What You’ll Learn
- Gain insights into the steps that home improvement and solar contractors can take to achieve their business goals.
- We’ll go over how to conduct a SWOT assessment, gain input from every echelon of the business, set up a common perspective, dodge overstretching, use the SMART approach for objectives, break down broad goals, mark successes, and sustain communication lines that stay open.
When it comes to business growth, setting goals is a critical first step. However, simply setting goals is not enough. Proper planning, execution, and communication are necessary to ensure success. In this article, we’ll share 10 tips for setting and reaching business growth goals. From knowing your company’s strengths and weaknesses to using SMART goal methodology, these tips can help solar and home improvement contractors achieve their growth objectives.
Know Your SWOT
A key first step in defining business growth goals is to know your company’s SWOT, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Completing a SWOT analysis will give you a good foundation to identify what business goals your company should prioritize in the immediate and distant future.
Solicit Input
Depending on your position in the organizational hierarchy, you might not have a full view of everything going on in each business line. Before you set your business growth goals, solicit input from all business lines and organization hierarchical levels. Doing this will help ensure you have a unified vision and will be working towards the same goal.
Establish a Unified Vision
A corporate-lingo phrase that gets thrown around a lot is “business silos.” It’s time to eliminate that phrase from our vocabulary. “Silos” indicate separate entities. If your teams are not aligned, you risk working against yourself in pursuit of business growth. Successfully achieving your goals hinges on a unified vision amongst product lines. When everyone works together, it makes the job easier.
Don’t Stretch Yourself Thin
It can be tempting to set lofty business goals, but it’s important to make sure you don’t stretch your company too thin. Many businesses with aggressive growth plans find success in narrowing their focus on a few niche markets for growth rather than attacking an entire demographic market. The saying is true: it is better to do a few things great than many things with mediocrity.
Spreadsheet Theory vs. Reality
Many businesses develop revenue growth goals in Excel based on linear year-over-year growth. The problem, according to a Harvard Business Review article titled “How to Set More Realistic Growth Targets” is that these spreadsheets “tend to reduce the world to linear models, when in reality the growth process is nonlinear, sometimes even exponential.”
Manage Expectations
Just like spreadsheet theory isn’t reality, the perfect world doesn’t exist. Despite all your planning, some forces are simply out of your control. Managing stakeholder expectations and building-in contingencies from the beginning with the understanding that there may be hiccups along the way is essential. If everyone goes in with the mindset that there will be challenges and setbacks, you will be better equipped to overcome them rather than panic and give up at the first signal of ‘failure’.
Use the SMART Goal Methodology
This goal-setting methodology originally gained popularity after a 1981 article in Management Review magazine. SMART is an acronym standing for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. This isn’t just another corporate gimmick either. Research has found that by sticking to the SMART methodology AND writing down your goals, you can increase your likelihood of success by 33%.
Break it Up
So, you’ve set your business growth goals. That means you now know what the “end” looks like. Before you get overwhelmed taking your business from point A to point Z, work backward and break up your goal into smaller ‘bite-sized’ pieces over the course of your growth period. Now you won’t be going from A to Z but rather A to B to C, which is much more manageable and less daunting for everyone involved.
Celebrate Milestones
As mentioned earlier, aggressive growth goals can feel overwhelming. Don’t put off celebrations until the very end. When you are breaking up your overarching goal into “bite-sized” pieces, build in milestones and celebrate the achievement of each milestone you reach along the way. This celebration of accomplishment will keep the momentum alive and the end goal within reach.
Communicate. Communicate. Communicate.
We can’t stress this one enough. Once you’ve established your business growth goals, it’s critical to maintain open lines of two-way communication between business lines and employees at all levels. Open communication ensures everyone stays on the same page from the very beginning.
Ready to Grow Your Business with Affordable Financing?
No matter what growth goals you set for your business, Salal Dealer Direct Lending takes the time to get to know each partner’s business and tailor our lending programs to meet their unique needs and goals. We’re serious about helping home improvement and solar contractors grow their businesses.
