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Setting Business Goals & Objectives: 4 Considerations

• 31 Oct 2023

Setting business goals and objectives is important to your company’s success. They create a roadmap to help you identify and manage risk , gain employee buy-in, boost team performance , and execute strategy . They’re also an excellent marker to measure your business’s performance.

Yet, meeting those goals can be difficult. According to an Economist study , 90 percent of senior executives from companies with annual revenues of one billion dollars or more admitted they failed to reach all their strategic goals because of poor implementation. In order to execute strategy, it’s important to first understand what’s attainable when developing organizational goals and objectives.

If you’re struggling to establish realistic benchmarks for your business, here’s an overview of what business goals and objectives are, how to set them, and what you should consider during the process.

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What Are Business Goals and Objectives?

Business objectives dictate how your company plans to achieve its goals and address the business’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. While your business goals may shift, your objectives won’t until there’s an organizational change .

Business goals describe where your company wants to end up and define your business strategy’s expected achievements.

According to the Harvard Business School Online course Strategy Execution , there are different types of strategic goals . Some may even push you and your team out of your comfort zone, yet are important to implement.

For example, David Rodriguez, global chief human resources officer at Marriott, describes in Strategy Execution the importance of stretch goals and “pushing people to not accept today's level of success as a final destination but as a starting point for what might be possible in the future.”

It’s important to strike a balance between bold and unrealistic, however. To do this, you must understand how to responsibly set your business goals and objectives.

Related: A Manager’s Guide To Successful Strategy Implementation

How to Set Business Goals and Objectives

While setting your company’s business goals and objectives might seem like a simple task, it’s important to remember that these goals shouldn’t be based solely on what you hope to achieve. There should be a correlation between your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs)—quantifiable success measures—and your business strategy to justify why the goal should, and needs to, be achieved.

This is often illustrated through a strategy map —an illustration of the cause-and-effect relationships that underpin your strategy. This valuable tool can help you identify and align your business goals and objectives.

“A strategy map gives everyone in your business a road map to understand the relationship between goals and measures and how they build on each other to create value,” says HBS Professor Robert Simons in Strategy Execution .

While this roadmap can be incredibly helpful in creating the right business goals and objectives, a balanced scorecard —a tool to help you track and assess non-financial measures—ensures they’re achievable through your current business strategy.

“Ask yourself, if I picked up a scorecard and examined the measures on that scorecard, could I infer what the business's strategy was,” Simon says. “If you've designed measures well, the answer should be yes.”

According to Strategy Execution , these measures are necessary to ensure your performance goals are achieved. When used in tandem, a balanced scorecard and strategy map can also tell you whether your goals and objectives will create value for you and your customers.

“The balanced scorecard combines the traditional financial perspective with additional perspectives that focus on customers, internal business processes, and learning and development,” Simons says.

These four perspectives are key considerations when setting your business goals and objectives. Here’s an overview of what those perspectives are and how they can help you set the right goals for your business.

4 Things to Consider When Setting Business Goals and Objectives

1. financial measures.

It’s important to ensure your plans and processes lead to desired levels of economic value. Therefore, some of your business goals and objectives should be financial.

Some examples of financial performance goals include:

• Cutting costs
• Increasing revenue
• Improving cash flow management

“Businesses set financial goals by building profit plans—one of the primary diagnostic control systems managers use to execute strategy,” Simons says in Strategy Execution . “They’re budgets drawn up for business units that have both revenues and expenses, and summarize the anticipated revenue inflows and expense outflows for a specified accounting period.”

Profit plans are essential when setting your business goals and objectives because they provide a critical link between your business strategy and economic value creation.

According to Simons, it’s important to ask three questions when profit planning:

• Does my business strategy generate enough profit to cover costs and reinvest in the business?
• Does my business generate enough cash to remain solvent through the year?
• Does my business create sufficient financial returns for investors?

By mapping out monetary value, you can weigh the cost of different strategies and how likely it is you’ll meet your company and investors’ financial expectations.

2. Customer Satisfaction

To ensure your business goals and objectives aid in your company’s long-term success, you need to think critically about your customers’ satisfaction. This is especially important in a world where customer reviews and testimonials are crucial to your organization’s success.

“Everything that's important to the business, we have a KPI and we measure it,” says Tom Siebel, founder, chairman, and CEO of C3.ai, in Strategy Execution . “And what could be more important than customer satisfaction?”

Unlike your company’s reputation, measuring customer satisfaction has a far more personal touch in identifying what customers love and how to capitalize on it through future strategic initiatives .

“We do anonymous customer satisfaction surveys every quarter to see how we're measuring up to our customer expectations,” Siebel says.

While this is one example, your customer satisfaction measures should reflect your desired market position and focus on creating additional value for your audience.

Related: 3 Effective Methods for Assessing Customer Needs

3. Internal Business Processes

Internal business processes is another perspective that should factor into your goal setting. It refers to several aspects of your business that aren’t directly affected by outside forces. Since many goals and objectives are driven by factors such as business competition and market shifts, considering internal processes can create a balanced business strategy.

“Our goals are balanced to make sure we’re holistically managing the business from a financial performance, quality assurance, innovation, and human talent perspective,” says Tom Polen, CEO and president of Becton Dickinson, in Strategy Execution .

According to Strategy Execution , internal business operations are broken down into the following processes:

• Operations management
• Customer management

While improvements to internal processes aren’t driven by economic value, these types of goals can still reap a positive return on investment.

“We end up spending much more time on internal business process goals versus financial goals,” Polen says. “Because if we take care of them, the financial goals will follow at the end of the day.”

4. Learning and Growth Opportunities

Another consideration while setting business goals and objectives is learning and growth opportunities for your team. These are designed to increase employee satisfaction and productivity.

According to Strategy Execution , learning and growth opportunities touch on three types of capital:

• Human: Your employees and the skills and knowledge required for them to meet your company’s goals
• Information: The databases, networks, and IT systems needed to support your long-term growth
• Organization: Ensuring your company’s leadership and culture provide people with purpose and clear objectives

Employee development is a common focus for learning and growth goals. Through professional development opportunities , your team will build valuable business skills and feel empowered to take more risks and innovate.

To create a culture of innovation , it’s important to ensure there’s a safe space for your team to make mistakes—and even fail.

“We ask that people learn from their mistakes,” Rodriguez says in Strategy Execution . “It's really important to us that people feel it’s safe to try new things. And all we ask is people extract their learnings and apply it to the next situation.”

Achieve Your Business Goals

Business goals aren’t all about your organization’s possible successes. It’s also about your potential failures.

“When we set goals, we like to imagine a bright future with our business succeeding,” Simons says in Strategy Execution . “But to identify your critical performance variables, you need to engage in an uncomfortable exercise and consider what can cause your strategy to fail.”

Anticipating potential failures isn’t easy. Enrolling in an online course—like HBS Online’s Strategy Execution —can immerse you in real-world case studies of past strategy successes and failures to help you better understand where these companies went wrong and how to avoid it in your business.

Do you need help setting your business goals and objectives? Explore Strategy Execution —one of our online strategy courses —and download our free strategy e-book to gain the insights to create a successful strategy.

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How To Set Business Goals (+ Examples for Inspiration)

Updated: July 22, 2024

Published: October 24, 2023

You’re a business owner — the captain of your own ship. But how do you ensure you’re steering your company in the right direction? 

Without clear-cut goals and a plan to reach them, you risk setting your sails on the course of dangerous icebergs. 

Table of contents:

• What are business goals?

Why business goals are important

How to set business goals, tips to achieve business goals, business goals examples, what are business goals .

Business goals are the desired outcomes that an organization aims to achieve within a specific time frame. These goals help define the purpose and direction of the company, guiding decision-making and resource allocation. They can be short-term or long-term objectives , aligned with the company’s mission and vision.

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Operating a business using your gut and feelings will only get you so far. If you’re looking to build a sustainable company, then you need to set goals in advance and follow through with them. 

Here’s what goal setting can do to make your business a success:

• Give your business direction. Business goals align everyone toward a common purpose and ensure all efforts and resources are directed toward achieving specific outcomes.
• Keep everyone motivated to keep pushing forward. Goals provide employees with a sense of purpose and motivation. According to research from BiWorldwide, goal setting makes employees 14.2x more inspired at work and 3.6x more likely to be committed to the organization.
• Create benchmarks to work toward (and above). Goals provide a basis for measuring and evaluating the performance of the organization. They serve as benchmarks to assess progress, identify areas of improvement, and make informed decisions about resource allocation and strategy adjustments .
• Prioritize activities and allocate resources effectively. Goals help you identify the most important initiatives, ensuring that time, money, and effort are invested in activities that align with the overall objectives.
• Make continuous organizational improvements. Goals drive continuous improvement by setting targets for growth and progress. They encourage businesses to constantly evaluate their performance, identify areas for refinement, and implement strategies to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Nothing creates solidarity among teams and departments like shared goals. So be sure to get everyone involved to boost camaraderie. 

Setting business goals requires careful consideration and planning. By defining specific and measurable targets, you can track progress and make necessary adjustments along the way.

Here are the steps to effectively set business goals.

Step 1: Identify key areas to improve in your business

Start by assessing the current state of your organization. Identify areas that require improvement or growth. This could include increasing revenue, expanding your customer base, improving employee satisfaction, or enhancing product offerings.

Step 2: Choose specific and measurable goals 

Setting clear and specific goals is essential. Use the SMART goal framework to ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. For example, instead of setting a vague goal like “increase revenue,” set a specific goal like “increase revenue by 15% in the next quarter.”

Step 3: Prioritize which goals to tackle first

Not all goals are equally important or urgent. Evaluate the impact and feasibility of each goal and prioritize them accordingly. By ranking your goals, you can focus your efforts and resources on the most critical objectives.

Step 4: Break down your goals into smaller milestones

Breaking down each goal into smaller, manageable tasks makes them more attainable. Assign responsibilities and set deadlines for each step. This approach helps track progress and ensures accountability.

Step 5: Decide what your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) will be

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are metrics used to measure progress toward your goals. Set realistic and relevant KPIs that align with your objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase customer acquisition, a relevant KPI could be the number of new customers acquired per month.

Now that you have set your business goals, it’s time to take action and work toward achieving them. Here are some tips to help you stay on track:

1. Write down your action plan 

Develop a detailed plan of action for each goal. Identify the necessary resources, strategies, and milestones to achieve them. A well-defined action plan provides a road map for success.

2. Foster a culture that’s goal-oriented

Encourage your employees to embrace and contribute to your goals. Foster a culture that values goal setting and achievement. Recognize and reward individuals or teams that make significant progress toward the goals.

3. Regularly track and evaluate progress

Monitor the progress toward each goal and make adjustments as needed. Use project management tools or software to track and visualize progress. Regularly review and evaluate your performance to ensure you’re on the right track.

4. Seek feedback and adapt

Gather feedback from employees, customers, and stakeholders. Their insights can provide valuable perspectives and help you refine your goals and strategies. Adapt your approach based on feedback to increase your chances of success.

5. Stay focused and motivated (even when you fail)

Staying motivated to achieve goals is difficult, especially when you come up short or fail. But don’t let this set you back. Continue pushing forward with your goals or readjust the direction as needed. Then do whatever you can to avoid distractions so you stay committed to your action plan.

Also, remember to celebrate small wins and milestones along the way to keep your team motivated and engaged.

Free SMART Goal Template

A free template to help you create S.M.A.R.T. goals for marketing campaign success.

• Set your goals
• Calculate your metrics
• Evaluate your success

To provide inspiration, here are some examples of common business goals:

1. Revenue growth

Revenue growth is a business goal that focuses on increasing the overall income generated by the company. Setting a specific target percentage increase in revenue can create a measurable goal to work toward.

Strategies for achieving revenue growth may include:

• Expanding the customer base through targeted marketing campaigns
• Improving customer retention and loyalty
• Upselling or cross-selling to existing customers
• Increasing the average order value by offering premium products or services

Example: A retail company sets a goal to increase its revenue by 10% in the next fiscal year. To achieve this, it implements several strategies, including launching a digital marketing campaign to attract new customers, offering personalized discounts and promotions to encourage repeat purchases, and introducing a premium product line to increase the average order value.

2. Customer acquisition

Customer acquisition focuses on expanding the customer base by attracting new customers to the business. Setting a specific goal for the number of new customers helps businesses track their progress and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Strategies for customer acquisition may include:

• Running targeted advertising campaigns
• Implementing referral programs to incentivize existing customers to refer new ones
• Forming strategic partnerships with complementary businesses to reach a wider audience

Example: A software-as-a-service (SaaS) company aims to acquire 1k new customers in the next quarter. To achieve this, it launches a social media marketing campaign targeting its ideal customer profile, offers a referral program where existing customers receive a discount for referring new customers, and forms partnerships with industry influencers to promote its product.

3. Employee development

Employee development goals focus on enhancing the skills and knowledge of employees to improve their performance and contribute to the organization’s growth. By setting goals for employee training and skill development, businesses can create a culture of continuous learning and provide opportunities for career advancement.

Strategies for employee development may include:

• Offering training programs
• Providing mentorship opportunities
• Sponsoring professional certifications
• Creating a career development plan for each employee

Example: A technology company aims to have 80% of its employees complete at least one professional certification within the next year. To achieve this, it offers financial support and study materials for employees interested in obtaining certifications, provides dedicated study time during working hours, and celebrates employees’ achievements upon certification completion.

4. Product development

Product development goals focus on creating and improving products or services to meet customer needs and stay competitive in the market. Setting goals for product development can prioritize your efforts and so you can allocate resources effectively.

Strategies for product development may include:

• Conducting market research to identify customer preferences and trends
• Gathering customer feedback through surveys or focus groups
• Investing in research and development to create new products or enhance existing ones
• Collaborating with customers or industry experts to co-create innovative solutions

Example: An electronics company sets a goal to launch three new product lines within the next year. To achieve this, it conducts market research to identify emerging trends and customer demands, gathers feedback from its target audience through surveys and usability testing, allocates resources to research and development teams for product innovation, and collaborates with external design agencies to create visually appealing and user-friendly products.

5. Social responsibility

Social responsibility goals focus on making a positive impact on society or the environment. These goals go beyond financial success and emphasize the importance of ethical and sustainable business practices. Setting goals for social responsibility allows businesses to align their values with their actions and contribute to causes that resonate with their stakeholders.

Strategies for social responsibility may include: 

• Implementing sustainable practices to reduce environmental impact
• Donating a percentage of profits to charitable organizations
• Supporting local communities through volunteer programs
• Promoting diversity and inclusion within the organization

Example: A clothing retailer aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 20% in the next two years. To achieve this, it implements sustainable practices, such as using eco-friendly materials, optimizing packaging to minimize waste, and partnering with ethical manufacturers. It also donates a percentage of its profits to an environmental conservation organization.

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How to Set Small Business Goals

8 min. read

Updated January 4, 2024

How happy are you with your business’s performance? Are you patting yourself on the back, having nailed every goal? 

If the answer is no, you’re like many business owners who struggle to hit business targets. You know exactly what you want—a bigger business, larger per-customer sales, more leads, higher profits—but you struggle to meet your goals.

In this article, we’ll show you how to set clear and actionable business goals to help you reach your full potential as an entrepreneur. 

How to set achievable business goals

There is always so much to do when you’re a business owner. You need to find new clients, keep your existing clients happy, manage your finances, streamline your processes, and motivate your employees—all at the same time. Here’s how you sort through all that clutter and set goals to move the needle.

1. Clarify the goals you’ll prioritize

To ensure you don’t waste time and money—you must know your top priorities when setting company goals for the year. These should be clear opportunities or issues that show the most significant potential to grow your business.

So, how do you identify them?

A SWOT analysis provides a simple but effective framework. You’ll look at your business and competitors to identify potential advantages and shortcomings that can set you apart. 

If you’re an up-and-running business, you’ll find additional value by reviewing your financial statements and forecasts . 

• Where did you over or underperform?
• Is your cash on hand what you expected?
• Are you overspending in any areas?

Answering questions like these will help you understand your current financial position. From there, you can dig deeper into specific departments, initiatives, line items, etc., and uncover what opportunities are worth tackling in the next year.  

Example: You run a local salon, and during your review, there was an immediate red flag—revenue is down. Exploring a bit further, you found that the average order value of each customer had decreased and that the number of new customers was far lower than the previous year. 

Considering those issues, you develop the following business goals:

• Introduce new product offerings and add-ons to increase revenue from existing clients.
• Increase client base by targeting local office workers.

Please note: These aren’t goals yet! They are your key areas to focus on. After you’ve discussed them with your team—which we’ll cover next—you’ll turn them into SMART goals (specific, measurable goals) to ensure that you’ll take action on them.

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2. Review these goals with your team

Your team is out there every day, working on your products or talking to clients. They are the people who can tell you what’s working and what’s not, what’s holding your business back, and where you should be focusing your efforts and setting your business goals for the year ahead.

So, once you’ve selected what you think should be the top goals for your business, sit down with your employees, and get their feedback. They may agree or have valuable insights that you haven’t considered.

By involving your employees in the goal-setting process, you make them feel valued and engaged while at the same time ensuring your goals are realistic and achievable.

Dig deeper: How to set team goals that actually work

3. Make your goals SMART

You have two to three business goals. Now, it’s time to make them actionable. While you can use several different goal-setting frameworks to do this, we recommend SMART goals:

• Specific: What exactly are you going to do?
• Measurable: How will you know if you are succeeding?
• Achievable: How will you implement the goal?
• Relevant: Does the goal connect to your overall objectives?
• Timely: When will you achieve the goal by?

Let’s take one of our business goals and turn it into a SMART goal.

Original idea: Increase client base by targeting local office workers.

• Specific: Gain 20 new customers from the surrounding office buildings.
• Measurable: Measure progress by tracking the number of new customers won and profits made while maintaining our existing customer base.
• Achievable: We will create a customized sales promotion, which we will publicize via leaflets and flyers in the office building.
• Relevant: This will help us increase the number of new customers, thus growing the salon business and profits.
• Timely: We will achieve this by the end of Q2 2024.

Dig deeper: How to set SMART business goals

4. Set key performance indicators (KPIs)

The SMART goal format should give you an idea of your timeline and what it will take to achieve your goal. However, you need to establish how you’ll measure your progress. One of the most common ways to do this is by adopting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) .

These numerical values, like the number of new clients from a specific campaign or monthly sales targets, indicate whether the goal is within reach. While creating SMART goals, you’ll define relevant KPIs, ensuring they align with company and individual objectives. 

For example, a salon might have overall KPIs related to customer acquisition from a campaign, while a stylist might focus on customer satisfaction and spending KPIs.

Dig deeper: 12 tips for choosing effective KPIs

5. Set a structure to review and revise

If you want to make something happen, you need to create a schedule and build good habits around it.

If you want to get healthier, you need to add exercise to your schedule, plan time to cook healthy meals, and so on. You should treat your business goals the same way. You need to schedule the actions you’ll take to reach your KPIs.

It’s a great idea to put regular (possibly monthly) business plan review meetings on your company calendar now This will help you set, revisit and revise specific short-and-long-term business goals and objectives.

To make these meetings less overwhelming, try and automate as much as possible. Use a calendar for both you and your staff, and add reminders and online task management software to organize tasks, set deadlines, and prompt you for repeat actions. 

Dig deeper: How to develop a strategic action plan

• The importance of setting business goals

Why are goals important? Here are a few reasons:

Goals provide clarity

There are plenty of things that you want to accomplish as a business owner. But what tasks are most important? How do you know if you’re making progress? 

Setting well-structured goals will help you prioritize work, establish a direction, and provide a framework to measure success. No more random assignments or distractions—just a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you’ll get there.

Goals motivate and align your team

Aimlessly taking on work does not lead to success. Without a set goal, there’s no shining beacon ahead that you’re trying to reach. And no milestones on the way there to celebrate and keep you going.

Having company and team goals provides greater motivation. It also makes it far easier to set individual goals that connect each employee’s work to that larger objective. 

Goals provide a structure to measure success 

Setting goals requires you to consider what metrics you’ll use to measure success. Doing this upfront makes tracking your progress much more manageable and lets you know if you’re still on track.

Skipping the goal-setting process means your ideas of success will remain vague and aimless. You’ll be more likely to run down unproductive rabbit holes and may never actually realize your aspirations.

Goals help your business grow

Much like writing a business plan increases your chances of successfully launching a business —setting goals increases your chances of achieving regular business growth. You’ll have well-structured ideas of where you want to go, how to get there, and if you’re progressing. 

And by continuing to set, review, and revise your goals—you’ll speed up the process and avoid costly mistakes.  

• Types of business goals

The goal-setting process in this article focused primarily on long-term business performance goals—the kind you’ll set once a year. These broader goals may focus on any of the following:

Financial goals

Whether it’s achieving a specific net profit margin or finding ways to cut back on certain expenses—these goals focus on growing or maintaining financial health.

Customer-related goals

These goals are all about better serving your target customer. This may include improving customer service, increasing repeat purchases, or expanding your clientele.

Operational goals

Sometimes, you’ll find savings by optimizing current workflows. This could mean reducing product production times, eliminating error rates, or streamlining your supply chain.

Marketing and sales goals

Marketing and sales goals can be broad, like boosting brand awareness, or very specific, like improving specific channel sales or launching a new marketing campaign.

Employee and team goals

These are goals focused on reducing employee turnover, boosting team spirit, or furthering education to keep everyone at the top of their game.

Sustainability and social responsibility goals

These are goals that may not directly impact your bottom line. Instead, they focus on accomplishing an altruistic mission such as shrinking your carbon footprint or giving back to the community.

Innovation and development goals

Far more opportunistic and research-based goals that could include launching a new product, embracing the latest tech, or venturing into new markets.

Compliance and risk management goals

Goals to ensure your operations meet all legal requirements and have strategies in place to dodge financial and operational pitfalls.

• Choosing the right goals is a process

Selecting goals and creating a plan to reach them takes time. Even by following the steps in this article, there’s no guarantee that you’ll select the best opportunity and be able to efficiently pursue it. 

That’s why the review process is so crucial. Rather than pursuing a goal that won’t make an impact, you can quickly pivot if you realize something isn’t working. 

Goal setting is just the start, and plenty of other ways to better manage and grow your business. 

• Create a business strategy
• Manage during a crisis
• Selling your business

Kody Wirth is a content writer and SEO specialist for Palo Alto Software—the creator's of Bplans and LivePlan. He has 3+ years experience covering small business topics and runs a part-time content writing service in his spare time.

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• 65 strategic goals for your company (wi ...

65 strategic goals for your company (with examples)

Strategic goals are a critical part of your strategic plan. In order to achieve your long-term goals, you need a clear sense of where you want to go—and an easy way to share those goals with your team. In this article, we take a look at the difference between strategic goals and other goal setting methodologies, then offer 65 example metrics and strategic goals you can use to get started. 

Goal-setting is a critical part of your business strategy. You want to make sure your team is cohesively moving in the right direction—and goals are a great way to do that. 

But in order for goals to be effective, they need to be measurable. The important thing isn’t just to create goals, but to create strategic goals that help you accomplish your overall company mission. 

In this article, we’ll walk you through when to set strategic goals—vs. other types of goals—and how to do so. 

What is a strategic goal? 

Because strategic goals are closely connected to strategic planning, they tend to be three to five year goals. But the most important part of setting a strategic goal is to identify where you want to go, and what goals you need to achieve to get there. 

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How strategic goals compare to other business processes

There are a lot of different strategy and goal setting frameworks you can use. Here’s how strategic goals differ from other types of goals. 

Strategic goals vs. strategic planning

Strategic planning is the process of defining the direction your company wants to go in the next three to five years. A strategic plan includes longer term goals, strategic goals, and shorter-term goals that describe how you’ll achieve your strategic goals. The strategic planning process is typically run by decision-makers and stakeholders. 

