Financial Goal Setting

In last weeks Blog, we discussed the importance of setting resolutions for your Business to establish targets. This was to assist in finding what outcome we want to achieve. This week aims to follow on from the resolutions to assist in turning them into goals. 

As a trained Physiotherapist, Sophie spends a lot of time in her health role, setting goals with patients to establish a treatment plan whether they come in due to injury or just to better themselves. In the financial setting, we can always better our situation but we need to know what that means for us. 

When setting a goal, it is important to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. We must ensure the goal we set is specific to what we want to achieve. We must have a measure to know whether or not we have reached our goal. We must set something that is attainable, to prevent us giving up from the start. We must choose a relevant goal to enable us to focus. We must set a clear time-frame to prevent procrastination. 

The first resolution we set can easily be turned into a SMART goal. ‘We will achieve a net profit of $52,000 for January to December 2021.’ The specificity is Profit, the measure is $52,000, the attainability is hard to determine (as we don’t know the business situation), it is relevant to building a thriving business and the timeline is set for 12 months. It is important to set the target higher but not so high that it is not achievable as this will assist you to work hard to achieve it. 

The next step is to break this into manageable chunks. If you find these smaller steps are too difficult or easy, you will want to re-assess your goal. Breaking the goal down looks like:  
– Quarterly Target: $13,000 net Profit 
– Monthly Target: $4,500 net Profit 
– Weekly Target: $1,000 net Profit

5 simple tips to help you stay on track to achieve your goals: 

1. Be precise when setting timeframes and amounts – this will help determine whether you have achieved your goal

2. Set priorities and choose a main goal to focus on – this ensures you and your team are focussed on the same target

3. Write your goal down and put it somewhere you see it everyday – this helps to maintain your motivation to achieve your goal and reconfirm it every day 

4. Tell someone or the world (via facebook) as this puts your intention out and makes you more accountable to achieving it

5. Break it down – this will make it less daunting and give you steps to achieving it

We hope you have a wonderful time goal setting and if you have any questions or want assistance please contact Sophie or Graham to book in a time.

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