Business owners know the key visions, strategies, focuses, objectives, and outcomes need to be taken out of their brains and put on paper. But that's not it. Your team should also understand the company's direction, why these goals are important, and how they can contribute to achieving the big goals.
Your company’s goals and objectives this year might be, for example, “Generate $200K in revenue,” “Increase customer retention by 25%,” or “Launch 5 new products.” But if there’s just a high-level business goal without actual day-to-day tasks to be done, it’s easy to lose focus and become misaligned.
That’s why business goal-setting is so important.
On this page, you’ll find a business goals template – fill it out with the company strategy and Objectives, Key Results, and Weekly planning and get your business goals going!
Business goals template
Download your free business goals planning template here!
This fillable free business goals template is fantastic because it’s relatively minimal and perfect for grouping together condensed versions of your business goals. It can honestly work for just about any business in any industry!
How do you set a business goal template?
Without further ado, let’s break down our business goals template.
1. Define Company Vision
This is arguably the most important part of your goal-setting process. Your business vision is the foundation for your overall business.
This vision should be a brief and concrete mission statement. You can define your vision a couple of times per year, but it should stay the same for around 5-10 years.
Think about what you visualize your business being at its most successful. For example, if you are a tax software company, you may list your vision as “Be the most dominant tax software online.” If you’re a skincare or makeup blog that operates exclusively online, your vision could be “Become the #1 most viewed skincare and makeup blog for advice and product reviews.”
Don’t add a deadline to this. If anything, your vision is merely a statement to focus on as you conduct business to maintain a level of consistency.
2. Define Strategy
A strategy is an important part of running a successful business. Write out how you’re going to “win” over your competitors within only two years.
Obviously, anyone business will have a number of strategies for different aspects of the business, such as marketing, sales, etc. The purpose of the “define strategy” section is to hone in on one strategy as your main strategy for success.
For example, a web app startup may list its strategy as “Have the biggest organic traffic in the native app market.” Similarly, an online florist that delivers locally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin may choose a strategy like “Get to the top four results in Google under ‘Milwaukee florist delivery.”
Choose a strategy that is tried and true for you when starting out. In two years, you’ll want to switch things up to align with new business goals that you aspire to reach. Think about your industry niche and how you can realistically get a leg up over your competitors in only two years.
3. Define One Year Focus
Write out the topmost important focus for this year. This can be easy as “revenue” or “invest in public relations.”
This focus will be the “theme” of your fiscal year. What do you want to focus on in twelve months? Why do you want to focus on it? Does this focus result in you achieving your vision and strategy?
For example, the tax software company we invented in the above section decided to run with “Have the biggest organic traffic in the native app market.” as their vision for five to ten years. They also chose “Have the biggest organic traffic in the tax software market.” as their two-year strategy. Their yearly focus could be something like “Invest heavily in content marketing and link building.”
4. OKRs
Objectives and Key Results (aka OKRs) section in the template suggests the process for your quarterly planning: defining an Objective you want to achieve within 3 months and setting Key Results that will help you measure and track your progress towards that Objective.
OKR goal-setting methodology is quite popular among business people in a wide range of niches, including the industry giants Google. It’s a fairly simple process to understand. This goal system is different from more traditional planning methods in that it is constantly set, tracked, and evaluated.
The three main Objectives in our template are as follows:
- Improve brand presence
- Improve content and distribution
- Achieve record metrics in blog organic traffic
For each Objective, list the Key Results you want (up to five per Objective) and list how you would like them to be measured. Also, include a deadline that is reasonable for each Key Result.
👉 Learn more about how to write good OKRs and take an advantage of the OKR examples.
For example, to “improve brand presence” you may decide you want to earn five placements in mainstream media. You could measure this simply as “1-5” and set a deadline for three months. Quarterly or when those three months are up, revisit this Key Result to see if it was achieved. If not, try again or consider a new key result to strive for. These Objectives should be evaluated and renewed on a quarterly basis.
That’s what a complete OKR example would look like:
5. Look into PPP Methodology Weekly
The weekly planning (PPP) structure should be visited once a week (we suggest Friday) to look at how different goals have been accomplished.
Look at how the week went. What did you accomplish this week? What do you plan on accomplishing next week? What problems do you expect to run into? Be brief here and don’t be afraid to include achievements that are relatively small, such as publishing two blog posts.
6. Desired Outcome
Like the above section, you’ll want to revisit your desired outcome each and every week on a Friday. Define the measurements for success for the next week. This can be as simple as having an agreed roadmap that your marketing team can use for writing content for the next few months. Keep these measurements brief and realistic.
What are business goals examples?
Business goals can be either long-term or short-term ones.
Here are a few examples of short-term business goals:
- Increase the number of blog posts to three ones a week;
- Create a marketing campaign for collecting clients’ reviews;
- Increase traffic to the company’s template library;
- Hire a new product marketing manager within the next month.
The following are examples of long-term business goals:
- Increase Community Outreach;
- Increase Market Share;
- Increase the total income of your company by 30% over the next year;
- Reduce production expenses by 10% over the next three months;
- Grow Shareholder Value;
- Increase overall brand awareness;
- Develop and launch three new products.
How to set business goals in Weekdone?
As usually business goals worksheets are difficult to maintain and keep collaborative among the team members, goal-setting software might be a handy option. You can set your company goals using OKR software like Weekdone and avoid using the business goals template.
For that, you start with an Objective. Objectives on the Company level represent high-level directions, and the teams would normally link their OKRs to one of the Company Objectives. Team Objectives, when linked up to Company Objectives, become Company level Key Results.
Team Objectives are improvement goals aligned with the overarching company direction.
Under each Team Objective, a team would set 2-5 Key Results – measurable outcomes that represent a valuable change in the business. Each Key Result can be measured on a scale of 0-100% or any numerical unit (for example, $, %, items, clients, etc.). Each time you update progress on a KR, leave comments to provide some helpful insights and record lessons learned.
The Bottom Line
The business goals template is a good way to organize the company goals and start the next quarter with specific milestones. Download this business goal-setting worksheet and fill it out, spread it around your team, and start planning your OKRs.
In case you need more information on how to fill out this business goal planning template, use these tips:
- OKR examples for different teams and how to brainstorm them;
- How to track business goals: a goal spreadsheet vs goal-setting software;
- How to track your business goals using OKR software.
Ready to set your business goals and automate the goal tracking process? Try out Weekdone goal-setting software for free today!