Part of defining your strategic plan is coming up with strategic goals. Your strategic plan should also include customer insights, a SWOT analysis , your company values , your organization’s competitive advantages, specific goals on a quarterly or yearly timeline, and a high-level project roadmap if you have one.

Strategic goals vs. strategic management

Strategic management is the organization and execution of business resources in order to achieve your company goals. These usually help you implement your overall organizational strategy. 

Strategic goals, on the other hand, are generally three to five year objectives that tie closely to your strategic plan. 

Think of strategic goals as the specific things you want to achieve in three to five years. These strategic goals are part of your strategic plan, which provides more context and direction for why your company wants to move in that direction. Your strategic plan fuels your strategic management process, which is how you’ll actually achieve those goals. 

Strategic goals vs. strategic objectives

The difference between strategic goals and strategic objectives is somewhat subjective. In general, objectives tend to be more specific than goals—some people argue that objectives are always quantitative, while goals can be either qualitative or quantitative. 

Whether you use the terminology strategic goals vs. objectives , it’s critical to make sure your goals are specific, measurable, and actionable. 

Strategic goals vs. big hairy audacious goals (BHAGs)

Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) are long-term goals that typically take between 10 and 25 years to complete. These are industry-defining goals, like Microsoft’s famous goal to put "a computer on every desk and in every home." 

Not every organization has—or needs—BHAGs. Depending on your business strategy, a vision statement might be enough. Whether or not you set BHAGs, strategic goals are shorter-term goals that help you accomplish these bigger, ambitious goals. 

Strategic goals vs. OKRs 

OKRs , which stands for Objectives and Key Results, is a goal setting methodology developed by Andy Grove that follows a simple but flexible framework: 

I will [objective] as measured by [key result] .

OKRs can span multiple years, but most commonly these are one to two year objectives that help your company accomplish your larger strategic plan. In a typical OKR structure, your OKRs feed into your broader strategic goals. 

Strategic goals vs. KPIs

KPIs, or key performance indicators , are qualitative measures of how you’re progressing. Like OKRs, KPIs tend to be shorter in time frame than strategic goals. This is partially due to the fact that KPIs are nearly always quantitative. Achieving several long-term KPIs helps you achieve your broader three to five year strategic goals. 

Strategic goals vs. business goals

Business goals are predetermined targets that organizations plan to achieve in a specific amount of time. Technically, strategic goals—along with BHAGs, OKRs, and KPIs—are a type of business goal. 

65 example strategic metrics and goals

If you’ve never written a strategic goal before, it’s helpful to check out common goals. Though your strategic goals are unique to your strategic plan, use these examples as templates to create measurable, actionable goals with clear success metrics. 

Set strategic goals that are:

Simply phrased

Easy to track

For more tips on what constitutes a good goal, read our article on how to write SMART goals . 

Keep in mind that these goals should be achievable in three to five years. For shorter goals, consider setting OKRs or KPIs instead. For longer goals, check out vision statements and BHAGs . 

Strategic goals: finance

Financial strategic goals typically center around a few different important financial metrics, including:

1. Increasing revenue

2. Attaining or maintaining profitability

3. Growing shareholder value

4. Diversifying your revenue streams

5. Becoming a financially sustainable company

6. Reducing production costs

7. Increasing profit margin

8. Setting revenue targets for new products

9. Reducing department-specific budgets

10. Influencing the percentage of local vs. international sales

Examples of financial strategic goals

These examples do not represent Asana’s goals, and are merely included here for educational purposes. 

11. Increase total revenue by $10M in the next three years.

12. Reduce cost by 12% to become a profitable company by 2024.

13. Grow a specific product’s revenue to 30% of overall business revenue within the next five years.

14. Reduce marketing budget by 10% in the next three years.

15. Update our sales profile so 50% of our sales are international by 2026.

Strategic goals: customer-focused

Strategic goals that focus on your customers can help you break into a new market or further develop a trustworthy brand. These metrics can include:

16. Reducing customer churn

17. Measurably increasing customer satisfaction

18. Increasing the number of new customers

19. Increasing customer retention

20. Offering great customer value

21. Boosting customer outreach

22. Increasing customer conversion rates

23. Breaking into new customer segments

24. Increasing the number of returning customers

25. Decreasing the percentage of returned products

Examples of strategic goals focused on customer metrics

26. Increase net promoter score (NPS) by three points in the next year, and 10 points in the next five years.

27. Capture 23% market share by 2025.

28. Provide the best customer experience in the market—measured based on reaction time, customer sentiment, and brand tracking. 

29. Increase customer retention by 3% every year.

30. Reduce the percentage of returned products to 2% by 2023.

Strategic goals: growth

On an organizational level, growth refers to how your company expands and develops. Growth metrics include:

31. Increasing market share

32. Breaking into new markets

33. Developing new products, features, or services

34. Increasing operational reliability and/or compliance

35. Increasing company velocity

36. Opening new locations

37. Building your brand on social media

38. Increasing website traffic

39. Acquiring a new company

Examples of strategic goals about growth

40. Open 12 new locations within the next four years. 

41. Increase market share to 8% by 2026.

42. Reach 5M followers on social media (including Instagram and Twitter).

43. Increase web traffic to 300K visitors per year by 2024.

44. Start three new product streams by 2027.

Strategic goals: internal

You can also set strategic goals focusing on your internal company goals. Example employee-centric metrics can include:

45. Increasing employee retention

46. Adding new team members

47. Building a healthy organizational culture

48. Implementing a performance review cycle

49. Standardizing titles and/or levels

50. Improving cross-functional productivity

51. Spinning up a project management office (PMO) to standardize processes

52. Attracting the best talent

53. Building high-performing teams

54. Investing in personal and professional development

55. Reducing burnout and impostor syndrome

56. Building employee-focused training programs

57. Reducing employee turnover

58. Improving workplace safety

59. Building better facilities management

Examples of internal strategic goals 

60. Add 20 new team members within the next four years. 

61. Increase overall engagement scores by 7% based on yearly surveys.

62. Increase new hire referrals to 5,000 team members per year by 2026.

63. Develop and circulate new company values by 2023.

64. Implement a biannual performance review cycle within the next three years.  

65. Attain maximum workplace safety score rating within the next three years. 

How Asana uses work management to effectively manage goals

Learn how Asana's Head of Organizational Strategy helps teams set, track, and achieve their goals.

Achieve your goals with goal tracking technology

Once you develop your goals, you need a clear way to track, measure, and communicate those goals. Too often, teams set great goals and then don’t know how to track those goals over time. 

Instead of letting your goals collect dust in a slide deck or spreadsheet somewhere, use goal tracking technology to connect your strategic goals to your team’s daily work. With Asana , you can track long-term goals, as well as the shorter-term objectives that feed into those goals. 

Related resources

What's the difference between accuracy and precision?

How Asana streamlines strategic planning with work management

What is management by objectives (MBO)?

7 steps to complete a social media audit (with template)

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How to Write a Business Plan in 9 Steps (+ Template and Examples)

Every successful business has one thing in common, a good and well-executed business plan. A business plan is more than a document, it is a complete guide that outlines the goals your business wants to achieve, including its financial goals . It helps you analyze results, make strategic decisions, show your business operations and growth.

If you want to start a business or already have one and need to pitch it to investors for funding, writing a good business plan improves your chances of attracting financiers. As a startup, if you want to secure loans from financial institutions, part of the requirements involve submitting your business plan.

Writing a business plan does not have to be a complicated or time-consuming process. In this article, you will learn the step-by-step process for writing a successful business plan.

You will also learn what you need a business plan for, tips and strategies for writing a convincing business plan, business plan examples and templates that will save you tons of time, and the alternatives to the traditional business plan.

Let’s get started.

What Do You Need A Business Plan For?

Businesses create business plans for different purposes such as to secure funds, monitor business growth, measure your marketing strategies, and measure your business success.

1. Secure Funds

One of the primary reasons for writing a business plan is to secure funds, either from financial institutions/agencies or investors.

For you to effectively acquire funds, your business plan must contain the key elements of your business plan . For example, your business plan should include your growth plans, goals you want to achieve, and milestones you have recorded.

A business plan can also attract new business partners that are willing to contribute financially and intellectually. If you are writing a business plan to a bank, your project must show your traction , that is, the proof that you can pay back any loan borrowed.

Also, if you are writing to an investor, your plan must contain evidence that you can effectively utilize the funds you want them to invest in your business. Here, you are using your business plan to persuade a group or an individual that your business is a source of a good investment.

2. Monitor Business Growth

A business plan can help you track cash flows in your business. It steers your business to greater heights. A business plan capable of tracking business growth should contain:

• The business goals
• Methods to achieve the goals
• Time-frame for attaining those goals

A good business plan should guide you through every step in achieving your goals. It can also track the allocation of assets to every aspect of the business. You can tell when you are spending more than you should on a project.

You can compare a business plan to a written GPS. It helps you manage your business and hints at the right time to expand your business.

3. Measure Business Success

A business plan can help you measure your business success rate. Some small-scale businesses are thriving better than more prominent companies because of their track record of success.

Right from the onset of your business operation, set goals and work towards them. Write a plan to guide you through your procedures. Use your plan to measure how much you have achieved and how much is left to attain.

You can also weigh your success by monitoring the position of your brand relative to competitors. On the other hand, a business plan can also show you why you have not achieved a goal. It can tell if you have elapsed the time frame you set to attain a goal.

4. Document Your Marketing Strategies

You can use a business plan to document your marketing plans. Every business should have an effective marketing plan.

Competition mandates every business owner to go the extraordinary mile to remain relevant in the market. Your business plan should contain your marketing strategies that work. You can measure the success rate of your marketing plans.

In your business plan, your marketing strategy must answer the questions:

• How do you want to reach your target audience?
• How do you plan to retain your customers?
• What is/are your pricing plans?
• What is your budget for marketing?

How to Write a Business Plan Step-by-Step

1. create your executive summary.

The executive summary is a snapshot of your business or a high-level overview of your business purposes and plans . Although the executive summary is the first section in your business plan, most people write it last. The length of the executive summary is not more than two pages.

Generally, there are nine sections in a business plan, the executive summary should condense essential ideas from the other eight sections.

A good executive summary should do the following:

• A Snapshot of Growth Potential. Briefly inform the reader about your company and why it will be successful)
• Contain your Mission Statement which explains what the main objective or focus of your business is.
• Product Description and Differentiation. Brief description of your products or services and why it is different from other solutions in the market.
• The Team. Basic information about your company’s leadership team and employees
• Business Concept. A solid description of what your business does.
• Target Market. The customers you plan to sell to.
• Marketing Strategy. Your plans on reaching and selling to your customers
• Current Financial State. Brief information about what revenue your business currently generates.
• Projected Financial State. Brief information about what you foresee your business revenue to be in the future.

The executive summary is the make-or-break section of your business plan. If your summary cannot in less than two pages cannot clearly describe how your business will solve a particular problem of your target audience and make a profit, your business plan is set on a faulty foundation.

Avoid using the executive summary to hype your business, instead, focus on helping the reader understand the what and how of your plan.

View the executive summary as an opportunity to introduce your vision for your company. You know your executive summary is powerful when it can answer these key questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• What sector or industry are you in?
• What are your products and services?
• What is the future of your industry?
• Is your company scaleable?
• Who are the owners and leaders of your company? What are their backgrounds and experience levels?
• What is the motivation for starting your company?
• What are the next steps?

Writing the executive summary last although it is the most important section of your business plan is an excellent idea. The reason why is because it is a high-level overview of your business plan. It is the section that determines whether potential investors and lenders will read further or not.

The executive summary can be a stand-alone document that covers everything in your business plan. It is not uncommon for investors to request only the executive summary when evaluating your business. If the information in the executive summary impresses them, they will ask for the complete business plan.

If you are writing your business plan for your planning purposes, you do not need to write the executive summary.

2. Add Your Company Overview

The company overview or description is the next section in your business plan after the executive summary. It describes what your business does.

Adding your company overview can be tricky especially when your business is still in the planning stages. Existing businesses can easily summarize their current operations but may encounter difficulties trying to explain what they plan to become.

Your company overview should contain the following:

• What products and services you will provide
• Geographical markets and locations your company have a presence
• What you need to run your business
• Who your target audience or customers are
• Who will service your customers
• Your company’s purpose, mission, and vision
• Information about your company’s founders
• Who the founders are
• Notable achievements of your company so far

When creating a company overview, you have to focus on three basics: identifying your industry, identifying your customer, and explaining the problem you solve.

If you are stuck when creating your company overview, try to answer some of these questions that pertain to you.

• Who are you targeting? (The answer is not everyone)
• What pain point does your product or service solve for your customers that they will be willing to spend money on resolving?
• How does your product or service overcome that pain point?
• Where is the location of your business?
• What products, equipment, and services do you need to run your business?
• How is your company’s product or service different from your competition in the eyes of your customers?
• How many employees do you need and what skills do you require them to have?

After answering some or all of these questions, you will get more than enough information you need to write your company overview or description section. When writing this section, describe what your company does for your customers.

The company description or overview section contains three elements: mission statement, history, and objectives.

• Mission Statement

The mission statement refers to the reason why your business or company is existing. It goes beyond what you do or sell, it is about the ‘why’. A good mission statement should be emotional and inspirational.

Your mission statement should follow the KISS rule (Keep It Simple, Stupid). For example, Shopify’s mission statement is “Make commerce better for everyone.”

When describing your company’s history, make it simple and avoid the temptation of tying it to a defensive narrative. Write it in the manner you would a profile. Your company’s history should include the following information:

• Founding Date
• Major Milestones
• Location(s)
• Flagship Products or Services
• Number of Employees
• Executive Leadership Roles

When you fill in this information, you use it to write one or two paragraphs about your company’s history.

Business Objectives

Your business objective must be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.) Failure to clearly identify your business objectives does not inspire confidence and makes it hard for your team members to work towards a common purpose.

3. Perform Market and Competitive Analyses to Proof a Big Enough Business Opportunity

The third step in writing a business plan is the market and competitive analysis section. Every business, no matter the size, needs to perform comprehensive market and competitive analyses before it enters into a market.

Performing market and competitive analyses are critical for the success of your business. It helps you avoid entering the right market with the wrong product, or vice versa. Anyone reading your business plans, especially financiers and financial institutions will want to see proof that there is a big enough business opportunity you are targeting.

This section is where you describe the market and industry you want to operate in and show the big opportunities in the market that your business can leverage to make a profit. If you noticed any unique trends when doing your research, show them in this section.

Market analysis alone is not enough, you have to add competitive analysis to strengthen this section. There are already businesses in the industry or market, how do you plan to take a share of the market from them?

You have to clearly illustrate the competitive landscape in your business plan. Are there areas your competitors are doing well? Are there areas where they are not doing so well? Show it.

Make it clear in this section why you are moving into the industry and what weaknesses are present there that you plan to explain. How are your competitors going to react to your market entry? How do you plan to get customers? Do you plan on taking your competitors' competitors, tap into other sources for customers, or both?

Illustrate the competitive landscape as well. What are your competitors doing well and not so well?

Answering these questions and thoughts will aid your market and competitive analysis of the opportunities in your space. Depending on how sophisticated your industry is, or the expectations of your financiers, you may need to carry out a more comprehensive market and competitive analysis to prove that big business opportunity.

Instead of looking at the market and competitive analyses as one entity, separating them will make the research even more comprehensive.

Market Analysis

Market analysis, boarding speaking, refers to research a business carried out on its industry, market, and competitors. It helps businesses gain a good understanding of their target market and the outlook of their industry. Before starting a company, it is vital to carry out market research to find out if the market is viable.

The market analysis section is a key part of the business plan. It is the section where you identify who your best clients or customers are. You cannot omit this section, without it your business plan is incomplete.

A good market analysis will tell your readers how you fit into the existing market and what makes you stand out. This section requires in-depth research, it will probably be the most time-consuming part of the business plan to write.

• Market Research

To create a compelling market analysis that will win over investors and financial institutions, you have to carry out thorough market research . Your market research should be targeted at your primary target market for your products or services. Here is what you want to find out about your target market.

• Your target market’s needs or pain points
• The existing solutions for their pain points
• Geographic Location
• Demographics

The purpose of carrying out a marketing analysis is to get all the information you need to show that you have a solid and thorough understanding of your target audience.

Only after you have fully understood the people you plan to sell your products or services to, can you evaluate correctly if your target market will be interested in your products or services.

You can easily convince interested parties to invest in your business if you can show them you thoroughly understand the market and show them that there is a market for your products or services.

How to Quantify Your Target Market

One of the goals of your marketing research is to understand who your ideal customers are and their purchasing power. To quantify your target market, you have to determine the following:

• Your Potential Customers: They are the people you plan to target. For example, if you sell accounting software for small businesses , then anyone who runs an enterprise or large business is unlikely to be your customers. Also, individuals who do not have a business will most likely not be interested in your product.
• Total Households: If you are selling household products such as heating and air conditioning systems, determining the number of total households is more important than finding out the total population in the area you want to sell to. The logic is simple, people buy the product but it is the household that uses it.
• Median Income: You need to know the median income of your target market. If you target a market that cannot afford to buy your products and services, your business will not last long.
• Income by Demographics: If your potential customers belong to a certain age group or gender, determining income levels by demographics is necessary. For example, if you sell men's clothes, your target audience is men.

What Does a Good Market Analysis Entail?

Your business does not exist on its own, it can only flourish within an industry and alongside competitors. Market analysis takes into consideration your industry, target market, and competitors. Understanding these three entities will drastically improve your company’s chances of success.

You can view your market analysis as an examination of the market you want to break into and an education on the emerging trends and themes in that market. Good market analyses include the following:

• Industry Description. You find out about the history of your industry, the current and future market size, and who the largest players/companies are in your industry.
• Overview of Target Market. You research your target market and its characteristics. Who are you targeting? Note, it cannot be everyone, it has to be a specific group. You also have to find out all information possible about your customers that can help you understand how and why they make buying decisions.
• Size of Target Market: You need to know the size of your target market, how frequently they buy, and the expected quantity they buy so you do not risk overproducing and having lots of bad inventory. Researching the size of your target market will help you determine if it is big enough for sustained business or not.
• Growth Potential: Before picking a target market, you want to be sure there are lots of potential for future growth. You want to avoid going for an industry that is declining slowly or rapidly with almost zero growth potential.
• Market Share Potential: Does your business stand a good chance of taking a good share of the market?
• Market Pricing and Promotional Strategies: Your market analysis should give you an idea of the price point you can expect to charge for your products and services. Researching your target market will also give you ideas of pricing strategies you can implement to break into the market or to enjoy maximum profits.
• Potential Barriers to Entry: One of the biggest benefits of conducting market analysis is that it shows you every potential barrier to entry your business will likely encounter. It is a good idea to discuss potential barriers to entry such as changing technology. It informs readers of your business plan that you understand the market.
• Research on Competitors: You need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and how you can exploit them for the benefit of your business. Find patterns and trends among your competitors that make them successful, discover what works and what doesn’t, and see what you can do better.

The market analysis section is not just for talking about your target market, industry, and competitors. You also have to explain how your company can fill the hole you have identified in the market.

Here are some questions you can answer that can help you position your product or service in a positive light to your readers.

• Is your product or service of superior quality?
• What additional features do you offer that your competitors do not offer?
• Are you targeting a ‘new’ market?

Basically, your market analysis should include an analysis of what already exists in the market and an explanation of how your company fits into the market.

Competitive Analysis

In the competitive analysis section, y ou have to understand who your direct and indirect competitions are, and how successful they are in the marketplace. It is the section where you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, the advantage(s) they possess in the market and show the unique features or qualities that make you different from your competitors.

Many businesses do market analysis and competitive analysis together. However, to fully understand what the competitive analysis entails, it is essential to separate it from the market analysis.

Competitive analysis for your business can also include analysis on how to overcome barriers to entry in your target market.

The primary goal of conducting a competitive analysis is to distinguish your business from your competitors. A strong competitive analysis is essential if you want to convince potential funding sources to invest in your business. You have to show potential investors and lenders that your business has what it takes to compete in the marketplace successfully.

Competitive analysis will s how you what the strengths of your competition are and what they are doing to maintain that advantage.

When doing your competitive research, you first have to identify your competitor and then get all the information you can about them. The idea of spending time to identify your competitor and learn everything about them may seem daunting but it is well worth it.

Find answers to the following questions after you have identified who your competitors are.

• What are your successful competitors doing?
• Why is what they are doing working?
• Can your business do it better?
• What are the weaknesses of your successful competitors?
• What are they not doing well?
• Can your business turn its weaknesses into strengths?
• How good is your competitors’ customer service?
• Where do your competitors invest in advertising?
• What sales and pricing strategies are they using?
• What marketing strategies are they using?
• What kind of press coverage do they get?
• What are their customers saying about your competitors (both the positive and negative)?

If your competitors have a website, it is a good idea to visit their websites for more competitors’ research. Check their “About Us” page for more information.

If you are presenting your business plan to investors, you need to clearly distinguish yourself from your competitors. Investors can easily tell when you have not properly researched your competitors.

Take time to think about what unique qualities or features set you apart from your competitors. If you do not have any direct competition offering your product to the market, it does not mean you leave out the competitor analysis section blank. Instead research on other companies that are providing a similar product, or whose product is solving the problem your product solves.

The next step is to create a table listing the top competitors you want to include in your business plan. Ensure you list your business as the last and on the right. What you just created is known as the competitor analysis table.

Direct vs Indirect Competition

You cannot know if your product or service will be a fit for your target market if you have not understood your business and the competitive landscape.

There is no market you want to target where you will not encounter competition, even if your product is innovative. Including competitive analysis in your business plan is essential.

If you are entering an established market, you need to explain how you plan to differentiate your products from the available options in the market. Also, include a list of few companies that you view as your direct competitors The competition you face in an established market is your direct competition.

In situations where you are entering a market with no direct competition, it does not mean there is no competition there. Consider your indirect competition that offers substitutes for the products or services you offer.

For example, if you sell an innovative SaaS product, let us say a project management software , a company offering time management software is your indirect competition.

There is an easy way to find out who your indirect competitors are in the absence of no direct competitors. You simply have to research how your potential customers are solving the problems that your product or service seeks to solve. That is your direct competition.

Factors that Differentiate Your Business from the Competition

There are three main factors that any business can use to differentiate itself from its competition. They are cost leadership, product differentiation, and market segmentation.

1. Cost Leadership

A strategy you can impose to maximize your profits and gain an edge over your competitors. It involves offering lower prices than what the majority of your competitors are offering.

A common practice among businesses looking to enter into a market where there are dominant players is to use free trials or pricing to attract as many customers as possible to their offer.

2. Product Differentiation

Your product or service should have a unique selling proposition (USP) that your competitors do not have or do not stress in their marketing.

Part of the marketing strategy should involve making your products unique and different from your competitors. It does not have to be different from your competitors, it can be the addition to a feature or benefit that your competitors do not currently have.

3. Market Segmentation

As a new business seeking to break into an industry, you will gain more success from focusing on a specific niche or target market, and not the whole industry.

If your competitors are focused on a general need or target market, you can differentiate yourself from them by having a small and hyper-targeted audience. For example, if your competitors are selling men’s clothes in their online stores , you can sell hoodies for men.

4. Define Your Business and Management Structure

The next step in your business plan is your business and management structure. It is the section where you describe the legal structure of your business and the team running it.

Your business is only as good as the management team that runs it, while the management team can only strive when there is a proper business and management structure in place.

If your company is a sole proprietor or a limited liability company (LLC), a general or limited partnership, or a C or an S corporation, state it clearly in this section.

Use an organizational chart to show the management structure in your business. Clearly show who is in charge of what area in your company. It is where you show how each key manager or team leader’s unique experience can contribute immensely to the success of your company. You can also opt to add the resumes and CVs of the key players in your company.

