Do you establish formal goals for your business and review progress?

[MichaelCorfman]

Larger businesses tend to have formal budget and business planning cycles. They will establish goals, provide funds to achieve specific objectives, and review and evaluate how they performed against those goals.

Small businesses often have a very informal process, and sometimes no regular review and assessment is performed. Other small business set goals and objectives and review their performance against them on a regular basis, making adjustments based on reality.

How about you? Do you have a planning and review process in place that you feel is appropriate for your business? Should you spend more time setting goals and reviewing progress? Or do you spend too much time planning and suffer from not spending enough time doing the work that needs to be done?

Michael

[ocreditor]

Goals and reviews are a must, but too often we get caught up in the regular flow of things to catch up or stop and reflect.
I recommend setting goals, not for a day or a week, and sometimes not even for a month, but rather for longer time periods...

[hannesf]

I don't set formal goals in terms of numbers.
I just try to do my best and hope that the rewards will be good as well.

[Zuga]

What i do is toss around ideas with my biz partner and our team and then commit to making them happen. So in that aspect you can say we're setting the goals and planning. Tho to the untrained eye it can look like a casual approach thing ( j/k ) :P

Our advantage is that we have a pretty big team so we can simultaneously be doing many projects, tho at times some have to be put on hold. Prioritizing so to speak. Organization and coordination is the key, aside from having a good idea, imo.

Most of the things we do are long term goals. Also we tend to make projections for the year ahead. So say if its about traffic or earnings we dont set a goal per se, but rather discuss what we would like it to be at the end of the year. And then we do our best to make it happen, which bring us back to having a good idea(s) and being creative to being with.

Naturally you have to be realistic about the goals you set, but with the hard work and dedication and from our experience the results will follow.

[sweetbet]

I keep a written set of goals that I add to and modify on a regular basis.