Goal Setting Critical for Successful Businesses

Entrepreneurs are being encouraged to set goals as a key ingredient for business success.

Goals are predetermined targets that a business or individual plans to achieve over a set period of time.

Managing Director of Sisters’ Ink, Opal Levy, explained that goal setting “is when business professionals create specific objectives for the future”.

She said that “when creating new businesses, entrepreneurs [must] select realistic and achievable goals, which can be long-term or short-term, to help them succeed”.

“What is critical in all of this is that a successful entrepreneur sets goals and actively seeks to broaden their skills to manage the new business successfully,” she pointed out.

Ms. Levy was addressing a recent Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC) Virtual Biz Zone session under the theme ‘Goal Setting: How to set Entrepreneurial Goals and Achieve Progress’.

Ms. Levy said that starting and running a business takes time, patience and dedication, and goal setting is critical to the success of any operation.

“You can’t just be employing all these resources into your business without having an outcome. You must have an outcome in mind, and so defining your goals will track the company’s progress,” she noted.

“You must be able to visualise your ideas and your thoughts clearly… you must be able to take the dream, the vision and put them down on a piece of paper,” she added.

Ms. Levy said that proper planning differentiates a successful business from a failing operation and “aids you in making the necessary adjustments at every step of your entrepreneurial journey”.

She said that an entrepreneur’s goals do not have to be etched in stone.

“You could plan to do X and you are taking the necessary steps to achieve X, then you realise that there is a change in the environment, which requires you to do some adjustments,” she pointed out.

She noted, however, that goal setting provides a “good milepost and a good understanding of where it is that you want to go and how to get there,” adding that if “you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

She encouraged entrepreneurs to ensure that their goals are bold, specific measurable, achievable and timebound.

The session was the second of a two-part series on the entrepreneurial mindset. The first session, which took place on August 2, focused on the principles that can help to develop an entrepreneurial mindset to build successful businesses.

The JBDC Biz Zone is a weekly series of webinars organised by the JBDC to assist MSMEs to further their development.

The JBDC is the Government’s business development agency that assists in the sustainable creation and development of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Jamaica.