The business and management structure section should show who the owner is, and other owners of the businesses (if the business has other owners). For businesses or companies with multiple owners, include the percent ownership of the various owners and clearly show the extent of each others’ involvement in the company.

Investors want to know who is behind the company and the team running it to determine if it has the right management to achieve its set goals.

Management Team

The management team section is where you show that you have the right team in place to successfully execute the business operations and ideas. Take time to create the management structure for your business. Think about all the important roles and responsibilities that you need managers for to grow your business.

Include brief bios of each key team member and ensure you highlight only the relevant information that is needed. If your team members have background industry experience or have held top positions for other companies and achieved success while filling that role, highlight it in this section.

A common mistake that many startups make is assigning C-level titles such as (CMO and CEO) to everyone on their team. It is unrealistic for a small business to have those titles. While it may look good on paper for the ego of your team members, it can prevent investors from investing in your business.

Instead of building an unrealistic management structure that does not fit your business reality, it is best to allow business titles to grow as the business grows. Starting everyone at the top leaves no room for future change or growth, which is bad for productivity.

Your management team does not have to be complete before you start writing your business plan. You can have a complete business plan even when there are managerial positions that are empty and need filling.

If you have management gaps in your team, simply show the gaps and indicate you are searching for the right candidates for the role(s). Investors do not expect you to have a full management team when you are just starting your business.

Key Questions to Answer When Structuring Your Management Team

• Who are the key leaders?
• What experiences, skills, and educational backgrounds do you expect your key leaders to have?
• Do your key leaders have industry experience?
• What positions will they fill and what duties will they perform in those positions?
• What level of authority do the key leaders have and what are their responsibilities?
• What is the salary for the various management positions that will attract the ideal candidates?

Additional Tips for Writing the Management Structure Section

1. Avoid Adding ‘Ghost’ Names to Your Management Team

There is always that temptation to include a ‘ghost’ name to your management team to attract and influence investors to invest in your business. Although the presence of these celebrity management team members may attract the attention of investors, it can cause your business to lose any credibility if you get found out.

Seasoned investors will investigate further the members of your management team before committing fully to your business If they find out that the celebrity name used does not play any actual role in your business, they will not invest and may write you off as dishonest.

2. Focus on Credentials But Pay Extra Attention to the Roles

Investors want to know the experience that your key team members have to determine if they can successfully reach the company’s growth and financial goals.

While it is an excellent boost for your key management team to have the right credentials, you also want to pay extra attention to the roles they will play in your company.

Organizational Chart

Adding an organizational chart in this section of your business plan is not necessary, you can do it in your business plan’s appendix.

If you are exploring funding options, it is not uncommon to get asked for your organizational chart. The function of an organizational chart goes beyond raising money, you can also use it as a useful planning tool for your business.

An organizational chart can help you identify how best to structure your management team for maximum productivity and point you towards key roles you need to fill in the future.

You can use the organizational chart to show your company’s internal management structure such as the roles and responsibilities of your management team, and relationships that exist between them.

5. Describe Your Product and Service Offering

In your business plan, you have to describe what you sell or the service you plan to offer. It is the next step after defining your business and management structure. The products and services section is where you sell the benefits of your business.

Here you have to explain how your product or service will benefit your customers and describe your product lifecycle. It is also the section where you write down your plans for intellectual property like patent filings and copyrighting.

The research and development that you are undertaking for your product or service need to be explained in detail in this section. However, do not get too technical, sell the general idea and its benefits.

If you have any diagrams or intricate designs of your product or service, do not include them in the products and services section. Instead, leave them for the addendum page. Also, if you are leaving out diagrams or designs for the addendum, ensure you add this phrase “For more detail, visit the addendum Page #.”

Your product and service section in your business plan should include the following:

• A detailed explanation that clearly shows how your product or service works.
• The pricing model for your product or service.
• Your business’ sales and distribution strategy.
• The ideal customers that want your product or service.
• The benefits of your products and services.
• Reason(s) why your product or service is a better alternative to what your competitors are currently offering in the market.
• Plans for filling the orders you receive
• If you have current or pending patents, copyrights, and trademarks for your product or service, you can also discuss them in this section.

What to Focus On When Describing the Benefits, Lifecycle, and Production Process of Your Products or Services

In the products and services section, you have to distill the benefits, lifecycle, and production process of your products and services.

When describing the benefits of your products or services, here are some key factors to focus on.

• Unique features
• Translating the unique features into benefits
• The emotional, psychological, and practical payoffs to attract customers
• Intellectual property rights or any patents

When describing the product life cycle of your products or services, here are some key factors to focus on.

• Upsells, cross-sells, and down-sells
• Time between purchases
• Plans for research and development.

When describing the production process for your products or services, you need to think about the following:

• The creation of new or existing products and services.
• The sources for the raw materials or components you need for production.
• Assembling the products
• Maintaining quality control
• Supply-chain logistics (receiving the raw materials and delivering the finished products)
• The day-to-day management of the production processes, bookkeeping, and inventory.

Tips for Writing the Products or Services Section of Your Business Plan

1. Avoid Technical Descriptions and Industry Buzzwords

The products and services section of your business plan should clearly describe the products and services that your company provides. However, it is not a section to include technical jargons that anyone outside your industry will not understand.

A good practice is to remove highly detailed or technical descriptions in favor of simple terms. Industry buzzwords are not necessary, if there are simpler terms you can use, then use them. If you plan to use your business plan to source funds, making the product or service section so technical will do you no favors.

2. Describe How Your Products or Services Differ from Your Competitors

When potential investors look at your business plan, they want to know how the products and services you are offering differ from that of your competition. Differentiating your products or services from your competition in a way that makes your solution more attractive is critical.

If you are going the innovative path and there is no market currently for your product or service, you need to describe in this section why the market needs your product or service.

For example, overnight delivery was a niche business that only a few companies were participating in. Federal Express (FedEx) had to show in its business plan that there was a large opportunity for that service and they justified why the market needed that service.

3. Long or Short Products or Services Section

Should your products or services section be short? Does the long products or services section attract more investors?

There are no straightforward answers to these questions. Whether your products or services section should be long or relatively short depends on the nature of your business.

If your business is product-focused, then automatically you need to use more space to describe the details of your products. However, if the product your business sells is a commodity item that relies on competitive pricing or other pricing strategies, you do not have to use up so much space to provide significant details about the product.

Likewise, if you are selling a commodity that is available in numerous outlets, then you do not have to spend time on writing a long products or services section.

The key to the success of your business is most likely the effectiveness of your marketing strategies compared to your competitors. Use more space to address that section.

If you are creating a new product or service that the market does not know about, your products or services section can be lengthy. The reason why is because you need to explain everything about the product or service such as the nature of the product, its use case, and values.

A short products or services section for an innovative product or service will not give the readers enough information to properly evaluate your business.

4. Describe Your Relationships with Vendors or Suppliers

Your business will rely on vendors or suppliers to supply raw materials or the components needed to make your products. In your products and services section, describe your relationships with your vendors and suppliers fully.

Avoid the mistake of relying on only one supplier or vendor. If that supplier or vendor fails to supply or goes out of business, you can easily face supply problems and struggle to meet your demands. Plan to set up multiple vendor or supplier relationships for better business stability.

5. Your Primary Goal Is to Convince Your Readers

The primary goal of your business plan is to convince your readers that your business is viable and to create a guide for your business to follow. It applies to the products and services section.

When drafting this section, think like the reader. See your reader as someone who has no idea about your products and services. You are using the products and services section to provide the needed information to help your reader understand your products and services. As a result, you have to be clear and to the point.

While you want to educate your readers about your products or services, you also do not want to bore them with lots of technical details. Show your products and services and not your fancy choice of words.

Your products and services section should provide the answer to the “what” question for your business. You and your management team may run the business, but it is your products and services that are the lifeblood of the business.

Key Questions to Answer When Writing your Products and Services Section

Answering these questions can help you write your products and services section quickly and in a way that will appeal to your readers.

• Are your products existing on the market or are they still in the development stage?
• What is your timeline for adding new products and services to the market?
• What are the positives that make your products and services different from your competitors?
• Do your products and services have any competitive advantage that your competitors’ products and services do not currently have?
• Do your products or services have any competitive disadvantages that you need to overcome to compete with your competitors? If your answer is yes, state how you plan to overcome them,
• How much does it cost to produce your products or services? How much do you plan to sell it for?
• What is the price for your products and services compared to your competitors? Is pricing an issue?
• What are your operating costs and will it be low enough for you to compete with your competitors and still take home a reasonable profit margin?
• What is your plan for acquiring your products? Are you involved in the production of your products or services?
• Are you the manufacturer and produce all the components you need to create your products? Do you assemble your products by using components supplied by other manufacturers? Do you purchase your products directly from suppliers or wholesalers?
• Do you have a steady supply of products that you need to start your business? (If your business is yet to kick-off)
• How do you plan to distribute your products or services to the market?

You can also hint at the marketing or promotion plans you have for your products or services such as how you plan to build awareness or retain customers. The next section is where you can go fully into details about your business’s marketing and sales plan.

6. Show and Explain Your Marketing and Sales Plan

Providing great products and services is wonderful, but it means nothing if you do not have a marketing and sales plan to inform your customers about them. Your marketing and sales plan is critical to the success of your business.

The sales and marketing section is where you show and offer a detailed explanation of your marketing and sales plan and how you plan to execute it. It covers your pricing plan, proposed advertising and promotion activities, activities and partnerships you need to make your business a success, and the benefits of your products and services.

There are several ways you can approach your marketing and sales strategy. Ideally, your marketing and sales strategy has to fit the unique needs of your business.

In this section, you describe how the plans your business has for attracting and retaining customers, and the exact process for making a sale happen. It is essential to thoroughly describe your complete marketing and sales plans because you are still going to reference this section when you are making financial projections for your business.

Outline Your Business’ Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

The sales and marketing section is where you outline your business’s unique selling proposition (USP). When you are developing your unique selling proposition, think about the strongest reasons why people should buy from you over your competition. That reason(s) is most likely a good fit to serve as your unique selling proposition (USP).

Target Market and Target Audience

Plans on how to get your products or services to your target market and how to get your target audience to buy them go into this section. You also highlight the strengths of your business here, particularly what sets them apart from your competition.

Before you start writing your marketing and sales plan, you need to have properly defined your target audience and fleshed out your buyer persona. If you do not first understand the individual you are marketing to, your marketing and sales plan will lack any substance and easily fall.

Creating a Smart Marketing and Sales Plan

Marketing your products and services is an investment that requires you to spend money. Like any other investment, you have to generate a good return on investment (ROI) to justify using that marketing and sales plan. Good marketing and sales plans bring in high sales and profits to your company.

Avoid spending money on unproductive marketing channels. Do your research and find out the best marketing and sales plan that works best for your company.

Your marketing and sales plan can be broken into different parts: your positioning statement, pricing, promotion, packaging, advertising, public relations, content marketing, social media, and strategic alliances.

Your Positioning Statement

Your positioning statement is the first part of your marketing and sales plan. It refers to the way you present your company to your customers.

Are you the premium solution, the low-price solution, or are you the intermediary between the two extremes in the market? What do you offer that your competitors do not that can give you leverage in the market?

Before you start writing your positioning statement, you need to spend some time evaluating the current market conditions. Here are some questions that can help you to evaluate the market

• What are the unique features or benefits that you offer that your competitors lack?
• What are your customers’ primary needs and wants?
• Why should a customer choose you over your competition? How do you plan to differentiate yourself from the competition?
• How does your company’s solution compare with other solutions in the market?

After answering these questions, then you can start writing your positioning statement. Your positioning statement does not have to be in-depth or too long.

All you need to explain with your positioning statement are two focus areas. The first is the position of your company within the competitive landscape. The other focus area is the core value proposition that sets your company apart from other alternatives that your ideal customer might consider.

Here is a simple template you can use to develop a positioning statement.

For [description of target market] who [need of target market], [product or service] [how it meets the need]. Unlike [top competition], it [most essential distinguishing feature].

For example, let’s create the positioning statement for fictional accounting software and QuickBooks alternative , TBooks.

“For small business owners who need accounting services, TBooks is an accounting software that helps small businesses handle their small business bookkeeping basics quickly and easily. Unlike Wave, TBooks gives small businesses access to live sessions with top accountants.”

You can edit this positioning statement sample and fill it with your business details.

After writing your positioning statement, the next step is the pricing of your offerings. The overall positioning strategy you set in your positioning statement will often determine how you price your products or services.

Pricing is a powerful tool that sends a strong message to your customers. Failure to get your pricing strategy right can make or mar your business. If you are targeting a low-income audience, setting a premium price can result in low sales.

You can use pricing to communicate your positioning to your customers. For example, if you are offering a product at a premium price, you are sending a message to your customers that the product belongs to the premium category.

Basic Rules to Follow When Pricing Your Offering

Setting a price for your offering involves more than just putting a price tag on it. Deciding on the right pricing for your offering requires following some basic rules. They include covering your costs, primary and secondary profit center pricing, and matching the market rate.

• Covering Your Costs: The price you set for your products or service should be more than it costs you to produce and deliver them. Every business has the same goal, to make a profit. Depending on the strategy you want to use, there are exceptions to this rule. However, the vast majority of businesses follow this rule.
• Primary and Secondary Profit Center Pricing: When a company sets its price above the cost of production, it is making that product its primary profit center. A company can also decide not to make its initial price its primary profit center by selling below or at even with its production cost. It rather depends on the support product or even maintenance that is associated with the initial purchase to make its profit. The initial price thus became its secondary profit center.
• Matching the Market Rate: A good rule to follow when pricing your products or services is to match your pricing with consumer demand and expectations. If you price your products or services beyond the price your customer perceives as the ideal price range, you may end up with no customers. Pricing your products too low below what your customer perceives as the ideal price range may lead to them undervaluing your offering.

Pricing Strategy

Your pricing strategy influences the price of your offering. There are several pricing strategies available for you to choose from when examining the right pricing strategy for your business. They include cost-plus pricing, market-based pricing, value pricing, and more.

• Cost-plus Pricing: This strategy is one of the simplest and oldest pricing strategies. Here you consider the cost of producing a unit of your product and then add a profit to it to arrive at your market price. It is an effective pricing strategy for manufacturers because it helps them cover their initial costs. Another name for the cost-plus pricing strategy is the markup pricing strategy.
• Market-based Pricing: This pricing strategy analyses the market including competitors’ pricing and then sets a price based on what the market is expecting. With this pricing strategy, you can either set your price at the low-end or high-end of the market.
• Value Pricing: This pricing strategy involves setting a price based on the value you are providing to your customer. When adopting a value-based pricing strategy, you have to set a price that your customers are willing to pay. Service-based businesses such as small business insurance providers , luxury goods sellers, and the fashion industry use this pricing strategy.

After carefully sorting out your positioning statement and pricing, the next item to look at is your promotional strategy. Your promotional strategy explains how you plan on communicating with your customers and prospects.

As a business, you must measure all your costs, including the cost of your promotions. You also want to measure how much sales your promotions bring for your business to determine its usefulness. Promotional strategies or programs that do not lead to profit need to be removed.

There are different types of promotional strategies you can adopt for your business, they include advertising, public relations, and content marketing.

Advertising

Your business plan should include your advertising plan which can be found in the marketing and sales plan section. You need to include an overview of your advertising plans such as the areas you plan to spend money on to advertise your business and offers.

Ensure that you make it clear in this section if your business will be advertising online or using the more traditional offline media, or the combination of both online and offline media. You can also include the advertising medium you want to use to raise awareness about your business and offers.

Some common online advertising mediums you can use include social media ads, landing pages, sales pages, SEO, Pay-Per-Click, emails, Google Ads, and others. Some common traditional and offline advertising mediums include word of mouth, radios, direct mail, televisions, flyers, billboards, posters, and others.

A key component of your advertising strategy is how you plan to measure the effectiveness and success of your advertising campaign. There is no point in sticking with an advertising plan or medium that does not produce results for your business in the long run.

Public Relations

A great way to reach your customers is to get the media to cover your business or product. Publicity, especially good ones, should be a part of your marketing and sales plan. In this section, show your plans for getting prominent reviews of your product from reputable publications and sources.

Your business needs that exposure to grow. If public relations is a crucial part of your promotional strategy, provide details about your public relations plan here.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a popular promotional strategy used by businesses to inform and attract their customers. It is about teaching and educating your prospects on various topics of interest in your niche, it does not just involve informing them about the benefits and features of the products and services you have,

Businesses publish content usually for free where they provide useful information, tips, and advice so that their target market can be made aware of the importance of their products and services. Content marketing strategies seek to nurture prospects into buyers over time by simply providing value.

Your company can create a blog where it will be publishing content for its target market. You will need to use the best website builder such as Wix and Squarespace and the best web hosting services such as Bluehost, Hostinger, and other Bluehost alternatives to create a functional blog or website.

If content marketing is a crucial part of your promotional strategy (as it should be), detail your plans under promotions.

Including high-quality images of the packaging of your product in your business plan is a lovely idea. You can add the images of the packaging of that product in the marketing and sales plan section. If you are not selling a product, then you do not need to include any worry about the physical packaging of your product.

When organizing the packaging section of your business plan, you can answer the following questions to make maximum use of this section.

• Is your choice of packaging consistent with your positioning strategy?
• What key value proposition does your packaging communicate? (It should reflect the key value proposition of your business)
• How does your packaging compare to that of your competitors?

Social Media

Your 21st-century business needs to have a good social media presence. Not having one is leaving out opportunities for growth and reaching out to your prospect.

You do not have to join the thousands of social media platforms out there. What you need to do is join the ones that your customers are active on and be active there.

Businesses use social media to provide information about their products such as promotions, discounts, the benefits of their products, and content on their blogs.

Social media is also a platform for engaging with your customers and getting feedback about your products or services. Make no mistake, more and more of your prospects are using social media channels to find more information about companies.

You need to consider the social media channels you want to prioritize your business (prioritize the ones your customers are active in) and your branding plans in this section.

Strategic Alliances

If your company plans to work closely with other companies as part of your sales and marketing plan, include it in this section. Prove details about those partnerships in your business plan if you have already established them.

Strategic alliances can be beneficial for all parties involved including your company. Working closely with another company in the form of a partnership can provide access to a different target market segment for your company.

The company you are partnering with may also gain access to your target market or simply offer a new product or service (that of your company) to its customers.

Mutually beneficial partnerships can cover the weaknesses of one company with the strength of another. You should consider strategic alliances with companies that sell complimentary products to yours. For example, if you provide printers, you can partner with a company that produces ink since the customers that buy printers from you will also need inks for printing.

Steps Involved in Creating a Marketing and Sales Plan

1. Focus on Your Target Market

Identify who your customers are, the market you want to target. Then determine the best ways to get your products or services to your potential customers.

2. Evaluate Your Competition

One of the goals of having a marketing plan is to distinguish yourself from your competition. You cannot stand out from them without first knowing them in and out.

You can know your competitors by gathering information about their products, pricing, service, and advertising campaigns.

These questions can help you know your competition.

• What makes your competition successful?
• What are their weaknesses?
• What are customers saying about your competition?

3. Consider Your Brand

Customers' perception of your brand has a strong impact on your sales. Your marketing and sales plan should seek to bolster the image of your brand. Before you start marketing your business, think about the message you want to pass across about your business and your products and services.

4. Focus on Benefits

The majority of your customers do not view your product in terms of features, what they want to know is the benefits and solutions your product offers. Think about the problems your product solves and the benefits it delivers, and use it to create the right sales and marketing message.

Your marketing plan should focus on what you want your customer to get instead of what you provide. Identify those benefits in your marketing and sales plan.

5. Focus on Differentiation

Your marketing and sales plan should look for a unique angle they can take that differentiates your business from the competition, even if the products offered are similar. Some good areas of differentiation you can use are your benefits, pricing, and features.

Key Questions to Answer When Writing Your Marketing and Sales Plan

• What is your company’s budget for sales and marketing campaigns?
• What key metrics will you use to determine if your marketing plans are successful?
• What are your alternatives if your initial marketing efforts do not succeed?
• Who are the sales representatives you need to promote your products or services?
• What are the marketing and sales channels you plan to use? How do you plan to get your products in front of your ideal customers?
• Where will you sell your products?

You may want to include samples of marketing materials you plan to use such as print ads, website descriptions, and social media ads. While it is not compulsory to include these samples, it can help you better communicate your marketing and sales plan and objectives.

The purpose of the marketing and sales section is to answer this question “How will you reach your customers?” If you cannot convincingly provide an answer to this question, you need to rework your marketing and sales section.

7. Clearly Show Your Funding Request

If you are writing your business plan to ask for funding from investors or financial institutions, the funding request section is where you will outline your funding requirements. The funding request section should answer the question ‘How much money will your business need in the near future (3 to 5 years)?’

A good funding request section will clearly outline and explain the amount of funding your business needs over the next five years. You need to know the amount of money your business needs to make an accurate funding request.

Also, when writing your funding request, provide details of how the funds will be used over the period. Specify if you want to use the funds to buy raw materials or machinery, pay salaries, pay for advertisements, and cover specific bills such as rent and electricity.

In addition to explaining what you want to use the funds requested for, you need to clearly state the projected return on investment (ROI) . Investors and creditors want to know if your business can generate profit for them if they put funds into it.

Ensure you do not inflate the figures and stay as realistic as possible. Investors and financial institutions you are seeking funds from will do their research before investing money in your business.

If you are not sure of an exact number to request from, you can use some range of numbers as rough estimates. Add a best-case scenario and a work-case scenario to your funding request. Also, include a description of your strategic future financial plans such as selling your business or paying off debts.

Funding Request: Debt or Equity?

When making your funding request, specify the type of funding you want. Do you want debt or equity? Draw out the terms that will be applicable for the funding, and the length of time the funding request will cover.

Case for Equity

If your new business has not yet started generating profits, you are most likely preparing to sell equity in your business to raise capital at the early stage. Equity here refers to ownership. In this case, you are selling a portion of your company to raise capital.

Although this method of raising capital for your business does not put your business in debt, keep in mind that an equity owner may expect to play a key role in company decisions even if he does not hold a major stake in the company.

Most equity sales for startups are usually private transactions . If you are making a funding request by offering equity in exchange for funding, let the investor know that they will be paid a dividend (a share of the company’s profit). Also, let the investor know the process for selling their equity in your business.

Case for Debt

You may decide not to offer equity in exchange for funds, instead, you make a funding request with the promise to pay back the money borrowed at the agreed time frame.

When making a funding request with an agreement to pay back, note that you will have to repay your creditors both the principal amount borrowed and the interest on it. Financial institutions offer this type of funding for businesses.

Large companies combine both equity and debt in their capital structure. When drafting your business plan, decide if you want to offer both or one over the other.

Before you sell equity in exchange for funding in your business, consider if you are willing to accept not being in total control of your business. Also, before you seek loans in your funding request section, ensure that the terms of repayment are favorable.

You should set a clear timeline in your funding request so that potential investors and creditors can know what you are expecting. Some investors and creditors may agree to your funding request and then delay payment for longer than 30 days, meanwhile, your business needs an immediate cash injection to operate efficiently.

Additional Tips for Writing the Funding Request Section of your Business Plan

The funding request section is not necessary for every business, it is only needed by businesses who plan to use their business plan to secure funding.

If you are adding the funding request section to your business plan, provide an itemized summary of how you plan to use the funds requested. Hiring a lawyer, accountant, or other professionals may be necessary for the proper development of this section.

You should also gather and use financial statements that add credibility and support to your funding requests. Ensure that the financial statements you use should include your projected financial data such as projected cash flows, forecast statements, and expenditure budgets.

If you are an existing business, include all historical financial statements such as cash flow statements, balance sheets and income statements .

Provide monthly and quarterly financial statements for a year. If your business has records that date back beyond the one-year mark, add the yearly statements of those years. These documents are for the appendix section of your business plan.

