Small Business Saturday Blog

Small Business Champion Series From Rich Brady ... Setting Business Goals

Monday, June 18 at 09:10

Inspire Series | Small Business Saturday Uk Champion

When you’re your own boss, in many ways you are never not at work, and it can be all too easy to slip into working on your business every possible hour; yet for many of us, a more positive life-work balance and being able to spend more time with family and friends was one of our main reasons for starting our own small business in the first place. How do you get back on track? Rich Brady, SmallBiz100 alumni and MD of Brady Global Ltd, is a passionate advocate for putting family time back into family business. As a Champion for Small Business, he’ll be sharing a series of blogs and videos with hints and tips on how you can find a more positive balance in your life. In this blog, the second in the series, he discusses the importance of creating priorities and setting business goals.

Setting business goals

It's really important to have a direction, something to aim for or a goal that you want to achieve: if we don't have a target, a plan, a place where we want to be, then we end up turning up every day and not really knowing what to prioritise. If you don't know what to let go of and what to drill down on, you are wasting lots of time.

I'd like to talk to you about how I set goals and how I try to get my team to set goals too. Going through this process is hugely beneficial and it will, I hope, radicalise how you start operating within your company.

The first thing I suggest you do is to go away and have a think about your personal goals or your life's ambition. Ask yourself this question: Where do I want to be in five years’ time? Think purely personal and forget about business for now. Where do you live? What are your family and friends doing? What do you do in your free time? Picture yourself in five years' time!

This could take some time, but once you've identified your personal goals you then need to work backwards. Say to yourself "Right, if that's where I want to be in my personal life in five years, what does my business look like to achieve that?" What does it need to be producing? What systems need to be in place? How does my company fit in with my personal goals? That's the way to do it.

In the beginning …

We start these companies because we've got an idea and a passion. We want to have the flexibility to run things the way we want to run things. That's a personal choice.

However, you're likely to see a mismatch, a disparity. Your current trajectory may be completely at odds with what your personal ambition is. If so, then there needs to be some quite significant changes. It's okay: you've got time.

You can do a lot in five years, but unless you go through this process, you're not going to realise what things you should be doing within your business and what things you shouldn't. Imagine waking up in 5 years’ time with a business that's doing well, but you're unhappy. That wasn't the plan!

It won't be because you haven't worked hard, it's tough running a company. Without goals we react to decisions coming in: Yes, I'm going to focus on that. That looks interesting, I want to work with those people. With no real idea of where your focus should be, you run the risk of ending up miles from where you hoped.

A better place

Once you've got those personal goals bottomed out, you're then in a much better position to say "Well, actually, I shouldn't even be looking at that." or "We need to stop doing that." or "That's an interesting opportunity. Yeah, it fits in with where the business needs to be for me to facilitate that personal goal. Let's spend a bit more time on that."

Setting goals now is a great way to plan. It's a great way of filtering out noise and distraction, which is hugely important for us as business owners. Distraction eats away our time and that's one thing we cannot buy more of, especially if it's just you. If you're on your own, there's even more pressure on you to be super-efficient. Distractions are really going to slow you down.

Go on, get cracking

I want you to take some time to think about your future.

You might find that you can sit down solidly for a couple of hours and really, really work things out. More likely, you'll need to go away and process this. Let the idea drip-feed into you over the next week or so. I highly recommend going away and talk to your family too, and make sure that your personal goals fit in with their vision of the future. Family comes first and that is fundamental.

Ensure that you are on the same path, and you'll be invincible.

Rich Brady will be posting regularly with his hints and tips - do keep an eye on social media and here on the blog for more Rich-ness. To hear directly from Rich, pop over to our Facebook page now for his first video.

About the Author: Rich Brady is Managing Director of Brady Global Ltd, and a Champion for Small Businesses both in his home of North Wales and across the UK. Rich is a SmallBiz100 Alumni and a passionate advocate for putting the family into family business.