Target Setting For Founders And CEOs

The previous article in this entrepreneur target setting series highlighted the benefits of target setting and periodic employee performance appraisal.

In additional, I established that the founder and CEO of a company should apply target setting and performance appraisal techniques to both himself and his employees.

Yes, target setting is not for only people you hire to work for you.

In order to grow your business from scratch to success, you must also set performance targets for yourself.

You see, self-imposed targets are a driving force. They are the ingredients that will spur you, the founder and CEO of the startup company, to accomplish more for your business each day. And the more you accomplish for your business each day, the sooner you will grow your business to amazing levels of profitability.

Here is a short story to drive home the point.

Entrepreneur Target Setting - A Case Study

I started a new business web site a couple of years ago.

The objective of the business web site was to drive traffic to a new product I was offering for sale.

The goal was to use the business web site as an attraction marketing tool to pull in people interested in the product and then convert those web site visitors into paying customers.

How was I going to do this?

I decided that to get the search engine's attention, I needed to create my business web site and add 100 well written articles about every aspect of the product. More important, I wanted to accomplish this in 100 days.

So, that was my target: To write 100 carefully crafted product-related articles in 100 days.

To achieve this target, I needed to keep it clearly in focus.

So, I created a table (using Microsoft Excel software) that listed the start date and every day after the start date and up to day 100.

I posted the table showing the target above my reading / work desk. And every day I wrote a new article, I updated the table.

Some days I wrote 2 articles because I knew ahead of time that my weekends were pretty busy and there was no way I would have time to write on weekends.

Guess what.

At the end of 100 days, I had written 75 articles.

That comes down to 75 percent target achievement.

I did pretty well, right?

Here's what happened next.

I slowed down my writing after day 100. And in the next 100 days after that feat was accomplished, I probably added only about 10 new articles to the site.

See the difference?

When I set a target for myself, I wrote 75 articles in 100 days. When I didn't set any target for myself, I wrote about 10 articles in 100 days.

Yes, setting targets and staying committed to meeting those targets puts your entire body on high alert. And this propels you to achieve more for your business daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

Bottom line.

Take advantage of target setting.

Set targets for yourself and your employees and insist those targets are met.

Trust me, your business will grow much faster.