8. Detail Your Financial Plan, Metrics, and Projections

If you used the funding request section in your business plan, supplement it with a financial plan, metrics, and projections. This section paints a picture of the past performance of your business and then goes ahead to make an informed projection about its future.

The goal of this section is to convince readers that your business is going to be a financial success. It outlines your business plan to generate enough profit to repay the loan (with interest if applicable) and to generate a decent return on investment for investors.

If you have an existing business already in operation, use this section to demonstrate stability through finance. This section should include your cash flow statements, balance sheets, and income statements covering the last three to five years. If your business has some acceptable collateral that you can use to acquire loans, list it in the financial plan, metrics, and projection section.

Apart from current financial statements, this section should also contain a prospective financial outlook that spans the next five years. Include forecasted income statements, cash flow statements, balance sheets, and capital expenditure budget.

If your business is new and is not yet generating profit, use clear and realistic projections to show the potentials of your business.

When drafting this section, research industry norms and the performance of comparable businesses. Your financial projections should cover at least five years. State the logic behind your financial projections. Remember you can always make adjustments to this section as the variables change.

The financial plan, metrics, and projection section create a baseline which your business can either exceed or fail to reach. If your business fails to reach your projections in this section, you need to understand why it failed.

Investors and loan managers spend a lot of time going through the financial plan, metrics, and projection section compared to other parts of the business plan. Ensure you spend time creating credible financial analyses for your business in this section.

Many entrepreneurs find this section daunting to write. You do not need a business degree to create a solid financial forecast for your business. Business finances, especially for startups, are not as complicated as they seem. There are several online tools and templates that make writing this section so much easier.

Use Graphs and Charts

The financial plan, metrics, and projection section is a great place to use graphs and charts to tell the financial story of your business. Charts and images make it easier to communicate your finances.

Accuracy in this section is key, ensure you carefully analyze your past financial statements properly before making financial projects.

Address the Risk Factors and Show Realistic Financial Projections

Keep your financial plan, metrics, and projection realistic. It is okay to be optimistic in your financial projection, however, you have to justify it.

You should also address the various risk factors associated with your business in this section. Investors want to know the potential risks involved, show them. You should also show your plans for mitigating those risks.

What You Should In The Financial Plan, Metrics, and Projection Section of Your Business Plan

The financial plan, metrics, and projection section of your business plan should have monthly sales and revenue forecasts for the first year. It should also include annual projections that cover 3 to 5 years.

A three-year projection is a basic requirement to have in your business plan. However, some investors may request a five-year forecast.

Your business plan should include the following financial statements: sales forecast, personnel plan, income statement, income statement, cash flow statement, balance sheet, and an exit strategy.

1. Sales Forecast

Sales forecast refers to your projections about the number of sales your business is going to record over the next few years. It is typically broken into several rows, with each row assigned to a core product or service that your business is offering.

One common mistake people make in their business plan is to break down the sales forecast section into long details. A sales forecast should forecast the high-level details.

For example, if you are forecasting sales for a payroll software provider, you could break down your forecast into target market segments or subscription categories.

Your sales forecast section should also have a corresponding row for each sales row to cover the direct cost or Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). The objective of these rows is to show the expenses that your business incurs in making and delivering your product or service.

Note that your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) should only cover those direct costs incurred when making your products. Other indirect expenses such as insurance, salaries, payroll tax, and rent should not be included.

For example, the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for a restaurant is the cost of ingredients while for a consulting company it will be the cost of paper and other presentation materials.

2. Personnel Plan

The personnel plan section is where you provide details about the payment plan for your employees. For a small business, you can easily list every position in your company and how much you plan to pay in the personnel plan.

However, for larger businesses, you have to break the personnel plan into functional groups such as sales and marketing.

The personnel plan will also include the cost of an employee beyond salary, commonly referred to as the employee burden. These costs include insurance, payroll taxes , and other essential costs incurred monthly as a result of having employees on your payroll.

3. Income Statement

The income statement section shows if your business is making a profit or taking a loss. Another name for the income statement is the profit and loss (P&L). It takes data from your sales forecast and personnel plan and adds other ongoing expenses you incur while running your business.

Every business plan should have an income statement. It subtracts your business expenses from its earnings to show if your business is generating profit or incurring losses.

The income statement has the following items: sales, Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), gross margin, operating expenses, total operating expenses, operating income , total expenses, and net profit.

• Sales refer to the revenue your business generates from selling its products or services. Other names for sales are income or revenue.
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) refers to the total cost of selling your products. Other names for COGS are direct costs or cost of sales. Manufacturing businesses use the Costs of Goods Manufactured (COGM) .
• Gross Margin is the figure you get when you subtract your COGS from your sales. In your income statement, you can express it as a percentage of total sales (Gross margin / Sales = Gross Margin Percent).
• Operating Expenses refer to all the expenses you incur from running your business. It exempts the COGS because it stands alone as a core part of your income statement. You also have to exclude taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Your operating expenses include salaries, marketing expenses, research and development (R&D) expenses, and other expenses.
• Total Operating Expenses refers to the sum of all your operating expenses including those exemptions named above under operating expenses.
• Operating Income refers to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. It is simply known as the acronym EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Calculating your operating income is simple, all you need to do is to subtract your COGS and total operating expenses from your sales.
• Total Expenses refer to the sum of your operating expenses and your business’ interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
• Net profit shows whether your business has made a profit or taken a loss during a given timeframe.

4. Cash Flow Statement

The cash flow statement tracks the money you have in the bank at any given point. It is often confused with the income statement or the profit and loss statement. They are both different types of financial statements. The income statement calculates your profits and losses while the cash flow statement shows you how much you have in the bank.

5. Balance Sheet

The balance sheet is a financial statement that provides an overview of the financial health of your business. It contains information about the assets and liabilities of your company, and owner’s or shareholders’ equity.

You can get the net worth of your company by subtracting your company’s liabilities from its assets.

6. Exit Strategy

The exit strategy refers to a probable plan for selling your business either to the public in an IPO or to another company. It is the last thing you include in the financial plan, metrics, and projection section.

You can choose to omit the exit strategy from your business plan if you plan to maintain full ownership of your business and do not plan on seeking angel investment or virtual capitalist (VC) funding.

Investors may want to know what your exit plan is. They invest in your business to get a good return on investment.

Your exit strategy does not have to include long and boring details. Ensure you identify some interested parties who may be interested in buying the company if it becomes a success.

Key Questions to Answer with Your Financial Plan, Metrics, and Projection

Your financial plan, metrics, and projection section helps investors, creditors, or your internal managers to understand what your expenses are, the amount of cash you need, and what it takes to make your company profitable. It also shows what you will be doing with any funding.

You do not need to show actual financial data if you do not have one. Adding forecasts and projections to your financial statements is added proof that your strategy is feasible and shows investors you have planned properly.

Here are some key questions to answer to help you develop this section.

• What is your sales forecast for the next year?
• When will your company achieve a positive cash flow?
• What are the core expenses you need to operate?
• How much money do you need upfront to operate or grow your company?
• How will you use the loans or investments?

9. Add an Appendix to Your Business Plan

Adding an appendix to your business plan is optional. It is a useful place to put any charts, tables, legal notes, definitions, permits, résumés, and other critical information that do not fit into other sections of your business plan.

The appendix section is where you would want to include details of a patent or patent-pending if you have one. You can always add illustrations or images of your products here. It is the last section of your business plan.

When writing your business plan, there are details you cut short or remove to prevent the entire section from becoming too lengthy. There are also details you want to include in the business plan but are not a good fit for any of the previous sections. You can add that additional information to the appendix section.

Businesses also use the appendix section to include supporting documents or other materials specially requested by investors or lenders.

You can include just about any information that supports the assumptions and statements you made in the business plan under the appendix. It is the one place in the business plan where unrelated data and information can coexist amicably.

If your appendix section is lengthy, try organizing it by adding a table of contents at the beginning of the appendix section. It is also advisable to group similar information to make it easier for the reader to access them.

A well-organized appendix section makes it easier to share your information clearly and concisely. Add footnotes throughout the rest of the business plan or make references in the plan to the documents in the appendix.

The appendix section is usually only necessary if you are seeking funding from investors or lenders, or hoping to attract partners.

People reading business plans do not want to spend time going through a heap of backup information, numbers, and charts. Keep these documents or information in the Appendix section in case the reader wants to dig deeper.

Common Items to Include in the Appendix Section of Your Business Plan

The appendix section includes documents that supplement or support the information or claims given in other sections of the business plans. Common items you can include in the appendix section include:

• Additional data about the process of manufacturing or creation
• Additional description of products or services such as product schematics
• Additional financial documents or projections
• Articles of incorporation and status
• Backup for market research or competitive analysis
• Bank statements
• Business registries
• Client testimonials (if your business is already running)
• Copies of insurances
• Credit histories (personal or/and business)
• Deeds and permits
• Equipment leases
• Examples of marketing and advertising collateral
• Industry associations and memberships
• Images of product
• Intellectual property
• Key customer contracts
• Legal documents and other contracts
• Letters of reference
• Links to references
• Market research data
• Organizational charts
• Photographs of potential facilities
• Professional licenses pertaining to your legal structure or type of business
• Purchase orders
• Resumes of the founder(s) and key managers
• State and federal identification numbers or codes
• Trademarks or patents’ registrations

Avoid using the appendix section as a place to dump any document or information you feel like adding. Only add documents or information that you support or increase the credibility of your business plan.

Tips and Strategies for Writing a Convincing Business Plan

To achieve a perfect business plan, you need to consider some key tips and strategies. These tips will raise the efficiency of your business plan above average.

1. Know Your Audience

When writing a business plan, you need to know your audience . Business owners write business plans for different reasons. Your business plan has to be specific. For example, you can write business plans to potential investors, banks, and even fellow board members of the company.

The audience you are writing to determines the structure of the business plan. As a business owner, you have to know your audience. Not everyone will be your audience. Knowing your audience will help you to narrow the scope of your business plan.

Consider what your audience wants to see in your projects, the likely questions they might ask, and what interests them.

• A business plan used to address a company's board members will center on its employment schemes, internal affairs, projects, stakeholders, etc.
• A business plan for financial institutions will talk about the size of your market and the chances for you to pay back any loans you demand.
• A business plan for investors will show proof that you can return the investment capital within a specific time. In addition, it discusses your financial projections, tractions, and market size.

2. Get Inspiration from People

Writing a business plan from scratch as an entrepreneur can be daunting. That is why you need the right inspiration to push you to write one. You can gain inspiration from the successful business plans of other businesses. Look at their business plans, the style they use, the structure of the project, etc.

To make your business plan easier to create, search companies related to your business to get an exact copy of what you need to create an effective business plan. You can also make references while citing examples in your business plans.

When drafting your business plan, get as much help from others as you possibly can. By getting inspiration from people, you can create something better than what they have.

3. Avoid Being Over Optimistic

Many business owners make use of strong adjectives to qualify their content. One of the big mistakes entrepreneurs make when preparing a business plan is promising too much.

The use of superlatives and over-optimistic claims can prepare the audience for more than you can offer. In the end, you disappoint the confidence they have in you.

In most cases, the best option is to be realistic with your claims and statistics. Most of the investors can sense a bit of incompetency from the overuse of superlatives. As a new entrepreneur, do not be tempted to over-promise to get the interests of investors.

The concept of entrepreneurship centers on risks, nothing is certain when you make future analyses. What separates the best is the ability to do careful research and work towards achieving that, not promising more than you can achieve.

To make an excellent first impression as an entrepreneur, replace superlatives with compelling data-driven content. In this way, you are more specific than someone promising a huge ROI from an investment.

4. Keep it Simple and Short

When writing business plans, ensure you keep them simple throughout. Irrespective of the purpose of the business plan, your goal is to convince the audience.

One way to achieve this goal is to make them understand your proposal. Therefore, it would be best if you avoid the use of complex grammar to express yourself. It would be a huge turn-off if the people you want to convince are not familiar with your use of words.

Another thing to note is the length of your business plan. It would be best if you made it as brief as possible.

You hardly see investors or agencies that read through an extremely long document. In that case, if your first few pages can’t convince them, then you have lost it. The more pages you write, the higher the chances of you derailing from the essential contents.

To ensure your business plan has a high conversion rate, you need to dispose of every unnecessary information. For example, if you have a strategy that you are not sure of, it would be best to leave it out of the plan.

5. Make an Outline and Follow Through

A perfect business plan must have touched every part needed to convince the audience. Business owners get easily tempted to concentrate more on their products than on other sections. Doing this can be detrimental to the efficiency of the business plan.

For example, imagine you talking about a product but omitting or providing very little information about the target audience. You will leave your clients confused.

To ensure that your business plan communicates your full business model to readers, you have to input all the necessary information in it. One of the best ways to achieve this is to design a structure and stick to it.

This structure is what guides you throughout the writing. To make your work easier, you can assign an estimated word count or page limit to every section to avoid making it too bulky for easy reading. As a guide, the necessary things your business plan must contain are:

• Table of contents
• Introduction
• Product or service description
• Target audience
• Market size
• Competition analysis
• Financial projections

Some specific businesses can include some other essential sections, but these are the key sections that must be in every business plan.

6. Ask a Professional to Proofread

When writing a business plan, you must tie all loose ends to get a perfect result. When you are done with writing, call a professional to go through the document for you. You are bound to make mistakes, and the way to correct them is to get external help.

You should get a professional in your field who can relate to every section of your business plan. It would be easier for the professional to notice the inner flaws in the document than an editor with no knowledge of your business.

In addition to getting a professional to proofread, get an editor to proofread and edit your document. The editor will help you identify grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and inappropriate writing styles.

Writing a business plan can be daunting, but you can surmount that obstacle and get the best out of it with these tips.

Business Plan Examples and Templates That’ll Save You Tons of Time

1. hubspot's one-page business plan.

The one-page business plan template by HubSpot is the perfect guide for businesses of any size, irrespective of their business strategy. Although the template is condensed into a page, your final business plan should not be a page long! The template is designed to ask helpful questions that can help you develop your business plan.

Hubspot’s one-page business plan template is divided into nine fields:

• Business opportunity
• Company description
• Industry analysis
• Target market
• Implementation timeline
• Marketing plan
• Financial summary
• Funding required

2. Bplan’s Free Business Plan Template

Bplans' free business plan template is investor-approved. It is a rich template used by prestigious educational institutions such as Babson College and Princeton University to teach entrepreneurs how to create a business plan.

The template has six sections: the executive summary, opportunity, execution, company, financial plan, and appendix. There is a step-by-step guide for writing every little detail in the business plan. Follow the instructions each step of the way and you will create a business plan that impresses investors or lenders easily.

3. HubSpot's Downloadable Business Plan Template

HubSpot’s downloadable business plan template is a more comprehensive option compared to the one-page business template by HubSpot. This free and downloadable business plan template is designed for entrepreneurs.

The template is a comprehensive guide and checklist for business owners just starting their businesses. It tells you everything you need to fill in each section of the business plan and how to do it.

There are nine sections in this business plan template: an executive summary, company and business description, product and services line, market analysis, marketing plan, sales plan, legal notes, financial considerations, and appendix.

4. Business Plan by My Own Business Institute

My Own Business Institute (MOBI) which is a part of Santa Clara University's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship offers a free business plan template. You can either copy the free business template from the link provided above or download it as a Word document.

The comprehensive template consists of a whopping 15 sections.

• The Business Profile
• The Vision and the People
• Home-Based Business and Freelance Business Opportunities
• Organization
• Licenses and Permits
• Business Insurance
• Communication Tools
• Acquisitions
• Location and Leasing
• Accounting and Cash Flow
• Opening and Marketing
• Managing Employees
• Expanding and Handling Problems

There are lots of helpful tips on how to fill each section in the free business plan template by MOBI.

5. Score's Business Plan Template for Startups

Score is an American nonprofit organization that helps entrepreneurs build successful companies. This business plan template for startups by Score is available for free download. The business plan template asks a whooping 150 generic questions that help entrepreneurs from different fields to set up the perfect business plan.

The business plan template for startups contains clear instructions and worksheets, all you have to do is answer the questions and fill the worksheets.

There are nine sections in the business plan template: executive summary, company description, products and services, marketing plan, operational plan, management and organization, startup expenses and capitalization, financial plan, and appendices.

The ‘refining the plan’ resource contains instructions that help you modify your business plan to suit your specific needs, industry, and target audience. After you have completed Score’s business plan template, you can work with a SCORE mentor for expert advice in business planning.

6. Minimalist Architecture Business Plan Template by Venngage

The minimalist architecture business plan template is a simple template by Venngage that you can customize to suit your business needs .

There are five sections in the template: an executive summary, statement of problem, approach and methodology, qualifications, and schedule and benchmark. The business plan template has instructions that guide users on what to fill in each section.

7. Small Business Administration Free Business Plan Template

The Small Business Administration (SBA) offers two free business plan templates, filled with practical real-life examples that you can model to create your business plan. Both free business plan templates are written by fictional business owners: Rebecca who owns a consulting firm, and Andrew who owns a toy company.

There are five sections in the two SBA’s free business plan templates.

• Executive Summary
• Company Description
• Service Line
• Marketing and Sales

8. The $100 Startup's One-Page Business Plan

The one-page business plan by the $100 startup is a simple business plan template for entrepreneurs who do not want to create a long and complicated plan . You can include more details in the appendices for funders who want more information beyond what you can put in the one-page business plan.

There are five sections in the one-page business plan such as overview, ka-ching, hustling, success, and obstacles or challenges or open questions. You can answer all the questions using one or two sentences.

9. PandaDoc’s Free Business Plan Template

The free business plan template by PandaDoc is a comprehensive 15-page document that describes the information you should include in every section.

There are 11 sections in PandaDoc’s free business plan template.

• Executive summary
• Business description
• Products and services
• Operations plan
• Management organization
• Financial plan
• Conclusion / Call to action
• Confidentiality statement

You have to sign up for its 14-day free trial to access the template. You will find different business plan templates on PandaDoc once you sign up (including templates for general businesses and specific businesses such as bakeries, startups, restaurants, salons, hotels, and coffee shops)

PandaDoc allows you to customize its business plan templates to fit the needs of your business. After editing the template, you can send it to interested parties and track opens and views through PandaDoc.

10. Invoiceberry Templates for Word, Open Office, Excel, or PPT

InvoiceBerry is a U.K based online invoicing and tracking platform that offers free business plan templates in .docx, .odt, .xlsx, and .pptx formats for freelancers and small businesses.

Before you can download the free business plan template, it will ask you to give it your email address. After you complete the little task, it will send the download link to your inbox for you to download. It also provides a business plan checklist in .xlsx file format that ensures you add the right information to the business plan.

Alternatives to the Traditional Business Plan

A business plan is very important in mapping out how one expects their business to grow over a set number of years, particularly when they need external investment in their business. However, many investors do not have the time to watch you present your business plan. It is a long and boring read.

Luckily, there are three alternatives to the traditional business plan (the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and Startup Pitch Deck). These alternatives are less laborious and easier and quicker to present to investors.

Business Model Canvas (BMC)

The business model canvas is a business tool used to present all the important components of setting up a business, such as customers, route to market, value proposition, and finance in a single sheet. It provides a very focused blueprint that defines your business initially which you can later expand on if needed.

The sheet is divided mainly into company, industry, and consumer models that are interconnected in how they find problems and proffer solutions.

Segments of the Business Model Canvas

The business model canvas was developed by founder Alexander Osterwalder to answer important business questions. It contains nine segments.

• Key Partners: Who will be occupying important executive positions in your business? What do they bring to the table? Will there be a third party involved with the company?
• Key Activities: What important activities will production entail? What activities will be carried out to ensure the smooth running of the company?
• The Product’s Value Propositions: What does your product do? How will it be different from other products?
• Customer Segments: What demography of consumers are you targeting? What are the habits of these consumers? Who are the MVPs of your target consumers?
• Customer Relationships: How will the team support and work with its customer base? How do you intend to build and maintain trust with the customer?
• Key Resources: What type of personnel and tools will be needed? What size of the budget will they need access to?
• Channels: How do you plan to create awareness of your products? How do you intend to transport your product to the customer?
• Cost Structure: What is the estimated cost of production? How much will distribution cost?
• Revenue Streams: For what value are customers willing to pay? How do they prefer to pay for the product? Are there any external revenues attached apart from the main source? How do the revenue streams contribute to the overall revenue?

Lean Canvas

The lean canvas is a problem-oriented alternative to the standard business model canvas. It was proposed by Ash Maurya, creator of Lean Stack as a development of the business model generation. It uses a more problem-focused approach and it majorly targets entrepreneurs and startup businesses.

Lean Canvas uses the same 9 blocks concept as the business model canvas, however, they have been modified slightly to suit the needs and purpose of a small startup. The key partners, key activities, customer relationships, and key resources are replaced by new segments which are:

• Problem: Simple and straightforward number of problems you have identified, ideally three.
• Solution: The solutions to each problem.
• Unfair Advantage: Something you possess that can't be easily bought or replicated.
• Key Metrics: Important numbers that will tell how your business is doing.

Startup Pitch Deck

While the business model canvas compresses into a factual sheet, startup pitch decks expand flamboyantly.

Pitch decks, through slides, convey your business plan, often through graphs and images used to emphasize estimations and observations in your presentation. Entrepreneurs often use pitch decks to fully convince their target audience of their plans before discussing funding arrangements.

Considering the likelihood of it being used in a small time frame, a good startup pitch deck should ideally contain 20 slides or less to have enough time to answer questions from the audience.

Unlike the standard and lean business model canvases, a pitch deck doesn't have a set template on how to present your business plan but there are still important components to it. These components often mirror those of the business model canvas except that they are in slide form and contain more details.

Using Airbnb (one of the most successful start-ups in recent history) for reference, the important components of a good slide are listed below.

• Cover/Introduction Slide: Here, you should include your company's name and mission statement. Your mission statement should be a very catchy tagline. Also, include personal information and contact details to provide an easy link for potential investors.
• Problem Slide: This slide requires you to create a connection with the audience or the investor that you are pitching. For example in their pitch, Airbnb summarized the most important problems it would solve in three brief points – pricing of hotels, disconnection from city culture, and connection problems for local bookings.
• Solution Slide: This slide includes your core value proposition. List simple and direct solutions to the problems you have mentioned
• Customer Analysis: Here you will provide information on the customers you will be offering your service to. The identity of your customers plays an important part in fundraising as well as the long-run viability of the business.
• Market Validation: Use competitive analysis to show numbers that prove the presence of a market for your product, industry behavior in the present and the long run, as well as the percentage of the market you aim to attract. It shows that you understand your competitors and customers and convinces investors of the opportunities presented in the market.
• Business Model: Your business model is the hook of your presentation. It may vary in complexity but it should generally include a pricing system informed by your market analysis. The goal of the slide is to confirm your business model is easy to implement.
• Marketing Strategy: This slide should summarize a few customer acquisition methods that you plan to use to grow the business.
• Competitive Advantage: What this slide will do is provide information on what will set you apart and make you a more attractive option to customers. It could be the possession of technology that is not widely known in the market.
• Team Slide: Here you will give a brief description of your team. Include your key management personnel here and their specific roles in the company. Include their educational background, job history, and skillsets. Also, talk about their accomplishments in their careers so far to build investors' confidence in members of your team.
• Traction Slide: This validates the company’s business model by showing growth through early sales and support. The slide aims to reduce any lingering fears in potential investors by showing realistic periodic milestones and profit margins. It can include current sales, growth, valuable customers, pre-orders, or data from surveys outlining current consumer interest.
• Funding Slide: This slide is popularly referred to as ‘the ask'. Here you will include important details like how much is needed to get your business off the ground and how the funding will be spent to help the company reach its goals.
• Appendix Slides: Your pitch deck appendix should always be included alongside a standard pitch presentation. It consists of additional slides you could not show in the pitch deck but you need to complement your presentation.

