Identifying and setting goals for your startup business – Twin Cities

Second Sunday Series – Editor’s Note: This is the fifth of 12 columns on starting a business — one on each second Sunday of the month, from September through August. Last month’s column outlined key steps in the startup process, while the months before discussed burnout, the entrepreneur’s personal assets and weaknesses, and self-employment as a career choice.

Welcome to the new year! New year, new business? That has a nice ring to it.

If you’ve been following this series of Second Sunday columns, you know the conversation so far has been centered on getting situated mentally. Now it’s time to start building the business itself. And what better task for January than setting goals for the year?

Let’s start with a quick glossary of terms:

Resolution: Something you decide to change or improve. That’s not what’s happening here, by the way, unless you’re resolving to change from employed to self-employed. You need something more high-powered.

Goal: An end point, status or achievement you intend to reach. This is the tool you need for starting your business. But wait, there’s more.

Plan: The process by which you intend to reach your goal. Without a plan, your goal devolves into a wish or even a pipe dream. It’s the plan that unlocks the pathway to reaching the goal.

Steps: The actual tasks you accomplish as part of the plan you’ve set for reaching your goal. Without steps, the plan is like a blueprint rolled up and stashed in the corner — interesting, but not turning into a house all by itself.

Calendar: The tool you use to assign your steps to a date so you can hold yourself accountable, or troubleshoot when something stalls.

Whew. Now that we’ve covered the basics, we can look at the goals themselves. If you start with the big one — open a business in 2022 — you’ll want to use a backwards planning process. That is, start by identifying your launch date so that you can work back from there to plan the steps needed.

One advantage of this process is the sense of urgency it creates. Instead of beginning January by saying, “This is the year I’ll start a business,” and then letting the months go by, you can say, “I plan to open on July 1, so here’s what I need to do before then.”

The other benefit of a backwards planning process is that it helps you see your “pinch points” — those spots on the calendar when you might be setting unrealistic expectations for your productivity. For example, if you want to open July 1 but your daughter’s wedding is June 15, will you really be focused on business startup steps in early June? With this clarity, you can either double down earlier in the year or move the opening out a month.

If you’re already partway into your launch process, or have actually begun your business, you may find that a forward-based, quarterly planning system works well for you.

In this case, the first quarter of the year might be dedicated to confirming or fine-tuning your initial products or services, including the competitive research or sourcing for materials that might entail. As you gain confidence in what you’ll be able offer your customers, you can use the second quarter of the year to build your marketing and improve bookkeeping systems, and so on.

For either process, it helps to have a master list of general business steps that you can modify for your own situation before assigning them to the calendar. As a quick reference, you can find a basic list in last month’s Second Sunday article (“Key steps for your business startup process”).

You’ll also find dozens of business startup lists online, although you’ll also see that the content varies by the provider of the list. Those compiled by financers lean toward financial steps, while the marketing groups want to be sure you’ve conducted market research.

And of course, at some point, you’ll want to add metrics to your year’s goals, as in “Sell 100 products by August” or “Gross $1,500 a week by September.” Those metrics don’t come out of a hat, by the way — confirming if a number can be reached is also part of your planning process.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed at this stage, so here’s a baseline set of steps for January: Choose a paper or online calendar; review general lists of business steps; assign two steps or goals per month for the year, even if they’re very basic.

That’s all you need to do to keep your momentum going (although it’s always fine to work ahead). Then come back next month for the next Second Sunday installment on business startup and we’ll dive into more steps.