goal setting 101
by sandi tomlin-sutker

Last month I talked about the importance of good planning. Most of us wouldn't go on even a short vacation without having a hotel reservation and at least an overall sense of what we wanted to do when we got to our destination. Maybe our main goal is to sit by the pool, sip iced tea and empty our minds of every worry we've ever had. Or it may be that we want to hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to New England!

Whichever direction we choose, we can't proceed without setting some goals. It's equally important in planning or expanding our businesses. We need to know our final destination...and we need to know what stops we want to make along the way.

When WNCWOMAN answered this question for the Oxygen network we planned to start at 24 pages and 5000 copies for distribution. That was one short-term goal; we expected that we would reach 36 pages and 12,000 copies within the first year. We talked about how often we planned to publish (monthly by next Spring) and how many employees, doing what tasks, we planned to have within that same first year. Then we set some two-to-five year goals: how many pages we thought we'd add each year; how and when we'd increase circulation; and when we planned to publish more frequently (say, bi-weekly).

Since the website is such an integral part of this publication, we set some separate goals for that. Most importantly, we needed to decide what the role of the website would be and how it would interface with and enhance the print publication.

In all this goal setting there are several important points to remember: keep your overall goals in mind - always - and determine the effect of any short-term goals you set. To make this task easier, create a Mission Statement. This is your map, your touchstone. Every time you think of a direction, a product, a customer you'd like to gain, the Mission Statement helps you come back to your vison and your values and decide how any action will effect your overall direction.

So, your goal is obviously to make some money - maybe a LOT of money. Think of goal-setting as the Map, with all the roads, side-trips, fun, good food and companions marked out along the way. And don't forget there may be detours, roadblocks, bad weather and many surprises (for us, as an example, we had to start publication with 32 pages because we had so much good material...and we now know that we will have to add pages much more quickly than we'd planned). But if you have set clear and meaningful goals it's so much easier to find and keep your way.

NEXT ISSUE: Risks and Challenges.