It is important to support your calculations with pictorial renditions. Infographics, such as pie charts or bar graphs, will be more effective in presenting the information than just listing numbers. For example, a six-month graph that shows rising profit margins will easily look more impressive than merely writing it.

Lastly, since a pitch deck is primarily used to secure meetings and you may be sharing your pitch with several investors, it is advisable to keep a separate public version that doesn't include financials. Only disclose the one with projections once you have secured a link with an investor.

Advantages of the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas, and Startup Pitch Deck over the Traditional Business Plan

• Time-Saving: Writing a detailed traditional business plan could take weeks or months. On the other hand, all three alternatives can be done in a few days or even one night of brainstorming if you have a comprehensive understanding of your business.
• Easier to Understand: Since the information presented is almost entirely factual, it puts focus on what is most important in running the business. They cut away the excess pages of fillers in a traditional business plan and allow investors to see what is driving the business and what is getting in the way.
• Easy to Update: Businesses typically present their business plans to many potential investors before they secure funding. What this means is that you may regularly have to amend your presentation to update statistics or adjust to audience-specific needs. For a traditional business plan, this could mean rewriting a whole section of your plan. For the three alternatives, updating is much easier because they are not voluminous.
• Guide for a More In-depth Business Plan: All three alternatives have the added benefit of being able to double as a sketch of your business plan if the need to create one arises in the future.

Business Plan FAQ

Business plans are important for any entrepreneur who is looking for a framework to run their company over some time or seeking external support. Although they are essential for new businesses, every company should ideally have a business plan to track their growth from time to time.  They can be used by startups seeking investments or loans to convey their business ideas or an employee to convince his boss of the feasibility of starting a new project. They can also be used by companies seeking to recruit high-profile employee targets into key positions or trying to secure partnerships with other firms.

Business plans often vary depending on your target audience, the scope, and the goals for the plan. Startup plans are the most common among the different types of business plans.  A start-up plan is used by a new business to present all the necessary information to help get the business up and running. They are usually used by entrepreneurs who are seeking funding from investors or bank loans. The established company alternative to a start-up plan is a feasibility plan. A feasibility plan is often used by an established company looking for new business opportunities. They are used to show the upsides of creating a new product for a consumer base. Because the audience is usually company people, it requires less company analysis. The third type of business plan is the lean business plan. A lean business plan is a brief, straight-to-the-point breakdown of your ideas and analysis for your business. It does not contain details of your proposal and can be written on one page. Finally, you have the what-if plan. As it implies, a what-if plan is a preparation for the worst-case scenario. You must always be prepared for the possibility of your original plan being rejected. A good what-if plan will serve as a good plan B to the original.

A good business plan has 10 key components. They include an executive plan, product analysis, desired customer base, company analysis, industry analysis, marketing strategy, sales strategy, financial projection, funding, and appendix. Executive Plan Your business should begin with your executive plan. An executive plan will provide early insight into what you are planning to achieve with your business. It should include your mission statement and highlight some of the important points which you will explain later. Product Analysis The next component of your business plan is your product analysis. A key part of this section is explaining the type of item or service you are going to offer as well as the market problems your product will solve. Desired Consumer Base Your product analysis should be supplemented with a detailed breakdown of your desired consumer base. Investors are always interested in knowing the economic power of your market as well as potential MVP customers. Company Analysis The next component of your business plan is your company analysis. Here, you explain how you want to run your business. It will include your operational strategy, an insight into the workforce needed to keep the company running, and important executive positions. It will also provide a calculation of expected operational costs.  Industry Analysis A good business plan should also contain well laid out industry analysis. It is important to convince potential investors you know the companies you will be competing with, as well as your plans to gain an edge on the competition. Marketing Strategy Your business plan should also include your marketing strategy. This is how you intend to spread awareness of your product. It should include a detailed explanation of the company brand as well as your advertising methods. Sales Strategy Your sales strategy comes after the market strategy. Here you give an overview of your company's pricing strategy and how you aim to maximize profits. You can also explain how your prices will adapt to market behaviors. Financial Projection The financial projection is the next component of your business plan. It explains your company's expected running cost and revenue earned during the tenure of the business plan. Financial projection gives a clear idea of how your company will develop in the future. Funding The next component of your business plan is funding. You have to detail how much external investment you need to get your business idea off the ground here. Appendix The last component of your plan is the appendix. This is where you put licenses, graphs, or key information that does not fit in any of the other components.

The business model canvas is a business management tool used to quickly define your business idea and model. It is often used when investors need you to pitch your business idea during a brief window.

A pitch deck is similar to a business model canvas except that it makes use of slides in its presentation. A pitch is not primarily used to secure funding, rather its main purpose is to entice potential investors by selling a very optimistic outlook on the business.

Business plan competitions help you evaluate the strength of your business plan. By participating in business plan competitions, you are improving your experience. The experience provides you with a degree of validation while practicing important skills. The main motivation for entering into the competitions is often to secure funding by finishing in podium positions. There is also the chance that you may catch the eye of a casual observer outside of the competition. These competitions also provide good networking opportunities. You could meet mentors who will take a keen interest in guiding you in your business journey. You also have the opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs whose ideas can complement yours.

Exlore Further

• 12 Key Elements of a Business Plan (Top Components Explained)
• 13 Sources of Business Finance For Companies & Sole Traders
• 5 Common Types of Business Structures (+ Pros & Cons)
• How to Buy a Business in 8 Steps (+ Due Diligence Checklist)

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Martin luenendonk.

Martin loves entrepreneurship and has helped dozens of entrepreneurs by validating the business idea, finding scalable customer acquisition channels, and building a data-driven organization. During his time working in investment banking, tech startups, and industry-leading companies he gained extensive knowledge in using different software tools to optimize business processes.

This insights and his love for researching SaaS products enables him to provide in-depth, fact-based software reviews to enable software buyers make better decisions.

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Give your business goals clarity, structure and guidelines.

Table of Contents

Goals and dreams have crucial differences. Dreams are wishes and fantasies; for example, many of us long to be rich, famous, more successful, happier and healthier. In contrast, goals put your dreams on a deadline and require actionable steps toward achievement. 

As with personal goals, you have a greater chance of achieving business goals when you work within a structure that sets you up for success. We’ll explore the SMART goals system and how you can apply this goal-achievement method to your business. 

What are SMART goals?

SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. The SMART goals framework is a way to stay on target and achieve your goals more systematically. 

The process includes the following components:

• Making your goal specific
• Quantifying your goal 
• Ensuring your goal is attainable, reasonable and realistic
• Hitching your goal to a deadline

An example of a SMART goal is to add 600 Instagram followers within 90 days.

How to incorporate SMART goals into your business plan

Here’s a look at each SMART goal element, along with implementation examples you can apply to your business. 

1. Make goals specific.

A specific goal clearly states what will be achieved, by whom, where and when (and sometimes why).

For example, let’s say you’re a wedding planner. Here’s how a non-SMART goal compares with a SMART goal in specificity: 

• Non-SMART goal: Market my business in Toronto.
• SMART goal : Start a monthly networking group for women on event planning in Toronto. Set a monthly attendance goal of 20 women, with two attendees per month signing up for my “How to plan your wedding without stress” workshop.

2. Make goals measurable.

Measuring your goal means evaluating the results and the milestones you must hit on the way. When you measure, you assess if you’re on the right track to achieve your goal by asking these questions:

For example, let’s say your goal is to increase sales to $96,000 per year. To measure your goal, you could take the following actions:

• Set a milestone target of $8,000 in sales each month. 
• Create a process that focuses on achieving $8,000 per month (adding up to $96,000 for the year). 
• Check your sales totals monthly to evaluate if you’re reaching your goal. 

Measuring draws your focus, helping you boost your odds of achieving your goal. One good way to measure is to have a dashboard arranged by month. For example, you could use a chart like this:

3. Make goals attainable.

Ensure that your goals are achievable. If you believe you can reach the goal, you’ll be more likely to do so. Setting unreachable goals is a mistake because you’re setting yourself up for failure. 

Setting attainable goals is also essential for team goal setting and can boost employee engagement . If you set unrealistic goals for your team, your team members won’t fully engage in the project. They need to be fully on board for the project to succeed. Everyone on the team should share in the goal setting so they own the goal and know it’s attainable. 

4. Make goals relevant.

Goals tend to fall into two categories: short-term and long-term. It’s essential to understand how both goal types fit your organizational or personal vision, mission and purpose.

It’s tempting to set a goal because it’s easy or sounds great, only to find out later that it is of no long-term importance to what you want to achieve as an individual or an organization.

5. Make goals time-based.

Setting a deadline attaches a time frame to your goals. A deadline can be an excellent motivator. For example, let’s say you want to run a marathon in a year. A time-based goal would look something like this:

Set up a system to get yourself marathon-ready in a year.

• Run twice a week for three months, gradually increasing your distance.
• Run three times a week for three months, gradually increasing your distance.
• Be ready for a half-marathon by the six-month mark. 
• Increase your frequency and distance over the next six months. 
• Be ready for the marathon in 12 months. 

Time-based goals help you avoid procrastination because your process offers incentives as you meet smaller achievements along the way. 

Why use SMART goals?

SMART goals allow you to chart a course and stay organized when reaching personal or professional goals. You’re more likely to succeed because you’re less likely to get overwhelmed and abandon your goal entirely. 

In a business setting, particularly, SMART goals provide teams with clarity, structure and guidelines. Here are a few reasons to use SMART goals in business:

• Setting specific goals provides accountability. Accountability helps ensure goals are achieved. For example, if your goal involves reducing customer complaints by a specific amount, your customer service manager should be the point person for the initiative and have some accountability for the goal’s success.
• Measurable goals help you refine strategies. When your goals are measurable, you can gauge your success — or how close you came to it. Tracking metrics and key performance indicators allows you to compare the efficacy of various strategies and use only the most successful ones in the future.
• Achievable goals boost morale. When you set achievable goals, employee morale is raised and your team is less likely to experience employee burnout and frustration. Employees are set up for success, helping you build an empowered employee culture .
• Relevant goals propel company growth. Goals are useless if they don’t contribute to overall business success. Find goals that help move the organization forward. Relevant goals can include meeting financial metrics, like increased profitability, and more general goals, like reducing business expenses , limiting waste and increasing recycling.
• Time-based goals provide accountability and urgency. Goals with deadlines are extremely motivating. A timetable brings a goal to life. Achieving time-based goals allows you to set new goals after your initial goals are met.

With SMART goals, you and your team know what success entails and can measure it within a project’s framework. Everyone knows the steps they must take to achieve their goals. With ambiguity gone and a direction mapped, SMART goals set up your team for success.  

How to identify and reach your goals

It’s crucial to set a goal that matches your personal or professional vision. After you set the goal, focus on a process that makes your goal achievable. Here are some steps to follow.

1. Identify your goal.

If you are unable to set a SMART goal, it’s usually because you need to clarify exactly what you want to accomplish within a set period. It’s inadvisable to skip the process of SMART goal setting and just “go for it.” You have a greater chance of success when you analyze your goals and match them to your vision.

To save time, prevent disappointment and avoid costly mistakes, perform the following exercise when you implement SMART goals.

What are your goals? Writing down your goals helps to clarify your thinking. Can you stretch yourself both personally and professionally by setting three goals in each area.

2. Determine what is reasonable. 

Because SMART goals are attainable and time-based, you must ensure you set a reasonable goal. For example, if your goal is to increase sales by 30 percent in a year but you have been successful in increasing sales by only 10 percent a year in the past, consider extending the period to two years or reducing the amount to 15 percent for one year. That way, you’re improving on previous years without being overly ambitious.

Also, examine the resources at your disposal. In the previous example, a 30 percent increase in one year might be attainable if you just received a cash infusion that you can put toward marketing expenses. Or, maybe you’ve recently made an acquisition or added to your sales team , making a once-ambitious goal more reasonable.

3. Focus on essential metrics. 

When you’re ensuring that your goals are relevant, specific and measurable, carefully determine which metrics to use. For example, you may want a better digital marketing return on investment (ROI) from your social media marketing . In this case, follower counts and engagement levels (likes, shares, comments) are appropriate metrics. If you have a relatively small number of followers, you may want to focus on follower counts. But if you have many followers who don’t contribute to sales, you should focus on engagement metrics.

It’s not enough to mindlessly pursue your goal; you must keep the overall business benefit in mind. In the previous example, if you wanted to grow your followers on social media, you could buy followers and seemingly accomplish that goal. However, this would not help you boost your social media marketing ROI, because most of those people would not engage with your company or become paying customers.

4. Identify and implement tactics to meet your goal.

Once you’ve set a goal, develop a system to achieve it. For example, if you want to write a book in one year and you’re not an author, you may feel overwhelmed. 

Instead, try writing 250 words per day. Don’t agonize over what you are writing — just write. At that rate, if you write five days per week (260 days per year), you will have 65,000 words in a year, or approximately a 250-page paperback.

Business goals work the same way. Set the goal, and then find a system to help you reach it. For example, when setting a sales goal, you may want to focus on consistently achieving 10 quotes per month with a 50 percent success rate.

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41 Business Goals Examples to Set in 2024 and Beyond

• Goal Management

What Are Business Goals?

4 goal frameworks with examples, manage business goals in weekdone.

For more than 10 years Weekdone has provided tens of thousands of teams from startups to Fortune 500 with world leading goal-setting software called Weekdone . These are our lessons learned.

Organizations invest time and resources in determining where to target their collective efforts. Whether your business goals and objectives center on strategic planning, expansion, or sustainability, they are a pivotal point in the expansion of any organization. They assist in several ways, from enhancing customer service to boosting revenues. In the end, they contribute to establishing the company’s main goal.

You may have come across many long-term and short-term goal-setting methodologies or frameworks in the business sector, such as Objectives and Key Results (OKR) , Balanced Scorecard (BSC), SMART goals, and so on. 

• OKRs – Objectives and Key Results – as implemented in products like Weekdone are today’s de-facto standard for goal-setting in teams and companies
• SMART goals can help you handle the bumps on the road. 
• Business model and vision statement provide a big picture view of your firm and what you want to achieve, 
• Short-term and long-term business objectives describe the exact techniques you’ll employ to get there.

It’s time to advance with a proactive, strategic strategy that prioritizes pressing problems and helps us avoid making snap judgments in the future. Let’s go through the ultimate strategies for setting great business goals for 2024 and beyond.

Business goals are the aims that a company expects to achieve within a specific time frame. You may define business goals for your entire organization as well as specific departments, staff, management, and/or clientele.

Goals often indicate the wider purpose of a firm and seek to set an ultimate goal for staff to strive toward. The time period you set your goal for will determine whether it’s considered short-term or long term.

Short term goals are usually those which can be achieved in one or two working quarters (3-6 months) sometimes maybe a year, depending on how committed the organization is.

Further, when thinking of a long term goal – it’s typically one set with a date to accomplish within one year or more.

📚 What’s the difference between goals and objectives ?

A goal framework is a systematic way of defining goals. Although these frameworks vary in terms of precise rules and methods, they are all intended to simplify the goal management process to maximize the probability of achievement. This generally entails breaking down larger and more complicated goals into smaller steps and activities that should be completed within a specific period.

The 4 goal-setting frameworks listed below are among the most widely used and successful frameworks available today.

Objectives and Key Results (OKR)

OKR stands for “ Objectives and Key Results .” This popular goal management framework focuses on development and progress by setting proper quarterly goals – leveraging the ability of your teams to achieve results. Weekdone is a tool to implement OKRs in your team.

Using OKRs is critical for attaining collaborative success and fulfilling the organization’s bigger vision. This framework helps businesses to keep alignment and engagement on the quantifiable metrics that actually matter!

OKR methodology entails defining objectives, involving individuals in the goal-setting exercise, and fostering an open and transparent culture. Maintaining this culture requires persistent and regular OKR check-ins to keep you on track and ensure you never lose sight of your priorities. OKRs have been embraced by many big corporations and charitable groups, including Netflix and Code for America.

Learn more about the best practices for tracking OKRs , why it is important, and how to use OKRs effectively throughout the company.

Get 14-day trial of Weekdone . Invite your teams and set better business goals with OKRs. Try it now .

How to Write Good OKRs

Writing OKRs at the Company or Team level lets you clearly view your core challenges and improvement possibilities and separate them from day-to-day activities. Good objectives bring teams together, foster long-term growth habits, and propel you to success. If you start using Weekdone , you can take advantage of the OKR examples in the software .

To create OKRs, you must first understand how to do them correctly. OKRs are composed of one main goal at the top and 3-5 accompanying key results. They may be expressed in the form of a statement.

Crafting Company Objectives

To begin, you need to create a corporate objective. The corporate goal should be wide enough to allow all teams to develop the most successful team goals. On the other hand, it should be detailed, so everyone understands the company’s direction.

Ultimately, the company objective helps to establish a quarterly focus for the entire organization. Team objectives are then developed based on this high-level focus.

Developing Team Objectives

Once the company’s Objective(s) is established, individual teams should work together to discuss their relative objectives. These motivating goals should be consistent with the general direction of the firm. They should create focus, a sense of urgency, and a sense of collective purpose. Furthermore, they are intended to represent challenges to be solved or possibilities for progress to be pursued during the quarter.

Pro Tip: In Weekdone , we recommend linking your team objectives to the company objective – creating the company OKR. This goal alignment tactic ensures that everything is moving as one cohesive organism.

Creating Key Results for Your Objectives

Objectives on all levels are subdivided into quantifiable key results used to track your success and progress toward the “O”. As a result, key results they must be time-bound, detailed, attainable, and quantifiable. While the goal is to fix or enhance the problem, crucial findings indicate whether the problem was successfully solved.

Keep in mind: Efficient Key results are lofty but attainable metrics -they are not KPIs or projects. KR’s are always tied to both the quarter and the objectives.

OKR Examples

By identifying some OKR examples to model and practice with, it will be much simpler to adopt the framework in your business effectively. Here are some example Objectives and their Key Results for different business departments:

Sales & Marketing Departmental OKR Examples

Example okr #1:.

Objective: Improve our overall sales performance. Key Result 1: Maintain a sales pipeline of quality leads worth at least $400K each quarter. Key Result 2: Increase the closure rate from 20% to 23%. Key Result 3: Increase the number of planned calls per sales rep from three to six per week. Key Result 4: Increase the average contract size from $12,000 to $124,000.

Example OKR #2:

Objective: Build a netbook of business recurring revenue to stabilize the firm. Key Result 1: Achieve $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue ($MRR) before the end of Q1. Key Result 2: Increase the proportion of subscription services sold against one-time contracts to 60%. Key Result 3: Increase the average paid subscription value to at least $400. Key Result 4: Increase the percentage of yearly renewals to 70%.

Example OKR #3:

Objective: Bring in as many high-quality leads to assist the sales team. Key Result 1: Develop three new case studies aimed at new consumer categories. Key Result 2:  Update the normal sales deck and discussion track with new products/offers. Key Result 3:  Try to double the number of online form leads. Key Result 4:  Organize two sales training sessions.

Example OKR #4:

Objective: Improve the quality of our outbound sales strategy. Key Result 1: Ensure that at least 75% of prospective parties are contacted directly within three working days. Key Result 2:   Consult with productive team members to determine what works in the sales process and develop a sales cheat sheet. Key Result 3: Publish a best practices sales process document with the lowest permitted service levels

Example OKR #5:

Objective: Generate sales leads of greater quality. Key Result 1: Create a set of lead metrics and prepare queries for CRM collection. Key Result 2:   Ensure that at least 75% of leads performed mandatory questions/answers. Key Result 3: Streamline the gathering of data from our database to CRM. Key Result 4: Redesign the user interaction form by adding three additional mandatory structured questionnaires.

Example OKR #6:

Objective : Extend our reach and brand recognition beyond our present geographic boundaries. Key Result 1:  Improve signups from transformational change leadership articles by 3% Key Result 2:  Boost publication subscriptions by 300 Key Result 3: Enhance web traffic from additional target areas by 12%.

Example OKR #7

Objective : Improve our SEO. Key Result 1: Get 20 fresh backlinks from relevant sites each quarter if your domain score exceeds 50. Key Result 2: Optimize our on-page optimization and improve ten pages every quarter. Key Result 3:  Increase the speed of our website to improve our speed score. Key Result 4:   Write one new blog article weekly optimized for our list of targeted search terms.

Example OKR #8

Objective : Foster a sense of community among our clients. Key Result 1:  Develop a best-practices-based customer community approach. Key Result 2:  During the first half of the year, produce 20 articles showing client satisfaction. Key Result 3:  We get 25% of our clients to engage in the community using discount opportunities. Key Result 4:  Earn five favorable PR mentions for our consumers this quarter.

Example OKR #9

Objective : Increase brand exposure and reputation. Key Result 1:  Roll out a new weekly magazine with valuable material and thought leadership. Key Result 2: Deliver five new value-added posts with over 250 words of content every month. Key Result 3: This quarter, obtain two favorable media exposure PR spots in our community. Key Result 4: Amass 10 reviews with five stars on Google and Yelp this quarter.

Example OKR #10

Objective : Deliberately and consistently enhance the competencies of our staff. Key Result 1:   Every member of the team has a personal growth plan. Key Result 2:  All workers have received 360-degree feedback. Key Result 3: Every manager has a one-on-one at least every other week. Key Result 4: Create a strategy for effective intervention opportunities to address capacity shortfalls.

SMART Goals for Business

SMART business goals give you the blueprint to make your overarching business aspirations a reality.

James Cunningham, Arthur Miller, and George Doran initially presented this method for defining goals in 1981. Setting SMART goals allows you to articulate your thoughts, organize your efforts, use your time and resources better, and enhance the odds of reaching your goal. Questions to ask when setting SMART goals:

• What exactly do you want to accomplish?
• What are your numeric priorities or restrictions regarding effort, expense, and time?
• How realistic is it? See committed or aspirational goals
• Does the goal apply to you and your company?
• What are your timeframes, deadlines, and quantifiable constraints?

SMART goals do not have a certain cadence or use case; they are suggestions and a descriptive set of criteria to use while considering what you want to accomplish. You may establish them for certain periods, departments, individuals, or tasks.

How to Write SMART Goals

Consider using the SMART steps to help you reach your goals:

• Specify your goal.
• Create a measurable goal.
• Set attainable goals.
• Ensure that it is relevant.
• Develop a time-bound plan.

SMART goals can be implemented in any section of a business. If you’re unsure whether it’s worthwhile to plan it out for your organization, consider using free online goal-setting tools.

SMART Business Goals Examples

1. i want to boost my revenue.

• Specific: I plan to boost revenue while decreasing spending. Shifting to a more affordable location, which would reduce my rent by 7%, will lower my operational expenditures.
• Measurable: I plan to increase sales over the following five months by signing up three additional potential clients.
• Attainable: I plan to strengthen my current client connections and develop the company through recommendations, networking, and social media. This will assist me in generating more leads, resulting in a rise in income for the company.
• Relevant: Moving to a less expensive location will lower my company’s operational costs, allowing for profit growth.
• Time-bound: By the end of the next three months, I will have doubled my profit.

2. Set Up a Virtual Sales Communication Link

• Specific: Our remote sales crew should have connectivity across the board and be fully functional.
• Measurable: The mission is fully functional when running the routing protocol, and our remote employees can start working.
• Achievable: This goal may be lofty, but we may bring it to the top of the list of priorities and briefly divert assets from longer-term initiatives to finish it.
• Relevant: Even if there is no epidemic, remote work is an excellent option. Remote networking assists people in being productive and organizations in achieving goals in a post-COVID environment.
• Time-bound: This objective has a time constraint of seven days.

