It’s never too late to reflect, plan and set new goals for your business. It’s important to take a step back to look at how your salon, spa or clinic performed over the year, and use these learnings to set goals for the year ahead.
To help you achieve this, here is a guide on how to take stock of where your business is at and create some SMART business goals to help you achieve success.
Goals – why do we need them?
Setting goals helps you to plan, prioritise and focus your time. They help you to reflect on your success as you see progress towards what you’re aiming to achieve. They can be short or long term, and in fact it can be useful and motivating to break down a long term goal into shorter goals or milestones to achieve along the way.
What are SMART goals?
There’s a reason SMART goals are talked about everywhere. This goal setting framework is simple and effective, especially for larger projects.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based. This simple goal-setting framework will help you to create goals for your business that have a clear purpose and are realistic.
However, before we set SMART goals, we need to do a few things first.
What’s your vision and strategy?
To develop your goals, you first need to determine your overall vision and strategy for what you want to achieve long term. Basically, think of two or three things you’d like to do in the next one, two or five years to improve your spa, salon or clinic. This will give you direction on how to spend your time.
Reflect on your year
Think back on the activities you carried out last year. What did you do? What worked and what didn’t? Did you achieve your goals? The last few years haven’t been typical, so there’s a good chance you couldn’t achieve the goals you would usually set, so it’s important to revisit these.
Should you carry over some of your previous goals, or do you need to pivot and create completely new ones? Now’s the perfect time to reflect, assess and think of the future.
Set your business goals for the year ahead
It’s time to dust off your old business plan and update your goals. Having your short and long-term business goals documented will not only boost your motivation, but also help keep you focused throughout the year.
How to set SMART goals for your business
Specific
Your goal should be clearly defined and easy to understand. For example, if you want to improve your rebooking rate, do you need to do this across all your services or only some?
Measurable
You need to know when you’ve achieved your goal or how you’re progressing towards it, i.e. your rebooking rate is 40% and you want it to be 60%.
Agreed upon
Get agreement on your goal with everyone who needs to be involved in helping to achieve it. This could be your salon manager, your team, and your business coach.
Realistic
Make sure your goal is achievable with the resources, knowledge and time you have available. Putting unrealistic pressure on yourself to get more done rarely ends in goals being achieved.
Time-based
Set a realistic timeframe to achieve your goal. This should allow you enough time to achieve the goal but not too much time that it causes you to lose focus on the goal.
Write down your goals
Once you know the goals you’d like to achieve for the year, write them down and put them on display somewhere prominent. You should have a constant reminder of what you’re working towards. This could be on your wall as a poster, stuck to your fridge or the background on your devices!
Find your starting point
Look at how you’re currently performing in relation to each of your goals and determine what you’ll need to do to achieve them. Use the reporting tools you have available to you.
For instance your salon and spa software should have your key business metrics and social media tools will give you reports on the success of your social media activity. You might have to do some extra research too, for example, talking to your staff, business partners or accountant.
Break it down
Once you know what your starting point is, you can start to see what you need to change, stop or introduce for you to achieve your goals.
Turn this into a series of tasks or projects. For example, if your goal is to be able to hire another stylist, you need to ensure you will have the client base, income, and resources such as space to support that stylist.
Create an action plan
Now that you have your goals and you’ve broken down the key tasks and projects that will enable you to obtain your goals, it’s time to create your action plan. This will help you ensure you’re working on the right things to move you in the right direction. As the saying goes, a goal without a plan is just a dream.
It’s tempting to jump right in and start doing things, however taking the time to organise and plan is a really important part of time management. When you have a plan, you’re less likely to procrastinate and more likely to get things done.
Put in a timeline
Spread the actions throughout the time frame you have chosen. When it comes to bigger projects, make sure you break them down into individual tasks with shorter time frames. It’ll make the project seem more achievable and allow you to complete part of the project even if you only have half an hour to spare.
Now you have a monthly plan so you can work towards your goal over the year, rather than become overwhelmed with how you’ll achieve your big goals.
Get your team on board
You’ve identified your business goals and created a plan, so now it’s time to discuss and brainstorm how you’re going to achieve them with your staff and who will be involved with specific projects.
It’s important they’re included and on board as you won’t be able to achieve your goals on your own. Have one-on-one chats with each of your team to set individual goals and identify growth and development opportunities. These should all help towards achieving your business goals.
Clean up your database
Set yourself up for successful goal achievement by taking time to update all your client’s details. If you have trouble obtaining them, try incentives. For example, complete a form to go in the draw to win a basket full of goodies. Keep client information up-to-date throughout the year by having staff check it when clients come in, too.
With Kitomba, you can send customised forms to clients by email, SMS, or by getting them to fill out a digital form in your salon, spa or clinic, which automatically updates their details in Kitomba. Find out more about Kitomba Forms.
By having correct client information at your fingertips, you’ll better service your clients and be able to do effective targeted marketing which will help you to reach your goals.
Map out your marketing
Avoid last minute marketing panic and substandard campaigns by planning the year ahead. Think about all your marketing channels – social media, text messages, your website – and come up with a plan for each.
You may also want to think about a particular campaign you’d like to run, for example, a Mother’s Day promotion or referral competition in July.
Learn how to create a strategic marketing plan, and for marketing tips, check out our marketing guide.
Daily planning
As well as planning for the long term, it’s important to plan each day to ensure you have time to work on your long term goals. It’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day so having a daily task list or planner is a helpful tool.
Download our free daily planner to help you get organised and plan your day.
Set your goals for the year
Now that you’re armed with a framework for setting SMART goals for your business, it’s time to create your goals and get ready for a great year ahead! Use this as a guide to help you through the process and we wish you all the best for the year.
For more tips for growing your business, download our free e-book 100 ways to grow. It contains 100 different ways to grow your salon, spa or clinic this year.
Read next:
- Three ways to grow a successful salon, spa or clinic
- The top 10 client messages you could automate now
- Find 4 hours a week using these 6 tips for powerful time management
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on 1 February 2019 and has been updated for relevance and comprehensiveness.
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