Common knowledge states that half of the new businesses won’t make it past their first year. The actual statistics for year one look a little better, with only 20% failing in that time frame. However, whether it’s 50% or 20%, you don’t want your business to stumble and fall within the first year.

Your success or failure hinges on your ability to make short and long-term goals. These 10 shining examples of business goals will give you something to strive for as you lead your company to new horizons.

1. Reach a New Demographic

Your business’ focus should remain on your base or target demographic. However, expanding your reach can help with company growth over time. That’s why it’s a great long-term goal to keep in mind.

Reaching broad-spectrum appeal will take time and dedicated marketing plans. However, if you keep the desire to reach a more diverse customer base in mind, it can ensure your survival.

2. Balance Your Budget

This goal can be short or long-term, depending on how you phrase it. Making concerted efforts to balance your company’s budget for this quarter is a good short-term goal. However, if the problem has become more severe, or you want something lasting, it can serve as a long-term goal as well.

After all, it’s hard to claim that you have enduring company success when you’re on the border of bankruptcy due to outstanding debts.

3. Increase Product/Service Reliability

One of the greatest success metrics you can use for your business is the reliability of your products and services. If there are weak spots, fix them, don’t just patch them up. Take stock of the tools, ingredients, and practices that you use, and find ways to improve or remove the ones that don’t work.

4. Grow Your Community Outreach

More and more consumers look to companies to model good behavior. People value ethical consumption. And frankly, they’re tired of the blame always shifting to consumers.

One way that you can help with this is by increasing your reach in the community. Building connections with other local businesses and establishing yourself as an active player in the community, people will resonate with that.

You can accomplish this in the short term with holiday-based incentives and drives. However, most people would rather see it become a key part of your business vision.

5. Hire New Staff for a Needed Position

Let’s face it: Company growth is impossible without the right people filling your positions. Thus, hiring new staff or expanding needed roles is one of the best examples of business goals we can offer.

Like many others on this list, this goal can be short-term, as in filling slots before the end of the quarter. Or, it can be long-term, in the form of creating a new department that will require more staff.

This goal also combines nicely with other business objectives, like diversifying your staff or increasing community outreach by hiring locals.

6. Increase Employee Satisfaction and Retention

Of course, filling your business with more staff can’t happen without improving your employee satisfaction and retention rates. In the short term, you can accomplish this by surveying your employees and searching for ways to resolve their pain points by the end of the month or the quarter.

Long-term, however, this goal requires much more engagement. You need to keep a finger on the pulse of your staff, listen to their concerns, and make them feel rewarded and valued for their contributions. That’s not done with one-off pizza parties, but with fair, competitive wages and useful benefits.

If you’ve tried making adjustments, but still fall short of your desired targets, look at these reasons to consider why they didn’t work.

7. Reduce Overhead Costs

One long-term goal that’s crucial to company success is to find ways to reduce overhead costs. The less you spend on your overhead, the more you can earn in profits.

So, how can you reduce your overhead? First, you need to conduct a proper budget analysis to see where most of your money gets spent. Once you’ve found the biggest spenders, it’s time to see what adjustments you can make to them without being cruel to your staff.

8. Increase Efficiency in Company Operations

Increasing your business’ efficiency can take several forms. One, you can find ways to increase your energy efficiency and reduce your carbon footprint. This kills several birds with one stone, as consumers will see your efforts and appreciate your dedication to the environment.

Another way to increase efficiency is to examine your supply chain and find the places where your orders or manufacturing process get held up. Find those snags and determine why they happen.

In so doing, you will improve your efficiency and boost your chances to improve across all success metrics. Profits, consumer reviews, employee satisfaction, all of them.

9. Boost Social Media Engagement

Social media is crucial to company growth these days. Thus, you need to make increasing your engagement across those platforms one of your business objectives. In the short term, this can mean increasing post frequency and response rate from your social media team.

Long-term, this can take the form of adding a new platform to your business’s social media repertoire. It might also mean expanding the types of content you post from text and photo to video.

10. Adjust Product Prices

Another goal you can set for your business is to adjust your product prices. This can help you gain traction with customers in the short term, or preserve your profits in the long term. While most clients would rather see your prices lower, raising them over a dedicated period of time can reduce the sting of their increase.

Need More Examples of Business Goals to Strive Towards?

We hope that this guide gave you some examples of business goals you can strive towards and increase your company’s success. However, if you’re still in the market for success metrics to strive towards, check out the Business section of our blog. We update each day with more handy guides like this one.

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