You have had a great year so far, but now it’s time to look to the future to ensure your business thrives in the year to come. Even if you have some business management experience, it can be tough to know how to plan your business goals for 2023 and beyond.
Read on for seven key steps to consider as you whip up your business plans and come up with new initiatives to pursue in the following year.
Consider Your Previous Business Successes
Your first goal should be to consider the previous business successes you saw in the last year. For example, if you managed to sell tons of products to your target audience, look at what you did right in terms of marketing, product manufacturing, and customer service.
By considering the previous successes you managed, you can double down on those successes, identify why you managed to succeed in certain areas or vectors, and learn how best to iterate or improve upon those successes for even more profits in the coming year.
Do a SWOT Analysis for Your Business
Next, consider doing a “SWOT” analysis for your business. A SWOT analysis involves analyzing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. In total, a good SWOT analysis can reveal blind spots in your business plan or operations that you might not notice during your day-to-day work and duties.
Strengths and weaknesses in a SWOT analysis are internal. In contrast, opportunities and threats are considered to be external (that is, they affect your business from the outside).
Take a long, hard look at what your company does well (strengths), how your company can improve (weaknesses), How your business could potentially expand in the next year (opportunities), and how competitors may threaten you in the next year (threats). Use cash flow statements and other financial documents to determine these things.
Think About Your Long-Term Business Vision
Of course, you’ll also want to heavily consider your long-term business vision. Odds are that you began your enterprise with a clear vision for how it would grow, what it would do, and how you would serve your target audience or target customers.
Is the long-term business vision the same? In a lot of cases, your business vision and goals can change as your ideas interact with reality. If your long-term business vision has changed, that’s okay! But you need to incorporate that into your business goals and plans for 2023.
Set “Macro” Goals for Your Business
Macro-level goals are overarching or long-term objectives for your business. For instance, if you want to launch a new product in 2023, that serves as a macro goal. Or, maybe you want to expand your business to two new retail locations in your local market. This is another example of a macro goal.
Whatever your macro goals happen to be, be sure to make them “SMART” – that is, they need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. Choosing goals SMART goals allows you to better track them and pursue specific initiatives or work that will help you fulfill them.
Identify KPIs for Business Goals
KPIs or key performance indicators are the metrics that you’ll track to see whether you are on target to meet your 2023 business goals or if you need to change things up significantly. Some of the most important KPIs to consider when deciding your business goals include:
- Cash flow
- Revenue, which is not the same thing as cash flow
- Expenditures
- Customer churn
- Customer conversion rate
- And more
Note that every business has different KPIs that it may want to measure, and you may want to observe different KPIs depending on your business objectives. For the best results, figure out your business goals first, then determine the KPIs that will help you best learn whether you are meeting those goals as 2023 goes along.
Plan Initiatives to Meet Business Goals
Initiatives are targeted business efforts that you can implement in order to achieve your goals, whatever they may be. For instance, if you want to open a new store in 2023, you might make initiatives for your company such as:
- Hire between 10 and 20 new employees
- Make a certain amount of extra revenue to fund the new retail location, such as $200,000
- Build up a new content marketing campaign to drum up anticipation and excitement for the new store launch
- Launch a new customer loyalty campaign
- Provide new ways for customers to pay, such as business credit cards that come with critical features like security authentication, cashback rewards, and more
Business initiatives help your employees (and you) focus efforts toward a distinct business objective. You’ll need to create several business initiatives if you want your goals to be truly achievable.
Take the Lead with New Initiatives
You need to plan to take the lead with new initiatives and business goals, particularly if they are goals that you decided on or came up with.
Your employees will look to you for leadership throughout 2023. Therefore, you should plan your business goals for the upcoming year while considering your leadership capabilities and potential. If you’re still struggling with the leadership aspect of running your business, double down on learning those skills so you can captain your proverbial ship to smooth seas.
Wrap Up
Ultimately, understanding your business goals for 2023 means deciding how you want your business to grow and where you want to focus your efforts in the year to come. Hiring the right people, using the right tools, and enacting the right initiatives will go a long way toward bolstering your business’s prosperity in the future.
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