Goal Setting: Keep it simple and use BHAGs
Setting goals for your business is vital but it is hard to know where to start and how to do it.
Why is goal setting vital?
If there are no goals for your business, what are you aiming for?
How do you measure progress?
How do you know what to spend your time on first?
Goals will help you determine all of the above.
Different types of goals
Goals can be divided into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals. Within Born to Fly, we’ve experimented with weekly accountability meetings for our weekly goals. And we attended quarterly goal setting meetings to make sure we would know what to focus on that specific quarter.
Based on our experience, we vouch for setting these types of goals. They are great stimulators to move your business forward.
But before you can determine weekly or quarterly goals, you need a bigger picture.
That’s where all goal setting starts: the vision.
It’s like a funnel: you start with the vision in mind and narrow it down to the tiniest steps to make it happen.
In order to know what those tiny steps our, you need a vision.
The term that we use for the big vision or the long-term goal is Big Hairy Audacious Goal or shortened: BHAG.
What exactly is a BHAG?
When the Born to Fly community was exploring time management methods for our businesses, we read Jordan Raynor’s book Redeeming Your Time, which gave a solid framework that proved easy to work with and successful.
This is the definition of a BHAG in Jordan's book:
"Some people refer to long-term goals as "vision statements," but to me that sounds lame, corporate, and helplessly vague. I prefer to call them BHAGs, the term Jim Collins and Jerry Porras coined in their classic book Built to Last.
What is a BHAG?
Exactly what it sounds like. Rather than define it further, let's look at some examples.
Tamika Catchings's BHAG was to play in the NBA (she's a woman).
William Wilberforce's BHAG was to abolish the slave trade.
At the organizational level, NASA's BHAG in the 1960s was to put a man on the moon.
Google's BHAG is to organize the world's information.
If you're an entrepreneur, your BHAG might be getting to ten million dollars in annual revenue in the next five years.
If you're a mother, your BHAG could be to see your kids walking with the Lord when they go off to college."
It’s clear that a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) is a long-term goal that is ambitious, compelling, and strategic in nature.
The goal should inspire and motivate you to achieve greatness and surpass what you thought was possible. It’s on the edge of “I don’t know if I can actually make it happen.” and “This is so exciting!” It’s rubbing against your comfort zone and challenging you into something that scares you a bit.
That’s good. That’s the right feeling you want to have about a BHAG.
How do you create a BHAG?
Create a sentence that sounds like you. Don’t throw any words in there that you don’t resonate with. A BHAG is personal, especially if you’re a solopreneur.
You could follow these steps to write down a BHAG:
Define a clear and specific objective: it should be easy to understand (and remember) what you're trying to achieve.
Make it achievable, but difficult: Your BHAG should be achievable, but difficult enough to challenge you (and potentially your team) to think outside the box and push yourself beyond your limits, forcing yourself to trust God more.
Make it measurable: so you can track your progress and know when you've achieved it, but also to be able to chop it up into digestible chunks.
Align it with your values and mission: in order to stay true to what God called you to do
Always set goals with God
Setting BHAGs is the first step of goal setting for your business. It can be a fun exercise to dive deep into your mission to eventually come out with a BHAG or two (don’t create five. It’s too hard to focus on and remember!).
But creating BHAGs can also be daunting and suffocating as you might find it hard to choose something.
Regardless of how you see it, always set your goals with God.
Intentionally planning time to sit down, pray with Him, and talk about your BHAG(s) is the starting point for goal setting in business.
Many blessings!
