You know that as a business owner, you *should* have some goals for your business. This helps keep you from wandering aimlessly from one project to the next. But what does that really mean to set (and achieve) goals as a stationery designer?And much more importantly, setting realistic goals for your business.
I like to just keep a running list of my thoughts and ideas throughout the year or things that I think would be a good idea in the future. So when I sit down to start planning out my business goals for the next year, I can pull up that list and see what I can take from it to work into my business plans for the year.I generally recommend that you try to have a good balance between small, medium, and large goals.
Think of large goals as “major effort” projects, something that could potentially take 2-3+ months to fully accomplish. Medium goals would be more of a 2-6 week task and small goals could be 1-2 weeks to wrap up. You clearly don’t want to have 5-6 large goals set for the year as that can become very overwhelming and likely lead to them not all being accomplished. Remember, you want to be realistic!I think that having 1-2 large goals, 3-4 medium goals, and however many small goals you think are realistically sprinkled in is a good balance!
If you’re curious how I then take those goals and fit them into my year and break them down quarterly, you can check out this blog post here!
So let’s break down a sample. For Heather O’Brien Design, my stationery business, it could look something like this:
Launch new wedding collection (large goal)
Launch wedding accessories shop (large goal)
Plan out full blogging schedule for the year (batch write) (medium goal)
Fully utilize Pinterest/outsource (medium goal)
Add holiday cards to collection (medium goal)
Send Quarterly wedding planner boxes (small goal)
Expand welcome sequence for newsletter subscribers (small goal)
Add to portfolio quarterly (small goal)
These goals are ones for my own stationery business, so some of the items may not be too hefty as I have to make sure that I save time for actual client work since I work with 2-4 clients a month on custom invitations.
But once I have those big picture items, I can decide which quarter/month I want to reach some of these goals and then backtrack and create due dates for the items to reach those goals.
For The Cultivated Creative, my outline is a little more in-depth as it revolves less around client work and more around content creation for you. What courses do I want to create this year, what newsletter topics will I write about, blog posts to add, shop products to revamp or create. So having those items detailed out makes it a little easier than just sitting down each week and looking at a blinking cursor or empty schedule.
No matter what type of business you’re in (custom work, shop products, etc) I fully believe in sitting down and planning out a rough overview of your year and what that will look like so you can start setting realistic goals for yourself to accomplish those items for the year.
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