Are Your Small Business Goals Too Small?
Are Your Small Business Goals Too Small?
When you conceived of your small business, your goals may have been nothing more than an image of yourself standing behind a market stall chatting to customers; or getting a story in the local newspaper. You liked the idea of being in business, and you had a good product, but you never had a goal in a strict business sense.
But to be really successful you need to have firm goals, and the bigger the goals are, the more you will keep pushing yourself and your business to achieve them. Here are some ways of thinking that can help you break out into new markets and make your business a vital entity.
Goals and how to achieve them in business
It’s not enough to set a goal, reaching it requires a number of steps and you have to outline these to yourself and commit to them. Let’s say you decide you want to make $50,000 in the next financial year. To do that, you need more advertising. You can’t afford paid advertising yet, so you need a social media campaign targeted to your customers. There’s no point dropping a mass of information on a Facebook site or a blog and leaving it. Social media is all about constant interactions you have with other people, it’s about your presence being felt on a regular basis.
So to reach your financial goal, you need more advertising, and to do that you have to commit to an hour of social media each day. To achieve that you need to have photos and stories or anecdotes to tell about your products. So to achieve the hour a day, you’ll need to spend time planning photos and writing down stories that show how great your product is. Gradually you build up a number of daily routines that all contribute to your ultimate goal of $50,000.
How to make a bigger impression in business
To free up time for social media, you need to better organise the way you interact with customers. If Monday morning is your social media time, you can use a call forwarding service to channel calls to another employee. With Zintel’s eReceptionist Day Routing and Time Routing, you can set incoming calls to be routed to another location (an employee or voicemail) during the time you are unavailable. So customer calls are answered even when you are busy.
The way it works is that Zintel’s numbers latch on to your existing mobile or landline and provide a digital receptionist service. So you get the advantages of a 1300 number or 1800 number (i.e. professional image, customer confidence) as well as additional services that make your small business seem bigger.
Setting big goals – $50,000 rather than $5,000! – means you are pushing yourself and your business out of your comfort zone. But that’s not as terrifying as it sounds, and the more you do it, the more you will discover the strengths and skills you didn’t think you had.