3. I Want To Improve My Business Operations Efficiency

• Specific: I’ll strengthen the effectiveness of my daily operations by putting pressure on my sales team to raise their closing ratio from 30% to at least 40%.
• Measurable: Salespeople are expected to enhance their closing ratio from 30% to 40%, and delivery time is expected to be reduced from 72 hours to 12 hours.
• Attainable: I’ll run a poll to determine what the notion means to both clients and the sales staff. I’ll put it in place as soon as the concept is approved.
• Relevant: expanding the number of motorcycles and pickup trucks that will provide delivery services for us will aid the strategy’s success.
• Time-bound: This should take place within a year.

4. I Want To Expand My Business Operations

• Specific: During the next three years, open three additional branches around the country
• Measurable: The goal is to boost the company’s operations and revenue. This, in turn, will encourage the establishment of three additional branches.
• Attainable: More manufacturing will increase my present selling space by 25%. This will allow me to save for the projected expansion to four branches around the country.
• Relevant: Growing production, operations, and income will result in a larger customer base; therefore, opening new branches will not waste time.
• Time-bound: The establishment of the branches should take place during the next three years.

5. My goal is to increase employee retention

• Specific: In 90 days, I will reduce staff turnover by 25% by training new workers to let them understand what is expected of them and a strategy to assist them in becoming acquainted with the operational processes.
• Measurable: the increase in staff turnover is expected to be roughly 25% and should occur within 90 days.
• Attainable: training courses and one-on-one sessions will guarantee that personnel are ready for what is required of them when they start working in production.
• Relevant: exceptional personnel will be considered for a reward scheme. There will be motivational training for individuals who are having difficulty.
• Time-bound: Within 90 days, staff turnover will have improved.

OKR Goals vs. SMART Goals

OKRs and SMART goals may appear to be very comparable on the surface. However, they have entirely different use cases. OKR is regarded as a more advanced method for creating corporate-wide goals.

OKRs are intended to propel firms to growth and long-term progress. They operate best with a quarterly goal-setting cycle and regular weekly check-ins to keep track of progress and stay on target. SMART goals are one-time objectives created for smaller initiatives without a direct or established link to higher-level objectives.

Management by Objectives (MBO)

Management by Objectives, abbreviated “MBO,” is a management concept created by Peter Drucker in the late 1960s as he began to propose better methods for managing skilled workers over agricultural and industrial employees who came before them.

Staff objectives are set using the main business goals, with this framework. MBO enables everyone in the firm to evaluate what they have done concerning the company’s key objectives and priorities while completing duties. This demonstrates how action and outcome are linked and how they may significantly boost productivity.

MBO Examples

MBO can be used and possibly benefit a variety of sectors. Here are some real-world applications for MBO:

Human Resources: MBO may improve employee happiness, hold workplace events, and increase staff participation.

Company Performance: Using MBO to boost gross margins, minimize carbon footprints, enhance sales, and so on.

Marketing: MBO may help you reach goals like boosting email subscriptions, expanding social media followers, and tripling online traffic.

Customer Service: Minimizing incident rates, boosting associate accessibility to assist in customer disagreements, and speeding up a dispute resolution.

Sales: Reduce the sales cycle from six to three months, boost average revenues to $10,000, and acquire 15 new clients over a certain period.

In reality, a clear objective setting in areas where the organization may now fall short may assist all facets of a company, from human resources to marketing to sales to information technology and everything in between.

OKR vs. MBO 

The most notable difference between these two frameworks is that OKR is about outcomes, rather than outputs. OKR has been known to foster more important cross-departmental and team discussions to get to the greater problem or big picture ideas. Management by Objectives has been linked to performance management and is driven by outputs – both of which are very different from the Objectives and Key Results goal management framework.

Read more on the difference between OKR and MBO . 

Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAG)

BHAG stands for ‘big, hairy, audacious goals’ and refers to lofty ambitions that may appear impossible in the short term but give a crucial feeling of aspiration and emotional energy to propel the business to the top.

The concept, coined by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, often defines long-term strategies tied to your company’s fundamental beliefs and ideals. BHAGs are long-term in nature, with a time frame of 10 to 25 years optimal. They should be based on the goal and guiding principles of your company.

Tips for Developing Your BHAG

Here are some helpful hints for developing a BHAG for your company:

• Employees are inspired to strive for the final objective since it is so large and inspirational;
• The BHAG may be broken down into sub-goals, which is a huge motivator;
• Your objective is specific;
• Don’t forget to set a time limit.

BHAG Examples

• Make your eatery the go-to choice for royalty and international leaders when they need catering.
• Establish a nonprofit organization to find a treatment for a serious illness like Parkinson’s or arthritis.
• Make your business more than just a producer of mobility aids by creating the first all-terrain wheelchair that improves the lives of millions of people.
• Surpass Starbucks and McDonald’s in brand recognition. It can also work in other industries by modifying it to become as recognizable a name as McDonald’s in your chosen field.
• Make your art gallery the most well-known in the world. One in which all the greatest artists compete to have their work showcased.
• Become a billion-dollar corporation in two decades. Some of the world’s top corporations began on kitchen tables with a BHAG.

More Business Goals Examples

Without rhyme or reason, implementing a new framework or not – you can always begin with some statement areas for improvement. We’ve created a list of example goals you can work with immediately in your organization. These are great to get started in your free Weekdone trial .

1. Increase Market Share

This goal is customer driven. The idea is to sell more of your product to your target consumers, thus, increasing overall market share for your product for investors. For example, if you operate a B2B company, your goal should be to reach out to more company heads or HR departments. If you operate a small business that focuses on building computers, you’ll want more of the local population to come to you for your services.

2. Increase Community Outreach

Becoming part of the community is a fantastic way to connect from the B2C side. Whether you are a large company contributing to community efforts through sponsorship or a small company that volunteers to help for Little League Baseball, community outreach is an excellent goal for new and established organizations alike. Increasing community outreach is especially important if your company or organization doesn’t have a good reputation with a particular group (I.E.: environmentalists).

Likewise, community outreach is essential if you are providing human necessities. For example, if you run a small scale grocery store, community outreach is what’s gonna keep you above water when competing with larger corporations. 

3. Maintain Profits

Financial goals are one of the most useful top-level objectives you can have. By nature, they are both aspirational and measurable, which equally makes financial-driven objectives essential for getting the goal setting process started for young businesses.

Maintaining profits (as opposed to increasing revenue) calls for a balance between profitability and investments. Investments are necessary to test out changes in the market and expand the business, so by establishing a balanced goal, you can reason how much money can go into growth and new projects/tools/campaigns while still reaching a paired profit goal. 

4. Reduce Energy or Decrease Unnecessary Use of Resources

This is a double-sided issue. If you are providing a service or product that requires being PHYSICALLY, cutting back on using that energy to save money means you can put that money to things that are more useful and productive (such as expanding or improving the product). This can be as minimal as cutting down on electricity. 

If your product isn’t physical, this goal equally applies to cutting out company tools by trying to find software or systems that maximize your company’s alignment and productivity. Aiming for 1-2 communication tools, for example, cuts out company miscommunication by having conversations spread out over several apps, messaging programs, and document sharing platforms. 

5. Grow Shareholder Value

Increasing shareholder value is an extension of increasing profit for consumers. Increasing the overall value of your organization can refer to reputation, profit, or any other classification of “value.” The most important aspect of this goal is to specify what that value is and structure your Key Results, projects, KPIs, etc. around this. 

6. Increase Percentage of Sales Made with New Product Features

When developing new products or features, promoting them so sales can close more deals/sell more of the new product should be one of your main priorities for increasing profit. This justifies the expenses from investing in the new product or feature in the first place and aims to ensure that the investment was worth it and will turn a profit. 

7. Invest in Quality Management

Total Quality Management (TQM) is all about continuing to reduce manufacturing error and streamlining a supply chain with physical products. It equally applies to both when dealing with improving customer experience and training staff. Improving quality across a wide variety of areas is a great company level goal that’s easy to align since each team or department can be held accountable for their own work. 

8. Focus on Leadership Skills for Team Members

Training employees is one thing, making them comfortable so they can speak for themselves and encouraging creative, out-of-the box behavior is another. If your company wants more input from lower levels, then this is important.

Implementing employee goals will increase their independence and confidence in the workplace. We have a post to explain how this works.

9. Maintain or Decrease Debt

Easily measurable, this category falls under finances as well. Maintaining a certain amount of financial debt is important… especially for businesses that are just getting started and may not have the profits to cover debt costs.

10. Balance Budget for X Period

Balancing a budget is a great top level goal for non-profits. Likewise, this goal is a great for teams who may get a set amount to invest in campaigns or projects quarterly or annually. 

11. Calculate and Create the Best Value of Product for Cost

This is on marketing and sales, so is a better team goal example than a company goal. The idea is to focus on selling customers that they are getting the best deal. Whether you’re selling something top of the line for high cost or a cheap, low-cost alternative that doesn’t have the polish of a different brand, you need to highlight to your customers why your product balances value and cost.

12. Make Product More Reliable/Create a Reliable Product

Making your product more reliable is a great way to gain customers while maintaining pre existing ones. This short term goal can be worked on quarter after quarter – split up the tasks by first reviewing existing value points, competitors and current positioning – then continue forward as you learn and explore more to prepare for development.

13. Cross-Sell to Long Term Customers

So, you have people buying a product of yours. A good goal for sales is to sell them on more products. This builds brand loyalty.

14. Best Customer Service

Dealing with the external face of your company, offering the best customer service means that consumers are happier with the overall experience of buying or using your product.

15. Team Building/Diversity Training Goals

A classic in HR teams, team building and diversity training focuses on employee satisfaction to prevent turnover and allow environments where everyone is comfortable enough to share their ideas.

It’s now time to sign up for your free Weekdone trial and get going.

The first step is to set up a goal for your firm or team. Each goal you establish has an impact on the next. As a result, ensure that your business goals and objectives are adaptable. Whether you are a small firm or an expert in your profession, consistently analyzing your work, raising your work standards, and expanding your goal list is the way to progress.

Efficient goal alignment promotes a greater sense of participation and direction among employees in a firm. The OKR process is at the forefront of assisting companies in aligning their aims through important results and activities.

Weekdone is your leading OKR software for status reporting, aligning team OKRs with business goals, and visualizing weekly and quarterly achievements. The fundamental concepts of appropriate alignment, structure, and connectivity are important to us. From the ground up, we can make your organization feel more connected by achieving business goals together. Sign up now .

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Goals and Objectives for Business Plan with Examples

Published Nov.05, 2023

Updated Apr.23, 2024

By: Jakub Babkins

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Every business needs a clear vision of what it wants to achieve and how it plans to get there. A business plan is a document that outlines the goals and objectives of a business, as well as the strategies and actions to achieve them. A well-written business plan from business plan specialists can help a business attract investors, secure funding, and guide its growth.

Understanding Business Objectives

Business objectives are S pecific, M easurable, A chievable, R elevant, and T ime-bound (SMART) statements that describe what a business wants to accomplish in a given period. They are derived from the overall vision and mission of the business, and they support its strategic direction.

Business plan objectives can be categorized into different types, depending on their purpose and scope. Some common types of business objectives are:

• Financial objectives
• Operational objectives
• Marketing objectives
• Social objectives

For example, a sample of business goals and objectives for a business plan for a bakery could be:

• To increase its annual revenue by 20% in the next year.
• To reduce its production costs by 10% in the next six months.
• To launch a new product line of gluten-free cakes in the next quarter.
• To improve its customer satisfaction rating by 15% in the next month.

The Significance of Business Objectives

Business objectives are important for several reasons. They help to:

• Clarify and direct the company and stakeholders
• Align the company’s efforts and resources to a common goal
• Motivate and inspire employees to perform better
• Measure and evaluate the company’s progress and performance
• Communicate the company’s value and advantage to customers and the market

For example, by setting a revenue objective, a bakery can focus on increasing its sales and marketing efforts, monitor its sales data and customer feedback, motivate its staff to deliver quality products and service, communicate its unique selling points and benefits to its customers, and adjust its pricing and product mix according to market demand.

Advantages of Outlining Business Objectives

Outlining business objectives is a crucial step in creating a business plan. It serves as a roadmap for the company’s growth and development. Outlining business objectives has several advantages, such as:

• Clarifies the company’s vision, direction, scope, and boundaries
• Break down the company’s goals into smaller tasks and milestones
• Assigns roles and responsibilities and delegates tasks
• Establishes standards and criteria for success and performance
• Anticipates risks and challenges and devises contingency plans

For example, by outlining its business objective for increasing the average revenue per customer in its business plan, a bakery can:

• Attract investors with its viable business plan for investors
• Secure funding from banks or others with its realistic financial plan
• Partner with businesses or organizations that complement or enhance its products or services
• Choose the best marketing, pricing, product, staff, location, etc. for its target market and customers

Setting Goals and Objectives for a Business Plan

Setting goals and objectives for a business plan is not a one-time task. It requires careful planning, research, analysis, and evaluation. To set effective goals and objectives for a business plan, one should follow some best practices, such as:

OPTION 1: Use the SMART framework. A SMART goal or objective is clear, quantifiable, realistic, aligned with the company’s mission and vision, and has a deadline. SMART stands for:

• Specific – The goal or objective should be clear, concise, and well-defined.
• Measurable – The goal or objective should be quantifiable or verifiable.
• Achievable – The goal or objective should be realistic and attainable.
• Relevant – The goal or objective should be aligned with the company’s vision, mission, and values.
• Time-bound – The goal or objective should have a deadline or timeframe.

For example, using the SMART criteria, a bakery can refine its business objective for increasing the average revenue per customer as follows:

• Specific – Increase revenue with new products and services from $5 to $5.50.
• Measurable – Track customer revenue monthly with sales reports.
• Achievable – Research the market, develop new products and services, and train staff to upsell and cross-sell.
• Relevant – Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, profitability and cash flow, and market competitiveness.
• Time-bound – Achieve this objective in six months, from January 1st to June 30th.

OPTION 2: Use the OKR framework. OKR stands for O bjectives and K ey R esults. An OKR is a goal-setting technique that links the company’s objectives with measurable outcomes. An objective is a qualitative statement of what the company wants to achieve. A key result is a quantitative metric that shows how the objective will be achieved.

OPTION 3: Use the SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for S trengths, W eaknesses, O pportunities, and T hreats. A SWOT analysis is a strategic tool that helps the company assess the internal and external factors that affect its goals and objectives.

• Strengths – Internal factors that give the company an advantage over others. 
• Weaknesses – Internal factors that limit the company’s performance or growth. 
• Opportunities – External factors that allow the company to improve or expand. 
• Threats – External factors that pose a risk or challenge to the company.

For example, using these frameworks, a bakery might set the following goals and objectives for its SBA business plan :

Objective – To launch a new product line of gluten-free cakes in the next quarter.

Key Results:

• Research gluten-free cake market demand and preferences by month-end.
• Create and test 10 gluten-free cake recipes by next month-end.
• Make and sell 100 gluten-free cakes weekly online or in-store by quarter-end.

SWOT Analysis:

• Expertise and experience in baking and cake decorating.
• Loyal and satisfied customer base.
• Strong online presence and reputation.

Weaknesses:

• Limited production capacity and equipment.
• High production costs and low-profit margins.
• Lack of knowledge and skills in gluten-free baking.

Opportunities:

• Growing demand and awareness for gluten-free products.
• Competitive advantage and differentiation in the market.
• Potential partnerships and collaborations with health-conscious customers and organizations.
• Increasing competition from other bakeries and gluten-free brands.
• Changing customer tastes and preferences.
• Regulatory and legal issues related to gluten-free labeling and certification.

Examples of Business Goals and Objectives

To illustrate how to write business goals and objectives for a business plan, let’s use a hypothetical example of a bakery business called Sweet Treats. Sweet Treats is a small bakery specializing in custom-made cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and other baked goods for various occasions.

Here are some examples of possible startup business goals and objectives for Sweet Treats:

Earning and Preserving Profitability

Profitability is the ability of a company to generate more revenue than expenses. It indicates the financial health and performance of the company. Profitability is essential for a business to sustain its operations, grow its market share, and reward its stakeholders.

Some possible objectives for earning and preserving profitability for Sweet Treats are:

• To increase the gross profit margin by 5% in the next quarter by reducing the cost of goods sold
• To achieve a net income of $100,000 in the current fiscal year by increasing sales and reducing overhead costs

Ensuring Consistent Cash Flow

Cash flow is the amount of money that flows in and out of a company. A company needs to have enough cash to cover its operating expenses, pay its debts, invest in its growth, and reward its shareholders.

Some possible objectives for ensuring consistent cash flow for Sweet Treats are:

• Increase monthly operating cash inflow by 15% by the end of the year by improving the efficiency and productivity of the business processes
• Increase the cash flow from investing activities by selling or disposing of non-performing or obsolete assets

Creating and Maintaining Efficiency

Efficiency is the ratio of output to input. It measures how well a company uses its resources to produce its products or services. Efficiency can help a business improve its quality, productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability.

Some possible objectives for creating and maintaining efficiency for Sweet Treats are:

• To reduce the production time by 10% in the next month by implementing lean manufacturing techniques
• To increase the customer service response rate by 20% in the next week by using chatbots or automated systems

Winning and Keeping Clients

Clients are the people or organizations that buy or use the products or services of a company. They are the source of revenue and growth for a company. Therefore, winning and keeping clients is vital to generating steady revenue, increasing customer loyalty, and enhancing word-of-mouth marketing.

Some possible objectives for winning and keeping clients for Sweet Treats are:

• To acquire 100 new clients in the next quarter by launching a referral program or a promotional campaign
• To retain 90% of existing clients in the current year by offering loyalty rewards or satisfaction guarantees

Building a Recognizable Brand

A brand is the name, logo, design, or other features distinguishing a company from its competitors. It represents the identity, reputation, and value proposition of a company. Building a recognizable brand is crucial for attracting and retaining clients and creating a loyal fan base.

Some possible objectives for building a recognizable brand for Sweet Treats are:

• To increase brand awareness by 50% in the next six months by creating and distributing engaging content on social media platforms
• To improve brand image by 30% in the next year by participating in social causes or sponsoring events that align with the company’s values

Expanding and Nurturing an Audience with Marketing

An audience is a group of people interested in or following a company’s products or services. They can be potential or existing clients, fans, influencers, or partners. Expanding and nurturing an audience with marketing is essential for increasing a company’s visibility, reach, and engagement.

Some possible objectives for expanding and nurturing an audience with marketing for Sweet Treats are:

• To grow the email list by 1,000 subscribers in the next month by offering a free ebook or a webinar
• To nurture leads by sending them relevant and valuable information through email newsletters or blog posts

Strategizing for Expansion

Expansion is the process of increasing a company’s size, scope, or scale. It can involve entering new markets, launching new products or services, opening new locations, or forming new alliances. Strategizing for expansion is important for diversifying revenue streams, reaching new audiences, and gaining competitive advantages.

Some possible objectives for strategizing for expansion for Sweet Treats are:

• To launch a new product or service line by developing and testing prototypes
• To open a new branch or franchise by securing funding and hiring staff

Template for Business Objectives

A template for writing business objectives is a format or structure that can be used as a guide or reference for creating your objectives. A template for writing business objectives can help you to ensure that your objectives are SMART, clear, concise, and consistent.

To use this template, fill in the blanks with your information. Here is an example of how you can use this template:

Example of Business Objectives

Our business is a _____________ (type of business) that provides _____________ (products or services) to _____________ (target market). Our vision is to _____________ (vision statement) and our mission is to _____________ (mission statement).

Our long-term business goals and objectives for the next _____________ (time period) are:

S pecific: We want to _____________ (specific goal) by _____________ (specific action).

M easurable: We will measure our progress by _____________ (quantifiable indicator).

A chievable: We have _____________ (resources, capabilities, constraints) that will enable us to achieve this goal.

R elevant: This goal supports our vision and mission by _____________ (benefit or impact).

T ime-bound: We will complete this goal by _____________ (deadline).

Repeat this process for each goal and objective for your business plan.

How to Monitor Your Business Objectives?

After setting goals and objectives for your business plan, you should check them regularly to see if you are achieving them. Monitoring your business objectives can help you to:

• Track your progress and performance
• Identify and overcome any challenges
• Adjust your actions and strategies as needed

Some of the tools and methods that you can use to monitor your business objectives are:

• Dashboards – Show key data and metrics for your objectives with tools like Google Data Studio, Databox, or DashThis.
• Reports – Get detailed information and analysis for your objectives with tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or SEMrush.
• Feedback – Learn from your customers and their needs and expectations with tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms.

Strategies for Realizing Business Objectives

To achieve your business objectives, you need more than setting and monitoring them. You need strategies and actions that support them. Strategies are the general methods to reach your objectives. Actions are the specific steps to implement your strategies.

Different objectives require different strategies and actions. Some common types are:

• Marketing strategies
• Operational strategies
• Financial strategies
• Human resource strategies
• Growth strategies

To implement effective strategies and actions, consider these factors:

• Alignment – They should match your vision, mission, values, goals, and objectives
• Feasibility – They should be possible with your capabilities, resources, and constraints
• Suitability – They should fit the context and needs of your business

How OGSCapital Can Help You Achieve Your Business Objectives?

We at OGSCapital can help you with your business plan and related documents. We have over 15 years of experience writing high-quality business plans for various industries and regions. We have a team of business plan experts who can assist you with market research, financial analysis, strategy formulation, and presentation design. We can customize your business plan to suit your needs and objectives, whether you need funding, launching, expanding, or entering a new market. We can also help you with pitch decks, executive summaries, feasibility studies, and grant proposals. Contact us today for a free quote and start working on your business plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the goals and objectives in business.

Goals and objectives in a business plan are the desired outcomes that a company works toward. To describe company goals and objectives for a business plan, start with your mission statement and then identify your strategic and operational objectives. To write company objectives, you must brainstorm, organize, prioritize, assign, track, and review them using the SMART framework and KPIs.

What are the examples of goals and objectives in a business plan?

Examples of goals and objectives in a business plan are: Goal: To increase revenue by 10% each year for the next five years. Objective: To launch a new product line and create a marketing campaign to reach new customers.

What are the 4 main objectives of a business?

The 4 main objectives of a business are economic, social, human, and organic. Economic objectives deal with financial performance, social objectives deal with social responsibility, human objectives deal with employee welfare, and organic objectives deal with business growth and development.

What are goals and objectives examples?

Setting goals and objectives for a business plan describes what a business or a team wants to achieve and how they will do it. For example: Goal: To provide excellent customer service. Objective: To increase customer satisfaction scores by 20% by the end of the quarter. 

At OGSCapital, our business planning services offer expert guidance and support to create a realistic and actionable plan that aligns with your vision and mission. Get in touch to discuss further!

OGSCapital’s team has assisted thousands of entrepreneurs with top-rate business plan development, consultancy and analysis. They’ve helped thousands of SME owners secure more than $1.5 billion in funding, and they can do the same for you.

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How to Set, Track, and Achieve Business Objectives with 60 Examples

By Kate Eby | April 10, 2023

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Businesses that set objectives make better decisions. Business objectives allow companies to focus their efforts, track progress, and visualize future success. We’ve worked with experts to create the most comprehensive guide to business objectives.

Included in this article, you’ll find the differences between business objectives and business goals , the four main business objectives , and the benefits of setting business objectives . Plus, find 60 examples of business objectives , which you can download in Microsoft Word.

What Is a Business Objective?

A business objective is a specific, measurable outcome that a company works to achieve. Company leaders set business objectives that help the organization meet its long-term goals. Business objectives should be recorded so that teams can easily access them. 

Business objectives cover many different factors of a company’s success, such as financial health, operations, productivity, and growth. 

One easy way to make sure that you are setting the right business objectives is to follow the SMART goal framework . SMART objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. 

To learn about setting project objectives using the SMART framework, see this comprehensive guide to writing SMART project objectives .

Business Objectives vs. Business Goal

A business goal is a broad, long-term outcome that a company works toward. Goals usually inform which strategies that department leaders will implement. A business objective , however, is a specific, short-term outcome or action that helps the company achieve long-term goals.

