Change is inevitable and in business as well as our personal lives we will encounter obstacles and challenges when trying to reach our goals. The way to overcome these challenges is to have SMART goals in place and have the flexibility to change them according to the circumstances that surround us. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. (Indeed Editorial Team, 2021) The importance of setting these SMART goals is to keep the individual focused on the task at have and having a timeframe and roadmap to achieve any personal or professional goals. An example is how my brother-in-law and I decided to set goals for growth for our small dry-cleaning business during the pandemic. We knew that in order to keep our doors open and our employees we would have to make decisions and take on accounts that we didn’t have before, and do it quick. We asked ourselves what kind of realistic goals can we set? What is our timeframe? What will be our strategy and what tactics will we use to engage any potential customers? Looking at our numbers we knew we had to increase revenue by 35 % in order to keep our employees and afford to stay open and we only had about a 6 to 8 month period to do that, reminder that this was at the peak of the pandemic.
We had our goal, and we had our timeframe, now it was time to come up with our strategy and tactics and execute. It can be misconceived that strategy and tactics are one in the same, but it is false. Tactics are the things that we did every day such as phone calls, emails, and signs. Our strategy was our overall vision on how we could help consumers during the pandemic and still reach our financial goal. (charliesaidthat, 2019) We knew that people were scared, and the media did a great job of turning people into germophobes. Using this knowledge, we marketed our pick-up and delivery service as contactless, which it was before anyway. We ensured that our drivers wore masks and gloves, and we started offering services that we really never offered before. Laundry service became big during the pandemic, so we started offering Wash and Fold delivery, household items such as drapes, comforters, sheets, and rugs. We sent out emails to all our current customers and posted on our social media sites and put-up signs all over the store in the windows so people would know that we were still there. These tactics lined up with our overall strategy which in turn helped us reach our goal.
Strategies and tactics work great, but we also had to keep an eye on certain KPI’s (key performance indicators) to ensure that we were moving toward our goal. Some KPI’s were the amount of traffic that was going to our website and social media pages. The amount of email responses from past customers. Number of new customers signing up and of course the amount of revenue in our bank accounts. With our overall vision and goal, and our tactics we had in place we saw traffic increase to our website and social media pages. We saw more and more people coming through our doors as well and new sign-ups for our delivery service. As word of mouth also spread and many of our competitors closed down, we stayed open and saw first responders, doctors, nurses and essential employees look to us for reliable dry cleaning and laundry services. Bottom line, because of the goals we set for ourselves and the strategy we used I am happy to say that not only did we survive a pandemic where our industry was probably the hardest hit, but we were able to keep 90 % of our work force, are looking to hire more people now and are almost back to pre-pandemic numbers in terms of revenue.
References:
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/smart-goals
Kostas Site 