Setting Goals for Your Home Business is Like Drinking Water for Your Body

Build Your Success With SMART Goals

Setting goals and developing a solid business plan is as important for the operations of your home based business as water is for the health of your body. Without a good solid business plan with strategically defined goals you will never understand the state of your business.

Jim Rohn, America’s most renowned business philosopher states “that we must set goals that are heart conceives, that our mind believes and that our bodies will carry out.” These are very affectionately known as SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym for the process that defines how to write well focused and achievable goals.

Specific – the goal must define exactly what you want to accomplish. It must answer the six W’s:

Who: Who is involved?
What: What do I want to accomplish?
Where: Identify a location.
When: Establish a time frame.
Which: Identify requirements and constraints.
Why: Specific reasons, purpose or benefits of accomplishing the goal.

Example: I want to be making $50,000 per month in my home based business by September 2008, with a marketing budget of $1,000 per month so I can be financial free to invest in other residual income opportunities.

Measurable – define the criteria by which you will measure your progress. When you measure your progress you stay on track and know if you’re reaching your targets. If not, you can make adjustments.

To know if your goal is measurable ask yourself questions like….How much? How many? How will know when it’s accomplished?

Attainable – you must believe in your goals. When you set a goal and measure it daily it has value and importance. You give it focus and attention. You do what it takes to make it come true. You develop attitudes, skills, to financial capacities to ensure you reach your goal.

As you reach a goal and set new ones, you build self-esteem. With confidence comes’ bigger and better ideas. You find you are more willing to do things you thought were out of reach not long ago.

Realistic – to be realistic your goal must be something you are both willing and able to work towards. It can and should be high or just starry enough to give you goose-bumps, but never something unbelievable. If you don’t believe you won’t achieve.

Timely – the goal should have a time frame. If there is no urgency in accomplishing the goal then it goes on and on….Someday I’ll get this done. Well we all know someday never comes.

Not having clearly defined goals is the biggest most fatal mistake home business owners make. A good business plan keeps the business expenses and profits front and center. This also means you must track all those costs. Without properly controlled books accounting for all the costs the IRS could view your business as a hobby. If that occurs you can loose all the deductions allowed when working from your home.

So take the time to develop SMART goals for your home business to ensure a long and prosperous life. And don’t forget to drink your water!