Rich Kid's Campus|A Community for High School and College Entrepreneurs

Well 2010 is now here and 2009 went by extremely fast. At the beginning of every year I like to establish some personal goals for myself. Most of the time my personal goals include; how many books I will read this year, how many new people I want to meet, how many new sites I will launch, etc. I refer to these as personal goals.

I also like to establish business goals for each one of my business property’s. These are a little, albeit, a lot different than my personal goals. It’s important to set goals periodically so that you can go back at the end of the goal period and find out if you have accomplished the goal you set out to accomplish. This is why it’s really important to write down your goals and keep track of them. Putting all of your goals in a 3 ring binder is a very easy way to keep track of everything.

We will focus on setting business, professional, or career goals but this same process and information can be used to set your personal goals as well.

What’s the point of setting goals?

Goal setting forces you to take a look in to your future and determine where you want to be in a year, three years, five years, or longer. This allows you to come up with a vision of what it is you want to do in the future and turn that vision in to a reality.

You will know exactly where you want to go and you will know precisely what you need to do to reach it. Not only will you think about where you want to be in the future, you will also think about what obstacles you may face along your journey; before experiencing them.

Goals are great for motivational purposes. This is why almost every sales firm, and business for that matter, establishes goals that are obtainable. Your motivation will be at an all time high once you actually achieve a goal. You will become addicted to setting goals and making sure you reach them. You will notice that your self-confidence is much higher once you achieve the goal than it ever was before.

Before we go any further I would like to provide you with a simple Goal Sheet that you can use. I recommend hanging it up on the wall over your desk. Unless you have a lot of goals, than use a binder.

Using SMART To Establish Goals

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely

Specific - Be as specific as possible about what it is you want to achieve. Specify exactly what it is you want to do, why you want to do it and how you plan on doing it.

Measurable - Simply put, if you can’t measure it than you have no idea how it’s working, right? You want to be able to see changes happening before your eyes or you will lose motivation and think that your goal setting efforts are failing miserably, when they could actually be working great!

Attainable - When setting up goals you need to be able to stretch yourself a little and get out of your “comfort zone”, otherwise the goal will not need your attention and you will not have a strong commitment towards it.

Realistic - Sometimes I see people set goals that are simply unrealistic. The goals set should be do-able. You want to make the goals hard enough that you need to push yourself to achieve them, but not completely out of your league.

Timely - Setting time frames are extremely important, otherwise the goal will never get accomplished (procrastination minus the time commitment means it will never happen). So set goals to be established in a timely manner, make sure they are attainable and realistic.

Goal Setting Steps

1) Vision - This is where you want to be in the future, your company or your website, etc. No matter what it is you are focusing on I’m sure you have a vision for what you want it to become; we all do.

Example: Rich Kid’s Campus wants to provide high school student’s, college student’s, young entrepreneur’s and anyone else that would like to start and run their own business’s, a community that they can come to for encouragement on taking the next step in their career’s. We envision a group of like-minded individuals working together to form a community that shares in a wealth of information.

2) Goals - Goals are more general, but still specific, and can often be unmeasurable.

Example: One of Rich Kid’s Campus’s goals is to get more targeted traffic to our website so we can build a strong community.

3) Objectives - This is where your vision and goals become a reality. They are the bridge between your forecast of the future and what you have envisioned. These are specific and are measurable.

Example: We want to have over 30,000 visitors a month on Rich Kid’s Campus by the beginning of 2011.

4) Tasks - This is where you really get specific. Basically you want to outline the methods that you will use to meet your objective. These are concrete and can easily be measured. Furthermore, if the tasks are not carried out than you will most likely not meet your objectives or goals.

Example: Use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets regularly to increase traffic and build a strong community.

5) Time line – This is the real key here. If you wait until a month before your goal needs to be achieved than you will never meet it! So, it’s important to set up a time line for when your tasks will be started and it’s also a good idea to establish how often the tasks need to be worked on.

Example: We will have our task list implemented before the end of January, 2010. We will focus on these tasks on a weekly basis.

6) Followup - This is the control portion of setting goals. You need to check your measurements periodically to see if you are on target to achieve your goal. If you are not on track than it’s time to make adjustments to your plan. Maybe you were overambitious, or you have not had enough time or your techniques are simply not working.

Setting goals are pretty simple really. Here is a Goal Sheet to get you started right away!