Although the terms are often used interchangeably, goals and objectives are not the same . In general, goals are broad in scope and describe an outcome, while objectives are narrow in scope and describe a specific action or step. 

While these differences are important to understand, many of the common frameworks for successful goal-setting — such as SMART, objectives and key results ( OKRs ), and management by objectives (MBO) — can be useful when writing business objectives. 

When deciding on objectives for a team or department, keep in mind the overarching goals of a business. Each objective should move the company closer to its long-term goals.

Project Goals and Objectives Template

Download the Project Goals and Objectives Template for Excel | Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF

Use this free, printable template to learn how to break down project goals into individual objectives using the SMART framework. Write the primary goal at the top of the worksheet, then follow the SMART process to create one or more specific objectives that will help you achieve that goal. 

For resources to help with setting and tracking goals at your company, see this all-inclusive list of goal tracking and setting templates .

What Are the Four Main Business Objectives?

The four main business objectives are economic, social, human, and organic. Each can help a business ensure their prolonged health and growth. For example, human objectives refer to employees’ well-being, while economic objectives refer to the company’s financial health. 

These are the four main business objectives:

• Example: Reduce spending on paid advertisements by 20 percent.
• Example: Reduce average customer wait times from eight minutes to four minutes. 
• Example: Hire two new chemical engineers by the end of Q2.
• Example: Improve the efficiency of a specific software product by 15 percent.

Types of Business Objectives

There are many types of business objectives beyond the main four. These range from regulation objectives to environmental objectives to municipal objectives. For example, a global objective might be to distribute a product to a new country. 

In addition to economic, social, human, and organic objectives, here are some other types of business objectives companies might set: 

• Regulatory: These objectives relate to compliance requirements, such as meeting quality standards or conducting internal audits.
• National: These objectives relate to a company’s place in and how they contribute to the country they operate in, such as promoting social justice causes and creating employment opportunities. 
• Global: These objectives relate to a company’s place in and its contribution to many countries, such as improving living standards and responding to global demands for products and services. 
• Environmental: These objectives relate to a company’s environmental impact, such as reducing chemical waste or making eco-friendly investments. 
• Healthcare: These objectives relate to the health and well-being of a population, whether within or outside an organization. These objectives might be improving healthcare benefit options for employees or refining a drug so that it has fewer side effects.

The Importance of Having Business Objectives

Teams need business objectives to stay focused on the company’s long-term goals. Business objectives help individual employees understand how their roles contribute to the larger mission of the organization. Setting business objectives facilitates effective planning. 

Here are some benefits to setting business objectives:

• Develops Leadership: Company leaders are more effective when they have a clear vision and can delegate tasks to make it a reality. Setting objectives is a great way to improve one’s leadership skills.
• Increases Motivation: People tend to be more invested in work when they have clear, attainable objectives to achieve. Plus, each completed objective provides a morale boost to keep teams happy and productive. 
• Encourages Innovation and Productivity: With increased motivation and workplace satisfaction come more innovations. Set attainable but challenging objectives, and watch teams come up with creative solutions to get things done.
• Improves Strategy: Setting objectives that align with overarching company goals means that everyone across the company can stay aligned on strategic implementation. 
• Enhances Customer Satisfaction: Overall customer satisfaction is more likely to increase over time when measurable quality improvements are in place. 
• Improves Prioritization: When they are being able to see all of the current objectives, team members can more easily prioritize their work, which in turn makes their workloads feel more manageable. 
• Improves Financial Health: Setting economic objectives in particular can help companies stay on top of their financial goals.

60 Examples of Business Objectives

Company leaders can use business objectives to improve every facet of an organization, from customer satisfaction to market share to employee well-being. Here are 60 examples of business objectives that can help a company achieve its goals. 

Economic Business Objectives

• Increase profit margins by 5 percent by the end of the Q4. 
• Recover 50 percent of total outstanding debts from each quarter the following quarter for the next year. 
• “Increase revenue by 10 percent each year for the next five years,” suggests Tyler. 
• Offer three new holiday sales events in the coming year. 
• Move 30 percent of surplus stock by the end of Q2.
• “Reduce costs by 10 percent each year for the next five years,” suggests Tyler.
• Reduce monthly interest payments by 1.5 percent by consolidating debt. 
• Introduce a new credit payment option to expand the potential customer base. 
• Apply for six government grants by the end of the year. 
•  Hire an accountant to track expenses and file the company’s taxes. 
•  Secure a $100,000 loan to start a business.
•  Pitch your business ideas to a venture capital firm. 
• Improve your business credit score from 75 to 85 in two years. 
• Invest in solar panels for your company headquarters to reduce building energy costs by 75 percent. 
• Establish a monthly practice to analyze your cash flow statement.

Social Business Objectives

• Decrease customer average customer wait times by 20 percent in two months.
• Improve the average customer service satisfaction rating from 3.2/5 to 3.8/5 in six months through targeting trainings. 
• Hire a contract UX designer to redesign the company website interface in four months. 
• Decrease customer churn by 15 percent in one year. 
• “Triple the customer base within two years,” suggests Tyler.
• Offer 20 percent more customer discounts and specials over the course of two years. 
• Increase market share by 5 percent in three years. 
• Increase monthly sales quotas for sales associates by 10 percent. 
• Develop a sales incentive program to reward top-performing sales associates with vacations, bonuses, and other prizes. 
• Donate $10,000 to local causes, such as public school funds or local charities. 
• Partner with a charitable organization to host a company-wide 5K.
• Increase your marketing budget by 15 percent.
• Hire a new marketing director by the end of Q3.
• Donate 40 percent of surplus stock to a relevant charity. 
• Increase engagement across all social media platforms by 10 percent with a multiplatform ad campaign.

Human Business Objectives

• Hire three new employees by the end of Q1.
• Hire a contractor to train your IT team on new software. 
• Rewrite and distribute your company values statement. 
• Conduct a quarterly, company-wide productivity training over the next two years. 
• Establish a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) committee. 
• Design and implement a mentorship program for diverse employees. 
• Create an incentive program that grants additional vacation days for all employees when company-wide productivity goals are met. 
• Offer a free monthly happy hour to improve the employee experience. 
• Select change leaders across multiple teams to provide support for a corporate reorg.
• Start three employee resource groups (ERGs) within the next six months. 
• Diversify websites and career fairs where the hiring team recruits applicants to encourage a more diverse pool of candidates for new jobs. 
• Invest in an office redesign that improves the office atmosphere and provides more in-office resources, such as free coffee and snacks, to on-site employees. 
• Upgrade employee laptops to improve productivity and employee satisfaction. 
• Conduct a yearly, comprehensive employee experience survey to identify areas of improvement. 
• Throw office parties to celebrate change milestones. 

Organic Business Objectives

• Increase the top line by 15 percent every year for the next five years.
• Achieve 20 percent net profit from 10 product enhancements in the next two years.
• Decrease raw materials costs by 10 percent by the end of the year.
• Reduce downtime by 25 percent by the end of the year.
• Within two years, attain a rate of 25 percent new revenue from products released within the last year.
• Improve customer acquisition ration by 10 percent every quarter for the next two years. 
• Reduce total inventory levels by 20 percent over four months.
• Interact with at least 20 Instagram users every month for one year.
• Have a new product launch covered by at least three reputable industry publications within two months of the launch date.
• Grow both the top line and the bottom line by 60 percent every year for three years. 
• Reduce product defects by 15 percent every year for four years.
• Increase on-time delivery dates for top customers by 25 percent over the span of three quarters.
• Conduct yearly workplace safety reviews.
• Decrease average customer wait times for responses to social media queries from 45 minutes to 15 minutes by the end of Q4.
• Improve your company website to be on the first page of search results within six months.

Download 60 Example Business Objectives for

Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF

Track the Progress of Business Objectives with Smartsheet

Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. 

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.  Try Smartsheet for free, today.

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Plan Your Business Plan Before you put pen to paper, find out how to assess your business's goals and objectives.

You've decided to write a business plan, and you're ready to get started. Congratulations. You've just greatly increased the chances that your business venture will succeed. But before you start drafting your plan, you need to--you guessed it--plan your draft.

One of the most important reasons to plan your plan is that you may be held accountable for the projections and proposals it contains. That's especially true if you use your plan to raise money to finance your company. Let's say you forecast opening four new locations in the second year of your retail operation. An investor may have a beef if, due to circumstances you could have foreseen, you only open two. A business plan can take on a life of its own, so thinking a little about what you want to include in your plan is no more than common prudence.

Second, as you'll soon learn if you haven't already, business plans can be complicated documents. As you draft your plan, you'll be making lots of decisions on serious matters, such as what strategy you'll pursue, as well as less important ones, like what color paper to print it on. Thinking about these decisions in advance is an important way to minimize the time you spend planning your business and maximize the time you spend generating income.

To sum up, planning your plan will help control your degree of accountability and reduce time-wasting indecision. To plan your plan, you'll first need to decide what your goals and objectives in business are. As part of that, you'll assess the business you've chosen to start, or are already running, to see what the chances are that it will actually achieve those ends. Finally, you'll take a look at common elements of most plans to get an idea of which ones you want to include and how each will be treated.

Determine Your Objectives Close your eyes. Imagine that the date is five years from now. Where do you want to be? Will you be running a business that hasn't increased significantly in size? Will you command a rapidly growing empire? Will you have already cashed out and be relaxing on a beach somewhere, enjoying your hard-won gains?

Answering these questions is an important part of building a successful business plan. In fact, without knowing where you're going, it's not really possible to plan at all.

Now is a good time to free-associate a little bit--to let your mind roam, exploring every avenue that you'd like your business to go down. Try writing a personal essay on your business goals. It could take the form of a letter to yourself, written from five years in the future, describing all you have accomplished and how it came about.

As you read such a document, you may make a surprising discovery, such as that you don't really want to own a large, fast-growing enterprise but would be content with a stable small business. Even if you don't learn anything new, though, getting a firm handle on your goals and objectives is a big help in deciding how you'll plan your business.

Goals and Objectives Checklist If you're having trouble deciding what your goals and objectives are, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• How determined am I to see this succeed?
• Am I willing to invest my own money and work long hours for no pay, sacrificing personal time and lifestyle, maybe for years?
• What's going to happen to me if this venture doesn't work out?
• If it does succeed, how many employees will this company eventually have?
• What will be its annual revenues in a year? Five years?
• What will be its market share in that time frame?
• Will it be a niche marketer, or will it sell a broad spectrum of good and services?
• What are my plans for geographic expansion? Local? National? Global?
• Am I going to be a hands-on manager, or will I delegate a large proportion of tasks to others?
• If I delegate, what sorts of tasks will I share? Sales? Technical? Others?
• How comfortable am I taking direction from others? Could I work with partners or investors who demand input into the company's management?
• Is it going to remain independent and privately owned, or will it eventually be acquired or go public?

Your Financing Goals

It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to make a lot of money, but it does take some. That's especially true if, as part of examining your goals and objectives, you envision very rapid growth.

Energetic, optimistic entrepreneurs often tend to believe that sales growth will take care of everything, that they'll be able to fund their own growth by generating profits. However, this is rarely the case, for one simple reason: You usually have to pay your own suppliers before your customers pay you. This cash flow conundrum is the reason so many fast-growing companies have to seek bank financing or equity sales to finance their growth. They are literally growing faster than they can afford.

Start by asking yourself what kinds of financing you're likely to need--and what you'd be willing to accept. It's easy when you're short of cash, or expect to be short of cash, to take the attitude that almost any source of funding is just fine. But each kind of financing has different characteristics that you should take into consideration when planning your plan. These characteristics take three primary forms:

• First, there's the amount of control you'll have to surrender. An equal partner may, quite naturally, demand approximately equal control. Venture capitalists often demand significant input into management decisions by, for instance, placing one or more people on your board of directors. Angel investors may be very involved or not involved at all, depending on their personal style. Bankers, at the other end of the scale, are likely to offer no advice whatsoever as long as you make payments of principal and interest on time and are not in violation of any other terms of your loan.
• You should also consider the amount of money you're likely to need. Any amount less than several million dollars is too small to be considered for a standard initial public offering of stock, for example. Venture capital investors are most likely to invest amounts of $250,000 to $3 million. On the other hand, only the richest angel investor will be able to provide more than a few hundred thousand dollars, if that.

Almost any source of funds, from a bank to a factor, has some guidelines about the size of financing it prefers. Anticipating the size of your needs now will guide you in preparing your plan.

• The third consideration is cost. This can be measured in terms of interest rates and shares of ownership as well as in time, paperwork and plain old hassle.

How Will You Use Your Plan

Believe it or not, part of planning your plan is planning what you'll do with it. No, we haven't gone crazy--at least not yet. A business plan can be used for several things, from monitoring your company's progress toward goals to enticing key employees to join your firm. Deciding how you intend to use yours is an important part of preparing to write it.

Do you intend to use your plan to help you raise money? In that case, you'll have to focus very carefully on the executive summary, the management, and marketing and financial aspects. You'll need to have a clearly focused vision of how your company is going to make money. If you're looking for a bank loan, you'll need to stress your ability to generate sufficient cash flow to service loans. Equity investors, especially venture capitalists, must be shown how they can cash out of your company and generate a rate of return they'll find acceptable.

Do you intend to use your plan to attract talented employees? Then you'll want to emphasize such things as stock options and other aspects of compensation as well as location, work environment, corporate culture and opportunities for growth and advancement.

Do you anticipate showing your plan to suppliers to demonstrate that you're a worthy customer? A solid business plan may convince a supplier of some precious commodity to favor you over your rivals. It may also help you arrange supplier credit. You may want to stress your blue-ribbon customer list and spotless record of repaying trade debts in this plan.

Assessing Your Company's Potential

For most of us, unfortunately, our desires about where we would like to go aren't as important as our businesses' ability to take us there. Put another way, if you choose the wrong business, you're going nowhere.

Luckily, one of the most valuable uses of a business plan is to help you decide whether the venture you have your heart set on is really likely to fulfill your dreams. Many, many business ideas never make it past the planning stage because their would-be founders, as part of a logical and coherent planning process, test their assumptions and find them wanting.

Test your idea against at least two variables. First, financial, to make sure this business makes economic sense. Second, lifestyle, because who wants a successful business that they hate?

Answer the following questions to help you outline your company's potential. There are no wrong answers. The objective is simply to help you decide how well your proposed venture is likely to match up with your goals and objectives.

• What initial investment will the business require?
• How much control are you willing to relinquish to investors?
• When will the business turn a profit?
• When can investors, including you, expect a return on their money?
• What are the projected profits of the business over time?
• Will you be able to devote yourself full time to the business, financially?
• What kind of salary or profit distribution can you expect to take home?
• What are the chances the business will fail?
• What will happen if it does?
• Where are you going to live?
• What kind of work are you going to be doing?
• How many hours will you be working?
• Will you be able to take vacations?
• What happens if you get sick?
• Will you earn enough to maintain your lifestyle?
• Does your family understand and agree with the sacrifices you envision?

Sources: The Small Business Encyclopedia , Business Plans Made Easy, Start Your Own Business and Entrepreneur magazine.

Continue on to the next section of our Business Plan How-To >> Elements of a Business Plan

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How to Write a Business Plan

Five examples of business goals and how to set them

What are five examples of business goals

Financial goals, growth goals, customer goals, employee development goals, social goals.

Moving forward in business is like planning a great trip: You know where you want to end up, but the road there isn’t always straightforward.

Smart business goals help you navigate the twists and turns along the way. While a business plan and vision statement offer a “big picture” perspective about your company and what you want to accomplish, short-term and long-term goals define the specific strategies you’ll use to get there.

However, not all business goals are created equal. In order to be effective, goals must involve specific, actionable items with a clear time frame and responsible parties.

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Here are five examples of smart goals for small business owners and how you can set them.

Financial goals help you focus on driving more revenue, cutting costs to raise profitability and sustain cash flow, and setting new financial targets for future growth.

To create and accomplish financial goals, you have to collaborate with different departments. Each department can help to identify strategies that trim costs, such as supplies or facility expenses. Your team’s expertise may also extend to implementing ideas that accomplish revenue and profitability goals.

When developing financial goals, project the total increase in profits over a long period like a year. Then break that amount down into quarterly financial targets. Make financial goals as specific as possible — for example, “increase production by x percent over three months.”

To develop growth goals, you need a clear vision statement that you can segment into achievable steps. Whether it’s reaching new markets, launching new products, increasing your customer base, or raising brand recognition, it’s important to establish a realistic number of goals, actionable tasks, and a team to complete those growth goals.

Start with a market analysis to ensure the approach makes sense. As you implement growth goals, you may need to change their priority or adapt them so you aren’t counteracting other business goals.

For example, growing a customer base may involve promotions that don’t necessarily improve your bottom line at the start. So you’ll need to make assessments along the way to gauge if and when you’ll achieve the financial goal connected to this growth goal.

Improving relationships with your target audience doesn’t just solve problems for individual customers. Enhanced customer service also helps your company develop respect among all stakeholders, which promotes additional business growth.

To set goals for customers, identify roadblocks that inhibit exceptional customer experiences. Roadblocks might include a complicated phone menu, significant response lag, or slow checkout time.

With these roadblocks in mind, develop customer goals to solve them, such as

• Simplify call-in customer support options
• Add other customer support channels like an online help desk or a chat option
• Streamline the online/in-store checkout process with new technology

Motivated, engaged employees offer many benefits for a company, such as increased productivity, deeper loyalty, and more creativity. This talent is an essential ingredient in a company’s recipe for success. That’s why it’s critical to design and execute goals that help employees develop skills and knowledge as well as challenge them enough to stay interested in their work.

To set employee development goals, collect regular feedback from team members about the types of incentives they want. Include these goals in performance reviews by aligning development actions like training and ongoing learning opportunities with business objectives like increasing engagement or converting new customers.

As your business grows, you’ll establish a place in the community you serve. To nurture this position, develop philanthropy and social programs that benefit local and global communities.

Not only does this feel good, but it also boosts your reputation as a socially conscious company. In addition, these social goals prove to the team that the company isn’t just about making money. Instead, it seeks to do good for everyone.

Your social goals don’t have to be financial. In-kind donations of products, services, or your thought leadership often make more of a positive impression than charitable donations. For example, if your small business isn’t yet in the position to donate a certain percentage of the profits from each sale, you can focus on having the team volunteer for a community project or donate products to those in need.

Specific and visible business goals

Studies show people are more likely to accomplish goals that are specific, challenging, and written down.

When creating the types of business goals detailed above, focus on adding a quantitative measure, where relevant, in terms of percentage of improvement or resource savings, growth or productivity improvements, or a deadline to achieve the goal. Also, keeping goals visible helps employees stay focused on business success. They have a way to benchmark their progress. And seeing what’s been achieved can be a prime motivator to continue working toward achieving your goals and tackling new ones in the future.

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10 Goals You Can Set to Grow Your Small Business in 2023

Setting realistic business goals gives your business a sense of direction and keeps your team accountable. Goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) allow you to stay focused and protect your business from becoming stagnant. Goal-setting should never be a one-time event. As a small business owner, you need to revise your existing strategies or implement new ones to stay in tune with the ever-changing market demands.

Table of Contents:

Increase traffic to your business website or blog, reduce business expenses, improve business quality, increase business growth, develop creative marketing strategies and programs, increase productivity among employees, introduce new products or services, expand your business premises, purchase business insurance, build your brand, here are 10 examples of realistic and achievable goals that you can set to grow your small business.

For an e-commerce business, website traffic is vital. If you own such a business, one of your primary goals should be to increase your website’s traffic by using digital marketing techniques, such as content marketing and social media marketing.

Typical business expenses include remuneration, utilities, advertisement, and supplies. While it may be difficult to do away with some expenses, you can set a goal to lower them significantly. For instance, per the Small Business Administration (SBA) , a business making $5 million in revenue per year should use about 7% of it on advertising. Therefore, if your advertisement expenses are high, you can opt for economical methods such as social media marketing.

Business quality generally refers to the quality of your products, services, environment, and general operations. While this may take time, improving your business quality is an effective way to attract more customers and skilled employees to your business.

With the right measures in place, small businesses can experience significant growth every year. For example, in 2016 alone, the average growth of U.S. start-ups was 75.62%, as reported by Statista . While growth is inevitable with the right resources, you can set a goal to increase your growth rate. Some businesses grow faster than others depending on factors such as the availability of finances and competition. However, having a set of predefined goals will allow you to grow steadily and maintain momentum.

Read: Is Your Small Business Still Profitable?

As competition in the market increases, businesses are developing more creative marketing strategies in an attempt to occupy the largest market share. This means that finding new strategies and marketing programs should be one of your business goals to remain competitive in the market.

High productivity among your employees can contribute to business growth and maximization of profits. You must strive to keep your employees motivated, as doing so will enhance their performance and ensure greater productivity.

While your customers are probably happy with your current products, you should try to expand your business by introducing new products or services. This will increase your chances of attracting new customers while building your brand loyalty with the existing ones.

As a small business owner, you probably do not need a large space to start. However, as your business grows, expanding your premises should be your goal. This is because with an increase in your scale of operation you will need more space for storage, as well as to accommodate new employees.

Business insurance shields your business from unfortunate events such as natural disasters, vandalism, accidents, and lawsuits. Therefore, you should purchase business insurance policies such as commercial property insurance, general liability policy, and auto insurance to protect your business from unforeseen liabilities.

To help your business stand out in the market, you need to build a personalized brand for your enterprise. Some of the ways to achieve this are by creating a logo, having a slogan, and specialty packaging for your products.

Read: 4 Effective Ways to Market Your Business in Ventura County

These are some of the goals that you can set to grow your small business. For more small business tips and resources, contact  the  Economic Development Collaborative . Conveniently located in Camarillo, California, we’re here to help and have a  webpage  devoted to resources and information on how your business can handle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read: 3 Small Business Problems and How to Overcome Them

Economic Development Collaborative

A private nonprofit, the EDC was founded in 1996 with funding from the County of Ventura, the 10 cities in the county and key private-sector companies to provide a pathway to business growth, economic prosperity and high quality of life for all. The EDC creates confident, connected, and directed business owners, civic leaders, and community partners by providing tools to build pathways for economic development.

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The importance of setting and tracking financial goals for your small business.

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James Webster, Executive Chairman, ROK Financial .

Setting financial goals for your business may be one of your most important responsibilities as a leader and business owner.

Your financial goals serve as far more than wishful projections to attract attention from potential investors. They form the backbone of your projected road map for success, internal and external. Something that every single business should possess regardless of its market, model or size.

In my experience and role, I've had the opportunity to assist other business owners through my networks and suggest ways in which they, too, can set and track their financial goals. For example, I once heard a business owner indicate that they blindly set their financial goals. They wanted to see a 15% increase year over year. However, they weren't constantly monitoring the current state of their business or identifying throughout the year areas in which they needed to turn up or cut back expenses to make that goal attainable. We sat and discussed ways that receiving monthly reporting from their teams on sales and expenses could allow him as a leader to steer the ship in the right direction.

Data is key to all business decisions and must be used when making financial decisions. Having goals is great (and you should do so), but they should be goals that accompany your data to make them achievable.

Five Ways To Make Extra Income In Retirement

Why you need tangible goals.

Setting your business goals gives you the foundation to build projections, direction, purpose and core metrics to measure your honest success and failure. You want to set these goals for risk mitigation as well as motivation and accountability.

Making tangible goals provides a solid framework for risk assessment. First, it lets you see potential financial pitfalls before they happen. Seeing, measuring and visualizing the criteria you need for success also reveals the criteria for failure. Both serve as two essential sides of the same essential coin. Especially for younger and smaller businesses relying on smaller amounts of capital. Secondly, setting realistic financial goals also allows you to create strong contingency plans for the potential pitfalls you identify. Remember, the only thing worse than being in a terrible financial situation is being in a terrible financial situation with no plan of escape.

