50 SMART Goals for your Business

When I was a middle manager, I saw many goals that ended up as roadkill on the business superhighway. Whatever the flavor of the year was, that’s what was reflected in the business goals. Things like: reducing dependence on one client, diversifying our service offerings, and others made the rounds through our business units.

One year our vice president even said something to the effect of “My being here is dependent on reducing our dependence on one particular client.” In hindsight, that vice president is still there, and the goal was accomplished by slowly losing business from that client (because it was clearly not a priority), while not getting new ones. In other words, the overall business is now much smaller.

Goal accomplished, then?

I have the impression that I am not alone in my experience with business goals.

Business goals should be SMART:

• Specific. If your goal is simply “to improve” I’ve got news for you.  You probably won’t.
• Measurable. Many wonderful goals are not easily measurable, and their success or failure gets drowned out by the debate.
• Achievable. There’s nothing more demoralizing than being given goals that are outside of someone’s abilities.
• Relevant. Ensuring the coffee is always hot and ready is a fantastic goal (in my office) but not relevant. That’s an extreme example but suffice it to say that it’s easy to set goals for secondary things. Keep them focused on the important performance metrics.
• Time-bound. In my previous company it was standard procedure to set goals that had no end in sight. Unsurprisingly, years later there was a different goal and nobody really knew what the goals meant. You can do everything else right, but you still need to have a time frame to achieve the goal.

Here are some examples of SMART goals you might utilize in your unit:

1. Earnings per share
2. Earnings per share growth rate
3. Revenue
4. Revenue growth rate
5. Profit
6. Profit growth rate
7. P/E ratio
8. EBITDA
9. CAPEX (Capital Expenditures)
10. OPEX (Operating Expenditures)
11. Return on Investment (ROI)
12. Market share
13. Market share among certain demographic, geographic area, etc.
14. Margin
15. Input cost
16. Input cost growth/decline rate
17. Product selling price
18. Number of units produced
19. Number of units sold
20. Total manufacturing cost
21. Price of a supply unit
22. Manufacturing time
23. Amount/value of waste
24. Product quality (i.e. six sigma score or similar)
25. Number of defects
26. Number of warranty returns
27. Number of leads generated
28. Conversion rate
29. Delivery time
30. After sales support response time
31. Number of stores/locations
32. Number of dealers
33. Employee cost
34. Employee turnover
35. Employee satisfaction
36. Utilization rate
37. Employee charge out rate
38. Number of employees
39. Client satisfaction (in our engineering business, our main client has a consultant evaluation score)
40. Number of clients
41. Cost variance
42. Schedule variance
43. Number of scope changes
44. Value of scope changes
45. Number of milestones achieved
46. Number of safety incidents
47. Amount of lost time
48. Safety audit score
49. Number of repeat customers
50. Percent complete

This is simply a list to get your brainstorming started. By no means do I advocate using all of them, because they couldn’t possibly all be relevant to the same business unit.