Goals if they are not achievable, will ultimately result as death of the startup; so, it’s important to set achievable goals. At times the goals, even if they are realistic and achievable are not met. This is because you didn’t chase them aggressively!

Achievable and aggressive goals are the key to startup growth and to do so, you must develop an autonomous culture whereby the team knows clearly articulated goals.

Setting achievable and aggressive goals requires you to know the strengths and weaknesses of your business. To know the strengths and weaknesses you must know the answers of following:

Startup Business Goals and Objectives

1- Where is your business doing well: Identify the market segments, products/services that generate most of the revenue?

2- What new opportunities are there to capitalize on: Whether you should introduce your most popular product to a new region or bring an ad-on to the same segment?

3- Where exactly the business is struggling: The market segments and the products/services with lowest sales revenues can clearly identify your weak areas.

4- What can be improved: Find out what is causing the problem in that particular weak area, i.e. payment method, delivery services, customer service, marketing or what else!

5- What does it require to refine and/or change completely: So if it’s marketing that you need to improve, you may need tweaking in marketing strategy, need to hire more staff or maybe it’s the budget that needs an increment!

Once you are done with the above 5 step analysis, you have some handy stats showing current performance. Based on this data and the available resources, you can set some realistic goals like:

Increasing the sales by XXX number in next quarter.

Introducing the top product in a new region with XXX number of sales in the first quarter.

To make sure that you set achievable and aggressive goals, consider the following points:

• An achievable goal is something that is measurable, so set goals in numbers!
• An achievable goal must have a deadline, so set a time frame to achieve that goal.
• Every goal you set for your team must have a good reward associated with it, so they aggressively work on it. (Not necessarily to be a monetary benefit).
• Clarity of direction is a must, i.e. everyone knows where they are heading and are aligned.
• Make sure that your team has the skills and resources to be able to achieve those goals.
• Achievable goals must be monitored regularly.

Setting realistic goals for your startup and working aggressively to achieve them is not something you can do alone. You need a fully motivated team to take things alone. Follow the points above and you can lead your team to achieve targets!