Read Time: 7 Minutes
Introduction
- Are you facing challenges in achieving breakthrough results?
- Are you Juggling multiple vital goals?
It’s possible you’re dealing with goal overload, diffusing energy, and impeding progress. When everything’s important, nothing truly is.
OVERCOME BUSINESS FAILURE AND PLAN FOR SUCESS WITH THIS SIMPLIFIED METHOD
In this blog, I’ll emphasize the significance of zeroing in on a single Wildly Important Goal (WIG) as the key driver to propel you towards success.
What is Success?
Success in the realm of small business encompasses more than mere survival—it’s about driving meaningful progress. Ultimately, success translates to moving the revenue needle while ensuring the longevity of your business. While daily tasks, operational challenges, and troubleshooting are indispensable aspects of entrepreneurship, they can sometimes overshadow the pursuit of success.
It’s crucial to strike a balance between managing day-to-day operations and chasing breakthrough results. By effectively planning for success and focusing on lead goals, you’re not only addressing immediate concerns but also creating a solid foundation for growth. Success isn’t just about addressing the whirlwind of tasks—it’s about strategically navigating through them to attain your business’s true potential.
Why is Planning for One Business WIG So Essential for Small Business Owners?
Planning for one wildly important goal (WIG) acts as a compass, guiding small business owners from survival to thriving. It transforms your business, propelling it towards its fullest potential. By strategically focusing on a single WIG, you shift from reactive tasks to proactive, purpose-driven actions. This cultivates growth and achievement, unlocking breakthrough results that fortify your business’s foundation and future.
AN ANALOGY TO EMPHASIZE THE IMPORTANCE ON FOCUSING ON ONE BUSINESS WIG
Imagine you have a pitcher of your favorite fruit juice. It’s delicious and refreshing. Now, if you start adding more and more water to the pitcher, trying to make it go further, what happens? The juice becomes weaker and loses its taste. It’s no longer the flavorful drink you loved.
In the business world, having too many Wildly Important Goals (WIGs), Secondary Important Goals (SIGs), and Team Important Goals (TIGs) is like adding too much water to your fruit juice. Each goal requires your time, effort, and attention. If you spread yourself too thin across many goals, your focus gets diluted, just like the juice. As a result, none of the goals get the full energy they need to truly succeed.
Instead, it’s like pouring that same amount of juice into a smaller glass. The flavor is concentrated, and it remains powerful and satisfying. Similarly, when you concentrate your efforts on one or a few key goals(WIGs, SIGs, and TIGs) you’re giving them the attention they deserve. This focused approach increases your chances of achieving remarkable results because you’re not spreading yourself too thin. Just like a smaller glass preserves the juice’s flavor, a focused approach preserves your energy and effectiveness in reaching your goals.
The Journey to Small Business Success
This journey entails understanding the significance of choosing the shortest route to breakthrough success, differentiating between LEAD and LAG goals, harnessing the power of wildly important goals (WIGs), and much more. The path to success starts here.
Choosing the Shortest Route to Success
The world of small business is a dynamic landscape where countless tasks and objectives vie for attention. Amid this complexity, the key to triumph lies in discerning the shortest route to your breakthrough results. While this doesn’t imply compromising quality or shortcuts, it does mean prioritizing tasks that have the most substantial impact. Limited resources, encompassing finances, staff, and time, necessitate a strategic approach to achieve results that move the business needle. This entails choosing a business goal that everyone can get behind to focus the teams energy to drive success.
Setting Long-Term Business WIG: A Roadmap to Success
Crafting a 1 to 5-year Wildly Important Goal (WIG) for your business lays the foundation for success. This roadmap ensures you’re moving in the right direction. Regularly reviewing your WIG or WIG’s progress yearly allows for adjustments, ensuring you stay on course. It’s a dynamic strategy that aligns your team, resources, and efforts toward consistent growth and breakthrough results.
Choosing LEAD Goals Over LAG Goals for Your Business WIG
When planning for success, it’s essential to differentiate between lead and lag goals. Lag goals reflect the past, like analyzing previous customer satisfaction rates or total revenue. In contrast, lead goals are actionable and forward-looking. They drive future growth and directly impact lag goals. By focusing on improving customer satisfaction or achieving a 30% sales increase in a specific region, you empower your team to drive real change with lasting effects.
Lead Goals: Lead goals are future-focused and actionable objectives that directly influence lag goals. They are the drivers of change that your team can actively work towards. Here are a few examples:
Increase Website Traffic: Increase website traffic by 20% in the next quarter through targeted content marketing, SEO improvements, and social media engagement.
Enhance Customer Satisfaction: Improve customer satisfaction by implementing a new feedback system and responding to customer inquiries within 24 hours.
Expand Market Share: Increase market share by 15% in a specific region by launching a targeted advertising campaign and offering region-specific promotions.
Employee Training: Conduct bi-monthly training sessions for staff to improve product knowledge and customer service skills, leading to higher sales conversion rates.
New Product Launch: Achieve 1,000 pre-orders for a new product within the first month of launch through an engaging marketing campaign and special early-bird offers.
Lag Goals: Lag goals are retrospective and focus on outcomes that have already happened. While you can’t change these outcomes, they provide important context for evaluating your business’s performance. Here are some examples:
Previous Year’s Revenue: Analyze last year’s total revenue and identify areas for growth based on trends and changes in customer behavior.
Customer Churn Rate: Assess the customer churn rate over the past quarter to understand retention challenges and implement strategies to improve customer loyalty.
