the year down and hanging them up where everyone can see them. This way, we all see the goals every day and have them out in the open to measure ourselves against and continually remind ourselves of. Additionally, we continually mention these goals in our status meetings to see where we’re at and track toward them. – Nic DeAngelo, Saint Investment Group
5. Use Key Performance Indicators
I suggest using key performance indicators (KPIs) to track team progress. First, choose quarterly goals for teams and individual employees and create a spreadsheet. Next, have your team record their progress each week on the sheet. This strategy allows you to see how your business is doing at a glance. You’ll also be able to identify areas for improvement, which will help you meet your goals. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
6. Celebrate Each Milestone
Whether it’s in life or business, the best way to achieve the goals you set is to break them down into smaller tasks and then celebrate each one when you meet them. As you check each milestone off your list, you gain momentum and confidence that you will indeed meet your goal. Taking the time to celebrate each small win also adds fuel to the fire and keeps you on track. – Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker
7. Create Friendly Competitions
Turning goals into friendly internal competitions (who can beat a particular mark first or by the most significant margin, etc.) with motivating rewards will ensure that there are multiple parties invested in tracking the results and metrics involved with that goal. The competition will also naturally help to encourage departments to meet these specific goals. – Salvador Ordorica, The Spanish Group LLC
8. Communicate Regularly
Tracking progress from goals is arguably more important than setting the actual goal. We track progress via a project management system and regular meetings. Communication among the team is the most important component to achieving progress on goal setting. Our team accomplishes this by alternating meeting types: weekly, quarterly and annual. We document, track progress, color code and reflect. – Libby Rothschild, Dietitian Boss
9. Set Calendar Reminders
Each month a calendar reminder should pop up with a message that says, “Are you on track for your goal?” It’s easy to get caught up with day-to-day life and lose sight of our overall goals. You can “snooze” on the reminder from time to time, but having your goal appear in writing helps to keep you on track and ensure that you can stop hitting “snooze” and hit “complete” before the year is over! – Bill Mulholland, ARC Relocation
