Break It Down: Set Your 3- and 1-Year Goals

Arrows In our last post, What’s Your Long-Term Goal? Get Everyone On the Same Page, our most recent in our series from Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman, we discussed that having a long-term goal is essential for keeping your team moving in the same direction.

However, once you know what you want to accomplish over the long term, it’s important to know the steps you’ll take to meet that overarching goal. Interim goals provide checkpoints along the way to help you measure and re-evaluate your progress at regular intervals.

Setting interim 3- and 1-year goals

The value in short-term goals is they allow you to see goal progress and make operational corrections when necessary. Setting goals for 3-year and 1-year intervals provides a way to guide both strategy and tactics for meeting your long-term goal.

A 3-year goal is strategic in nature.

Break down your 10-year goal into measurable milestones. A lot can happen over the course of 10 years, so you’ll want to have your team working with hard data about your company and your market.
Use realistic numbers, and keep your ranges narrow. Revenue of between “$10 million and $25 million” is too broad. Work closely with your team and your data to see if you can find a specific, realistic, single number for your interim time frame.
Be sure to explore and put down on paper what the organization will look like when you hit those numbers, too.

With a 3-year goal in front of you, it’s easier to determine the tactical steps you’ll need to take — your 1-year goals.

Beware of trying to accomplish too much in a single year. If you set too many objectives, you’ll end up accomplishing very little.
Keep your data handy and decide on your immediate revenue and profit goals — and how you will measure your progress.
Be specific. “Improve customer satisfaction” is a wish, not a goal. Instead, specify: “Improve customer ratings to a 9 out of 10.”
Be sure you have a realistic budget to support your initiatives.
Revisit and reprioritize initiatives every 90 days.

In our Traction blog series, we’re exploring how to create a clear vision for your business. Inspired and guided by the concepts in the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman, these blogs will walk you through essential steps that will enable you to get traction, grow, and thrive.

To read the entire series, visit the Operational Insights blog page.

Short-term goals are energizing because they not only create a focus, but they also create clear steps to take. Now your team will be ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work!

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