Profit Margin: Review the profit margin for the previous year to identify cost-saving opportunities and pricing adjustments that can positively impact profitability.
Employee Turnover: Examine the turnover rate for the last six months to identify patterns and reasons for employee attrition, then develop retention strategies.
Market Penetration: Analyze the percentage of target market penetration achieved in the last year to set benchmarks for future expansion efforts.
Remember, lead goals are actionable and focused on driving change, while lag goals provide insights into historical performance. The key is to strike a balance between these two types of goals to create a well-rounded strategy for business success.
Crafting Secondary Important Goals (SIGs)
Once your Wildly Important Goal (WIG) shines as your guiding light, the strategy evolves to create Secondary Important Goals (SIGs). These goals span across departments, all serving the purpose of bolstering the WIG achievement.
SIGs are instrumental in supporting your primary WIG by addressing specific areas that contribute to its accomplishment. Let’s take the example of the WIG “Increase Website Traffic by 20% in the next quarter.” Here are three SIGs that align with this WIG:
Content Optimization: Increase organic website traffic by 10% by optimizing existing content for relevant keywords, enhancing meta descriptions, and implementing internal linking strategies.
Social Media Engagement: Boost website traffic by 5% through targeted social media campaigns, sharing valuable content, and engaging with the online community.
Guest Blogging Initiative: Collaborate with industry influencers for guest blog posts to drive an additional 5% increase in website traffic, leveraging their existing audiences.
By setting these SIGs, you’re breaking down the larger WIG into actionable components that address crucial areas, thereby propelling your business towards its breakthrough results.
Leveraging Team Participation in Crafting Effective TIGs
Maximize the power of teamwork in shaping Team Important Goals (TIGs) for each department that drive you towards your overarching goals. Encourage open discussions, brainstorming, and feedback sharing, allowing employees to contribute creative strategies that complete the Secondary Important Goals (SIGs) and propel us towards achieving our Wildly Important Goal (WIG). By involving the team in creating TIGs aligned with their strengths, we foster ownership, boost engagement, and amplify our path to a breakthrough business success.
Empowering your teams to contribute to SIGs and the overall WIG involves the establishment of Team Important Goals (TIG). These are goals that front-end staff can actively work on to support the achievement of SIGs and, ultimately, the WIG.
For instance, considering the SIG “Content Optimization,” TIGs could be:
Content Refresh Schedule: Develop a schedule for updating existing blog posts and web pages to maintain relevance and improve search engine rankings.
Keyword Research Training: Provide training sessions to content creators on effective keyword research techniques to enhance the discoverability of published content.
Internal Linking Strategy: Implement a strategy for interlinking relevant articles within the website to guide users towards related content, improving user experience and increasing page views.
The TIGs ensure that the action steps are tangible and clear, allowing each team member to contribute directly to the larger objectives. These goals foster a sense of ownership and accountability, as well as a deeper understanding of how individual efforts contribute to the collective success of the business.
Strategically Planning with SMART Goals
Transforming objectives into actionable plans hinges on creating SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Each goal necessitates a clear outline, detailing its components, measurement metrics, and completion timeframe. This strategic approach aligns your team’s efforts, fostering motivation and efficiency in achieving desired outcomes. Through SMART goals, you bridge the gap between visionary aspirations and practical execution.
Simplicity, Transparency, and Clarity for All Goals
In the pursuit of small business success, focus on a straightforward and crystal-clear goals. This principle unifies teams, replacing complexity with understanding. Break down your Business WIG into SIG’s, and TIG’s that are actionable steps, aligning efforts for accelerated progress and decision-making.
Scoreboard for SIGs and TIGs: Fueling Team Enthusiasm
Just as a basketball game thrives on the clock and score, your business benefits from a visible scoreboard for Secondary Important Goals (SIGs) and Team Important Goals (TIGs). This real-time tracker ignites team excitement, highlighting progress like a scoreboard at a game. Watch the enthusiasm grow as each step forward is celebrated, motivating everyone to contribute their best to the win.
Key Takeaways
Singular Focus for Success: Concentrating on one Wildly Important Goal (WIG) at a time directs your energy towards achieving remarkable outcomes.
Lead Goals Lead the Way: Lead goals, future-focused and actionable, drive change and progress, directly impacting lag goals.
Simplify for Success: Keeping goals simple, transparent, and clear empowers alignment and a shared sense of purpose among teams.
Strategic Planning: Break down your WIG into Secondary Important Goals (SIGs) and Team Important Goals (TIGs) that contribute to your overarching success.
Visualize Progress: Employ scoreboards for SIGs and TIGs to motivate teams, celebrating incremental wins on the path to victory.
Long-Term Vision: Set a 1 to 5-year Business WIG and review annually to ensure your business remains on course towards success.
War of Least Battles: Similar to a strategic war, focusing on calculated battles through lead goals and efficient routes accelerates success.
Collective Triumph: Celebrate each victory, no matter how small, as every accomplishment builds the foundation for enduring success.
Summary
In the realm of small business, the path to success mirrors a calculated war strategy that focuses on winning through the path of least battles. Each victory – achieved lead goals, conquered SIPs, and met TIG objectives – adds to the mosaic of breakthrough results. By zeroing in on the shortest route to victory and executing it flawlessly, you establish the foundation for your business’s triumph. These incremental conquests serve as the bedrock of sustained success, ensuring that breakthrough results are consistently met.
Work Cited
This blog was heavly influenced by 4DX. Please take the time to read this book or website to see the full benefits of this process.
- Chris Mcchesney (2012). 4DX: The 4 disciplines. Achieving your wildly important goals.