With the new year fast approaching, we’re all thinking about what business is going to look like next year. We’ve got questions. We probably all have an idea about what we want our year to look like and we’re thinking about resolutions, for ourselves and for our businesses.

But how often have we set resolutions at the beginning of the year and then fail to follow through within the first month? First week? Maybe even the first day? I used to be one of those people. That was before I discovered the power of SMART goals.

A little backstory about me. I am someone who has spent most of his life overweight, technically Obese Class II. I’m only 5’8” on a good day and in 2011, I hit a high of 250 lbs. (or 113.4 kilos). I needed to lose weight and I wanted to lose weight. 

One of my best friends was going to work for The Second City on a cruise ship for four months and there wasn’t going to be much for him to do onboard except hit the gym. So, we decided to have a bit of friendly competition. We would work to see who could lose the greatest percentage of our body weight in four months. 

Since the ideal weight for someone my height is 160 lbs, I decided I would try for 100 pounds in 100 days. That’s extreme and obviously, I didn’t make it. That’s fine because I did manage to drop 50 pounds in 120 days. 

I’m not going to go into the details of my diet because this episode is about setting goals, not dieting. In the three months leading up to Sean’s departure, I did a ton of research about biochemistry, the psychology of weight loss, and setting goals. That’s when I discovered SMART goals.

What are SMART goals?

SMART goals are goals that are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Time-bound. 

SPECIFIC — Who? What? When? Where? Why? Be specific about WHAT you want to accomplish, WHO needs to be involved (if anyone other than yourself), and WHY you want it to happen. Be specific. The more specific you can be, the better off you’ll be because you will be working with a solid, concrete goal, rather than a nebulous concept of some future accomplishment. Don’t use words like improve, reduce, or increase. Those words are not specific. They are not measurable.

MEASURABLE — Think of this aspect of your goal as the outcome target. Be specific about it. Measurement is qualitative, such as the amount of money made, the number of personal shoots completed, or the number of new images added to your print portfolio. If it’s an annual sales goal, what is that exact number? If you want to take more meetings with photo editors, exactly how many photo editors do you want to meet with this quarter?

ACHIEVABLE — This is a critical factor as well. People will often confuse goals with dreams. Dreams are not achievable because they are just ideas, but if you convert each dream you have into a SMART goal, then you can assess whether or not you have the skills to achieve your goal. 

But don’t get discouraged if you realize you don’t. Skills can be learned. No one gets into a cockpit and can fly a plane without first going to ground school, flight school, and then logging a lot of hours learning to fly. You can learn to fly. 

Knowing what is and is not achievable with our current skill set is a crucial part of setting realistic goals. It also informs of what skills we need to learn to achieve our goals or what mindset shift we made need to make.

RELEVANT — This one is simple. Make sure each goal is relevant to your business objectives. If the goal is to launch a new service or transition into a new genre, that’s relevant. If the goal is to 

TIME-BOUND — The final aspect, and I think the key ingredient, is that you need to set a timeline for the goal. Without binding the goal to a specific date by which you want to achieve your measurable outcome, it’s just a nebulous idea and can easily be put on the back burner. 

Having a specific timeline — for example, one year — allows you to break your goal down further and easily figure out where you need to be in six months, which allows you to figure out what you need to have finished in three months, which allows you to figure out where you need to be in one month.

Setting time limits is less about giving yourself a deadline and more about giving you a real sense of what needs to happen when to reach your desired outcome. SMART goals not only allow you to measure specific, realistic outcomes, but they allow you to break your goals down into smaller subgoals and tasks and track your progress over time.

Don’t have what it takes to do $300,000 in sales this year, what skills do you need to learn in the next year and master in the following year so that you can hit that goal in year three.

Bill Gates said, “People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years.”

Summary

When you break your objectives down into a timeline of specific, measurable, goals that are relevant to your business and achievable within specific timeframes, your business becomes a lot less ambiguous, easier to manage, and it gives you a crystal clear path to follow.

So when you sit down to plot out your goals for the upcoming year, make sure to be SMART about them.

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