One of the important elements of setting goals and guidelines for our home business operations is to make sure that we have clear objectives on how to reach those goals. Objectives can be a bit tricky, however, and there are also different sorts of objectives to be concerned with.
In my years of grant proposal writing for various nonprofit organizations, I became very experienced in figuring out objectives. There were learning objectives, financial objectives, and time-sensitive objectives. The important thing to remember about objectives is that they need to be quantifiable; they need to be actions and activities that you can actually measure. I know this can sound confusing but let me share some examples:
Let us say that your overall goal is to increase revenue for the coming calendar year. That is a fairly typical and manageable goal. How are you going to do it, however? That can be trickier. It helps to set a measureable number to the goal and then start working on your objectives for how to reach that goal. Let us say you want to increase revenue by 20% in the next twelve months. Now we’ve got something tangible to work with. Your objectives might look something like this:
1. Design new marketing program in first the first quarter.
2. Increase contact list by 50 names.
3. Make 5 sales calls each week.
4. Attend 2 networking events each month.
Can you see how the objectives are measureable and they are stepping stones on the road to reaching your goal. Your objectives could also be things like “read 2 trade journals each month” (learning objectives) or “have lunch with prospects and/or colleagues 4 times a month.” You can also set internal deadlines such as “increase ad sales by 10% by the end of the second quarter.” Of course, you will want to actually plot out how you plan to reach those goals with an plan of objectives.
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