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Setting Operational Goals

Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Many budding, and often existing entrepreneurs fall into the trap of always setting goals and judging success by monetary measures. It is really easy to fall into this trap, after all, at the end of the day the easiest way to see how you did is to see what happened to your bank account. Of course you have to keep tabs on your money supply and how you are doing, but it seems a lot of people put exuberant amounts of time and faith into projections and daily, weekly, or monthly profit. The problem I see with this are two fold. Real operational progress is not being made while obsessively worrying about the amount of money the business brings in, and the mentality often times discourages making moves that would create long-term sustainable growth.

In order to combat this, I challenge you to create some goals that deal with your operation, and not just with the monetary results. After all, you have the control to effect your operations on a daily basis. For example, f you are in the content business, set a goal to write x amount of articles a day/week. Maybe you could create a goal to go out and bring in 5 links a day. Perhaps you would like to add one more data source or feature to your website each week. All of these things can be easily quantified and obtained through your own means.

Now once you come up with some goals, record how you do against these goals. In fact, you might want to write down some sort of reward for achieving the goals for a month or some time period. I find that this works better than just worrying about earnings. Mostly because it gives you something to determine if your business is growing or not, and is not such a rollercoaster ride as traffic, earnings, or even profit typically is. Plus, if you set your operational goals right, they should act as a freight train to meeting your long-term monetary goals.

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