More and more businesses are becoming aware of how creating team, department and even company goals can motivate individuals into action.

When there's a clear desired outcome, the team is more likely to harmonize together on achieving it. By clarifying specific targets and objectives with core metrics, the team members can better comprehend their collective responsibilities. This can lead directly to better communication, effort and efficiency.

How To Set Financial Goals In 5 Steps

1. evaluate your current financial state.

As a business owner, you start building financial goals by painting a clear picture of the business's current performance.

Your battle plan always starts with an in-depth analysis of your performance. Use all the information at your disposal to paint an internal and external picture. This should include assessing revenue streams, expenses, debts, cash flow or anything that can help you understand where. All of it will serve to set realistic and achievable financial goals. The more information you can draw from, the better off you'll be.

2. Define Clear Objectives

Write out what you want to achieve and be as specific as possible. The main advantage of setting goals lies in their tangibility and measurability. So committing to vague goals like "increase profits'' is only going to hinder you.

Instead, you should opt for a specific target like "boost monthly net profit by 15% within six months." Make sure to use as many solid metrics as possible when you're describing your objective. Relying on numbers will ensure that everyone understands the desired outcomes.

3. Align Them With Your Business Strategy

Your financial goals must align with your overall business strategy. This means taking into consideration factors such as company values, mission statement and long-term vision. Goals should support and contribute to the bigger picture of what you want to achieve with your business (not just financial). Any financial goal you set should align with your business strategy seamlessly. If you're aiming for market expansion, it needs to be tangibly reflected in the necessary investment and revenue targets.

4. Break Down Goals Into Achievable Milestones

Large goals can be overwhelming. When you have your own business goals, you want them to serve as guiding and motivating future achievements. If you make them feel unattainable, they can turn into looming reminders of failure—which is the opposite of what you want to see. Take all of your goals and break each down into small achievable milestones. This will also give you opportunities for celebrating incrementally on the path.

5. Assign Responsibilities

You need to assign responsibilities for each separate goal. One good method for doing this is assigning key teams or departments to a specific financial goal. Make each one responsible for driving the initiatives associated with the financial objectives. Initiate a plan of action and milestones that should be met to achieve a set goal.

Allow your team to feel a deep sense of shared achievement. Make each department responsible for a portion of that goal; this way they have a sense of the company win being their win as well.

Tips For Keeping Track Of Small-Business Finances

Your financial goals need to be tangible, solid and measurable. You'll notice a crystal clear correlation between how effective your financial projections are and how measurable they can be. Plus, if you don't make them coherent, they'll become detrimental to your decision-making process instead of helpful.

Regularly Reconcile Accounts

You should be reconciling everything from bank statements to credit card statements, or anything else you can use to paint a financial picture. In fact, every responsible business owner should be doing this consistently. Regularly reconciling your accounts ensures that your records are accurately reflecting your transactions. This information is not just for your financial goals. It also factors into the general management of your assets and capital. Reconciling your accounts will serve as one of your primary methods for identifying financial discrepancies.

Monitor Cash Flow

Monitoring your cash flow is another source of financial information you should be measuring constantly. This should be something that you're doing well before you even begin to make financial projections, and should be taken into consideration when making those projections. It should be a pillar of all your future goals. And it should serve as another core metric of how well your goals are being met as you move forward.

Remember, financial goals aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet. They're the heartbeat of your business's financial health. But they also serve as a means to unite and motivate your staff. Creating a healthy and competitive culture that is all the more qualified to achieve success. Both the short-term and long-term.

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Understanding retirement calculators

How to use a retirement calculator, benefits of using a retirement calculator, accurate retirement calculator: plan your future with ease.

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• Retirement calculators provide a rough estimate of how your invested savings will grow over time.
• Our retirement calculator tracks your retirement savings progress and shows if you might fall short.
• Compare the estimated retirement funds with the amount you will need by your desired retirement age.

Taking advantage of the compound growth, tax advantages, and investment opportunities provided by the best retirement plans is the first step in building long-lasting wealth. But how do you know if you've contributed enough to support yourself during your golden years?

Business Insider's free retirement calculator offers free estimates to help you plan accordingly based on personal details like your life expectancy, income, expected expenses, and estimated retirement age.

Here is how you can use an online retirement calculator and the information you need to generate an accurate estimate. 

Retirement Calculator

Use insider’s calculator to see if you’re on your way to a comfortable retirement by answering a few questions about yourself, your savings, and how long you expect to keep working..

70% of pre-retirement income

*Need is based on covering 70% of your annual pre-retirement income and a life expectancy of 100 years.

What is a retirement calculator?

Retirement calculators are free online planning tools that estimate how your invested savings will grow based on personal and economic factors. 

"If you start investing in your retirement plans in your early 20s, the more likely you'll have a larger pool of money to support you in retirement than if you start saving and contributing to retirement accounts later in life," says Chloe Wolhforth, financial planner and senior managing director at Angeles Investments . 

Business Insider's retirement calculator, above, is designed to track your savings progress with detailed retirement projections. It's based on the idea that Americans generally spend less as they age and can sustain a 30- to 40-year retirement on 70% of their pre-retirement income. 

The calculator generates two important numbers:

• The amount you will have by your desired retirement age. By providing your current savings rate and retirement account balances, the retirement calculator can estimate how much money you'll have in savings or investments by retirement. 
• The amount you will need by your desired retirement age. Using your current income and expected salary increases, the retirement calculator can estimate how much money you'll need in savings or investments by retirement. 

How much you'll need to retire may be more or less than the 70% rule of thumb, depending on your lifestyle. For a more accurate estimate of how much you can expect to spend in retirement, consult a financial advisor . 

Why you need a retirement calculator

The best retirement calculators estimate how much you need to save for your future using personal and financial information. A general rule of thumb is that the earlier you start saving, the better.

Investing your savings and accumulating compound interest is the best way to grow long-term wealth. Now is the time to start if you're not already contributing to a retirement savings plan like a 401(k) or IRA. 

Inflation is considered when calculating retirement savings. But remember, a retirement calculator can't predict the future, and the actual inflation rates may vary. It can't predict market crashes, failed investments, or future financial hardships. It is only one of many financial planning tools you need to ensure a comfortable retirement. 

Input your personal and financial information

For the retirement calculator, we define a comfortable retirement as living on 70% of your pre-retirement income. However, the calculator is customizable. If you're able, incorporate as many specific details as possible. 

Here's what you'll need to input:

• Personal information: Current age and the age at which you expect to retire. 
• Current retirement balance: The total retirement savings across all your accounts, including 401(k)s and IRAs .
• Current household income: Your annual gross income (the amount you earn before taxes).
• Rate of savings: How much money you save toward retirement each month. You can enter this as a dollar amount or a percentage of your income.

The following inputs are pre-filled, but you can change some to customize your retirement calculation further.

• Expected annual salary increases: How much do you expect your salary to increase each year? The calculator's default is 2%.
• Anticipated monthly spending in retirement: We assume you'll spend 70% of your pre-retirement income (the amount you're projected to earn right before you retire), but you can change that number if you expect to spend more or less.
• Life expectancy: How long do you expect to live? The default calculation uses a life expectancy of 100 years.
• Investment returns: We assume your savings are invested and earn a 5% annual rate of return. If your retirement savings aren't invested, you may be missing out on earnings through capitalizing on compound interest. 

Analyze the results of the retirement calculator

Don't be discouraged if the retirement calculator shows you fall short of your financial target. There's still time to adjust your savings rate or investment strategy to meet your goal. 

Increasing your income is one of the most effective ways to catch up on retirement savings. If you cannot score a raise in your current position, consider switching jobs for a higher salary or better benefits, such as a more generous 401(k) match, or investing in stocks and similar assets.

Other strategies you can consider are maxing out your 401(k), contributing to a Roth or traditional IRA , or working with a financial advisor to boost your savings further. 

"Investing is a critical part of growing wealth. It is important to invest savings that you have identified as long-term so your assets can grow over time," Wolhforth says. 

Above all, be flexible. As you approach retirement, consider taking a part-time job, waiting to claim Social Security benefits, downsizing your home, or relocating to a more affordable city. 

Using a retirement calculator to see where you stand provides several perks. Here are some of the benefits of retirement calculators:

• Snapshot of your future: A rough estimate of how much money you'll need to retire by a certain age is better than having no estimate.
• Identify shortfalls: The calculator shows if you might fall short of your financial goal, allowing you to plan for a higher savings rate or find supplementary income sources.  
• See your options: By adjusting the calculator's inputs — such as changing your savings rate or your planned retirement age — you can see how your overall plan is affected.

"Depending on when you want to retire, your employment, your tax status, and other considerations, a blend of multiple accounts may be suitable," says Jordan Gilberti, senior financial planner at Facet. 

FAQs about retirement calculators

The accuracy of a retirement calculator can vary, but it is always a rough estimate. Online calculators cannot predict economic shifts or financial hardships that may impact invested funds. Retirement calculators provide estimates based on your inputs, but their accuracy depends on the data you provide and the assumptions used. 

The information you need to use a retirement calculator includes details about your current savings, income, retirement age, expected expenses, and similar data. Retirement calculators also adjust estimations based on predicted inflation and compound growth. 

A retirement calculator can help you save more by revealing whether your current contributions and investment strategy are on track. Based on your estimated retirement age and preferred lifestyle, you can better gauge how long your savings will last. It helps to set realistic goals and adjust your retirement saving strategies accordingly. 

Many free retirement calculators are reliable financial planning tools using standard financial models. However, retirement calculators only provide estimates, so the generated rate of return may not always be accurate. If you're worried about coming short, consider consulting a financial advisor to help grow your retirement savings. 

You should use a retirement calculator on an annual basis or whenever your financial situation changes. It is a good idea to recalculate your estimated retirement savings if you change your salary deferral rate, have increased income, or are considering withdrawing from your retirement savings to afford other expenses. 

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• Disaster recovery planning and management

Example disaster recovery plan for small businesses

Small businesses make significant investments in it infrastructure. they must protect those investments from unplanned and potentially destructive events with a dr plan..

• Paul Kirvan

Technology disaster recovery plans are necessary for businesses of every size. A small business disaster recovery plan protects and recovers critical IT infrastructure assets after a disruptive event.

DR plans provide step-by-step procedures for recovering disrupted systems and networks, helping them return to normal operations. The goal of these processes is to minimize any negative impacts to company operations. DR plans are essential for ensuring that a business can continue to deliver its products and services in the aftermath of a crisis.

The scale and details of a small-to-medium business ( SMB ) DR plan are typically less complex than those for a large enterprise but no less necessary. The key is to have the resources and procedures for recovering critical systems, networks and data the organization needs to function.

Included in this article is an example disaster recovery plan for small business. This template is a solid first step that can facilitate the initiation and completion of an IT DR plan. The structure of this article and the template is consistent with established national and international standards for IT disaster recovery .

Why create a DR plan specifically for small business?

Regardless of the type and size of the business, a DR plan provides a structured approach for responding to unplanned incidents that threaten an IT infrastructure. These can include threats to software, networks, processes and people.

Protecting an organization's investment in its technology infrastructure and its ability to conduct business are the key reasons for implementing an IT DR plan. Considering that businesses of any size depend on technology, DR plans should be on every CIO's short list. Support from senior management is the primary starting point for a small business DR plan, especially with funding and a project budget .

Get started with goals and analyses

Once management approval has been received to develop a DR plan, IT and DR teams should begin by completing a risk assessment to identify potential threats to the IT infrastructure. A risk assessment can also be used to identify potential vulnerabilities and single points of failure that could cause a disruption or outage.

The goal of a risk assessment is to determine which infrastructure elements are most at risk to the organization's business. For a small business with less than 100 employees, this could be any hardware in the data center, key applications the business uses, and networking resources. If the organization uses external cloud resources, the assessment should consider risks that might affect their ability to recover from an incident.

When an incident -- internal or external -- negatively affects the IT infrastructure, the business could be compromised, resulting in loss of business and reputational damage. Identifying risks and threats to the infrastructure is a key activity. For smaller organizations with fewer resources, attention to detail is critical.

It might be advisable to conduct a business impact analysis (BIA), which identifies the most important activities the organization performs. BIAs also correlate the key functions with the technologies needed to support them. This information, coupled with data from the risk assessment, results in a DR plan design that focuses on protecting the most essential systems and functions.

What do you need for a DR plan?

It is essential to have the right players during the planning process as well as a team ready to respond to system disruptions. Coordination with business unit leaders, particularly those who are responsible for the mission-critical functions, helps zero in on the technology requirements needed to sustain business operations. Senior leaders define recovery time objectives and recovery prioritization.

The DR planning process identifies critical IT systems and networks; links them to mission-critical business functions; prioritizes recovery times; and delineates the steps needed to restart, reconfigure, and recover operations.

A comprehensive IT DR plan also includes relevant supplier contacts and sources of expertise for recovering disrupted systems.

In today's business environment, both large and small businesses use cloud-based services to supplement existing IT resources. Data storage is a key use for cloud services, and many cloud vendors offer DR services of their own. The flexibility and relatively low cost of cloud DR make it a good option for small businesses.

In addition to securely protecting data, databases and applications, hardware devices must also be protected in a DR plan. Having one or two spare servers ready to use if an existing server fails is one way to minimize the consequences of a device failure. Backup power, such as uninterruptible power systems , is also essential.

Considering how much small business technology can be deployed today from hosted sources, one could make the argument that in-house DR is unnecessary for SMBs. Such a decision should be carefully made and in consultation with third-party resources to make sure they can support the technology needs of a business.

Limitations and benefits of a DR plan

Among the less tangible benefits of a DR plan is peace of mind. Aside from that, it is good to know how to manage disruptions to IT systems and return them to normal. In situations where the technology is on site, a DR plan -- even if it is only a few pages of who to call and what systems to fix first -- is far better than having no plan at all.

By contrast, SMBs using hosted systems for most of their infrastructure will still need to know who to call, what to say, and how to work on an interim basis while the third party fixes operations.

One of the key activities to perform with a DR plan is a periodic test . This will determine if the right systems are being addressed and the recovery steps have been validated. Periodic testing ensures that backup systems and data are accessible, and the organization has contact information for all necessary parties, within and outside the organization.

Regrettably, testing is perhaps the one activity most SMBs fail to perform, and it increases the risk of damage from a disruptive event.

Another challenge with DR plans is keeping them up to date. Changes in technology, installation of new patches, changes to storage devices, updates to key applications and other events should be added to DR plans but often are not.

Additional resources to develop an IT DR plan

In addition to the plan template attached to this article, the National Institute for Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-34, Contingency Planning for Information Technology Systems , is a helpful resource for building a DR plan.

This standard covers several areas of DR organizations can include in a plan. Helpful additions from this standard might include the following:

• Add a vulnerability assessment component to the risk assessment to identify and address any potential weak points.
• Identify preventive controls that reduce the effects of system disruptions and can increase system availability and reduce life cycle costs.
• Conduct plan testing, training and exercising to improve plan effectiveness and overall company preparedness.
• Consider the plan as a living document to be reviewed and updated regularly to remain current with system changes and business requirements.

SMB considerations

While this article addresses disaster recovery from a general perspective, the SMB template is designed to be flexible yet comprehensive enough to address the key business and technology issues an organization might face in a disaster. An SMB might decide that the focus is recovering critical system and network resources. As such, other sections of the template can be omitted.

Staffing can be a challenge in an SMB. In some organizations, there might be only one or two employees who can lead a recovery effort. Organizations with a one- or two-person IT department might be challenged to respond in an incident.

It might be necessary to consolidate DR plan data and procedures into a one- or two-page document. As long as emergency contacts are up to date for crisis communications , procedures are current, and backup resources are in place, SMBs can likely make it through all but the most devastating events.

How to use the template

The included template is designed to be flexible for most SMBs, and users can delete sections that don't apply to their business. Key sections to review include emergency contacts, recovery and restoration procedures, and any other activities needed to return the IT infrastructure to normal.

Following is a summary of the plan template and its sections:

• Information Technology Statement of Intent . This sets the stage and direction for the plan.
• Policy Statement. It is important to include an approved statement of the organization's policy regarding the provision of disaster recovery services.
• Objectives. These describe the main goals of the plan.
• Key Personnel Contact Information. Key contact data should be included early in the plan. It is the information most likely to be used right away and must be easy to locate.
• Plan Overview. This describes basic aspects of the plan.
• Emergency Response . This describes what needs to be done immediately following the onset of an incident.
• Disaster Recovery Team . This lists members and contact information of the DR team.
• Emergency Alert, Escalation and DR Plan Activation. These list steps to take through the early phase of the incident, leading to activation of the DR plan.
• Media. This includes tips for dealing with the media during and after a crisis.
• Insurance. This summarizes the insurance coverage associated with the IT environment and any other relevant policies.
• Financial and Legal Issues. This lists actions to take for dealing with financial and legal issues.
• DR Plan Exercising. This underscores the importance of DR plan exercising.
• Appendix A – Technology Disaster Recovery Plan Templates. This includes sample templates for a variety of technology recoveries. For some organizations, these templates might be sufficient by themselves as DR plans.
• Appendix B – Suggested Forms. These are ready-to-use forms that will facilitate the plan completion.

Paul Kirvan is an independent consultant, IT auditor, technical writer, editor and educator. He has more than 25 years of experience in business continuity, disaster recovery, security, enterprise risk management, telecom and IT auditing.

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Plan approved by North Carolina panel to meet prisoner reentry goals

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RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A new state panel has laid out specifics designed to bring numerous North Carolina state government agencies together to work on improving outcomes for prisoners when they are released, leading to reduced recidivism.

The Joint Reentry Council created by Gov. Roy Cooper’s executive order in January approved last week a plan to meet more than two dozen objectives by using over 130 different strategies.

The order directed a “whole-of-government” approach, in which Cabinet departments and other state agencies collaborate toward meeting goals and take action.

More than 18,000 people are released annually from the dozens of North Carolina adult correctional facilities and face challenges brought by their criminal record to employment, education, health care and housing.

The council’s plan “lays out our roadmap to help transform the lives of people leaving prison and reentering society while making our communities safe,” Cooper said in a news release Tuesday.

Cooper’s order also aligned with the goals of Reentry 2030 , a national effort being developed by the Council of State Governments and other groups to promote successful offender integration. The council said North Carolina was the third state to officially join Reentry 2030.

The plan sets what officials called challenging goals when unveiled in January. It also seeks to increase the number of high school degrees or skills credentials earned by eligible incarcerated juveniles and adults by 75% by 2030 and to reduce the number of formerly incarcerated people who are homeless by 10% annually.

Several initiatives already have started. The Department of Adult Correction, the lead agency on the reentry effort, has begun a program with a driving school to help train prisoners to obtain commercial driver’s licenses. The Department of Health and Human Services also has provided $5.5 million toward a program helping recently released offenders with serious mental illnesses, Cooper’s release said.

The governor said in January there was already funding in place to cover many of the efforts, including new access to federal grants for prisoners to pursue post-secondary education designed to land jobs once released.

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How Harris’ vision for the economy is a twist on Biden’s

Asma Khalid

Harris is signaling her campaign's priorities. The economy could be key for voters

Vice President Harris speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at West Allis Central High School on July 23 in West Allis, Wis. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images hide caption

For more on the 2024 race, head to the NPR Network's elections updates page.

In January 2023, Vice President Harris gave a little-known speech about the economy in Chicago. “We are building an economy, as President Biden often puts it, from the bottom up and the middle out,” she said. “And I’ll add, from the outside in.”

That last phrase was an aside, but it was also a telling glimpse into how the vice president thinks about the economy — and her focus on wealth creation, racial equity and access to capital.

Among White House officials and economic advisers NPR spoke with for this story, there was a consensus that Harris’ economic vision is largely aligned with the Biden economic agenda, focused on strengthening the middle class and trying to lower costs. But the vice president is likely to highlight different priorities to achieve that goal. And the clearest sign of that is what she’s prioritized in the past.

What Harris is saying now that she’s the nominee

On the campaign trail, Harris talks about the economy in bold, yet broad terms.

“We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth — a future with affordable health care, affordable child care, paid leave,” Harris told a crowd in Atlanta last week, when for the first time in her nascent campaign, she put out details around her economic platform. “All of this is to say: Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.”

She pledged on “Day 1” to take on “price gouging.”

2024 Election

Abc news says harris and trump have agreed to a presidential debate on sept. 10.

In her stump speeches, she ticks through plans to lower costs that echo the administration’s existing efforts: ban hidden fees and cap unfair rent hikes and prescription drug costs.

Next Thursday, Biden and Harris are planning a joint appearance to discuss their efforts to lower costs for Americans.

Like Biden, Harris also contrasts her vision with GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, insisting his plans would raise prices for middle-class families. Trump has multiple proposals intended to appeal to middle-class Americans, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security benefits. He’s also repeatedly said he would raise a variety of tariffs , which economists say would raise prices for American consumers.

Where Harris is distinguishing herself from Biden

While Harris’ economic vision is largely a continuation of the Biden agenda, there is a degree of differentiation.

In 2019, when she was in the Senate, Harris co-sponsored legislation to increase the child tax credit. And upon becoming vice president, she was particularly passionate on the issue.

“I saw with my own eyes the way that she fought for and championed the expanded child tax credit,” said Michael Pyle, Harris’ former chief economic adviser at the White House, referring to the COVID-era American Rescue Plan.

Former White House officials and advisers say Harris has specifically been a vocal supporter of policies that help working families with children.

In February 2021, amid the pandemic, she took to the pages of the Washington Post to warn that the “mass exodus of women from the workforce” was a “national emergency” and called for “affordable and accessible childcare.”

Poll: Harris jumps to a small national lead over Trump

“The vice president wanted the care agenda to be a part of their economic agenda,” said Ai-jen Poo, an advocate and organizer for caregivers. “Historically, the care agenda shows up as a child care pillar inside of a women's agenda.”

But looking at care as part of a broader economic agenda, Poo said, was novel.

The Biden administration laid out an ambitious investment to lower the cost of caregiving. But that part of Biden’s agenda didn’t have the votes in Congress.

“After it was clear it wasn't going to make it through the Senate bill, I did have a conversation with [Harris] where she said to me that she was not going to stop fighting for those investments in the care agenda and that we shouldn't stop either,” Poo said. “I really think that she is going to double down on the pieces that are still the unfinished business.”

Another key priority for Harris as vice president has been small-business creation.

“Her very first meeting when she became vice president with ordinary Americans was with small-business owners,” Pyle said. “That’s something she made clear to me, she made clear to the entire staff — ‘This matters to me.’ ”

When Harris would travel around the country, even if visiting a city for an unrelated matter, she often made a point of visiting small, women- or minority-owned businesses.

A former Harris adviser told NPR that it was important to the vice president to bring people to the table who traditionally have not had a seat — and she did that through her work with small businesses and community-development financial institutions.

What challenges are expected ahead

But policy priorities are theoretical at a moment when the most persistent concern voters have is their daily experience with the economy.

The unemployment rate is at its highest level in nearly three years. And even though inflation has cooled from its record high of 9.1% in the summer of 2022, many Americans still say prices are too high.

All Things Considered

Sticker shock: how the supermarket has become a potent symbol of inflation in america.

“People are pretty negative about the state of the economy,” said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster with Public Opinion Strategies.

But he said voters don’t seem to blame Harris directly for their woes the way they blame Biden.

Trump has held a significant advantage among voters on the economy throughout this presidential campaign, but the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found his edge shrinking. In June, Trump led Biden on who was more trusted to handle the economy by 9 points (54% to 45%). Now he leads Harris by just 3 points (51% to 48%).

Still, Harris is the sitting vice president. And negative impressions of the economy are traditionally more detrimental to the party in power.

“Since people have negative impressions of the economy, it's more of a drag on her than a positive,” Bolger said. “Keep in mind, she's relatively new as the candidate for president.”

NPR's Megan Lim and Jordan-Marie Smith contributed to this story.