Setting goals is a great start to ensuring your service business’ success. Unfortunately, simply identifying what you’d like to achieve isn’t enough to make those things happen. If you want to reach your goals, you’ll need to put in some serious effort.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools out there that can help you achieve your business objectives. Many of these tools are essentially smart business goal templates that walk you through the process.
If you’re struggling to stay on track or your results are constantly falling short of your expectations, using one or more of these tools can help you create a better plan of attack and stick to it.
In this post, we’ll take a look at three handy tools you can use to achieve your business goals more easily!
1. Create a Digital To-Do List with ToDoist
To-do lists are perfect for anyone looking to get a variety of tasks done. When you create a to-do list, you’re able to see everything you’d like to achieve at once. Plus, you’ll be constantly always aware of what you still need to do. However, business owners looking to achieve their goals will need to do more than simply jot down all their tasks in one place.
That’s why digital to-do lists are great for business owners. They usually enable you to map out everything you’d like to get done, assign due dates, and even collaborate with other team members. If you can allocate tasks to different members of your team and track whether or not they’ve been completed, you can ensure that everyone is doing their part. When all team members are on the same page, your business goals will be more easily achieved.
If you’re interested in creating a digital to-do list, ToDoist is an excellent tool:
Within this app, you can create tasks and subtasks, assign due dates, and even give priority to certain jobs. Your team can upload links to important resources, leave comments for each other, and delegate certain tasks or subtasks to other members. Plus, you can sync ToDoist with other apps and programs to help streamline your workflow. These options include Dropbox, Google Drive, and Slack.
When using ToDoist to work on your business goals, you’ll want to approach the app more like a project management tool than a traditional to-do list. While it’s a great place to jot down tasks you don’t want to forget, it can also act as a daily project task sheet. You can use ToDoist to keep track of everything you need to complete. Then, you can organize and delegate those tasks into an efficient strategy.
2. Develop New Habits with Coach.me
Developing new supporting habits is a great way to work towards your business goals. When something is a habit, you become used to doing it each and every day (or week, or month). For small tasks that are crucial, but are likely to be forgotten or pushed to the end of your to-do list when you get busy, turning them into habits can help you achieve your business goals faster.
On average, it takes about two months of doing the same thing every day for it to become a habit. Turning simple yet important tasks into habits, such as responding to emails, updating your blog, or making a certain amount of cold calls each day, can help you get progressively closer to crossing another goal off your list.
Coach.me offers a free habit tracking app that allows you to monitor the progress you’re making on your goals:
It’s likely that there are certain tasks or behaviors you’d like to do every day, such as reaching out to a particular number of new leads. You can use this app to track the number of times you’ve completed these tasks successfully. If you’re looking for additional assistance turning a behavior into a business habit, you can also sign up for various types of coaching services.
To use habit building to help reach your business goals, consider the long-term achievements you’d like to reach. Then decide what tasks you’ll have to do that will bring you a little closer to that goal every day. Use the Coach.me app to remind you to complete those daily activities, until they become habits you don’t even need to think about. Once your desired behaviors become second nature, you can move on to a new set of goals.
3. Use Aha! to Create a Roadmap to Achieving Your Goals
This tool is what a business goal templates would look like if they provided guidance, visibility, and better tracking.
Many service business owners already know what they’d like to achieve. They’re capable of looking far off into the future and explaining how successful they’d like to be, what kinds of companies they want to own, or how much money they’d like to be making. Unfortunately, they have a more difficult time creating an actionable pathway to those achievements. Instead, they sit back and hope that their dreams will fall into their laps.
In order to avoid this trap and reach your long-term goals, you need to have some idea of what’s required to turn your ambitions into reality. Having a clear roadmap to your business goals lets you see the small steps you need to take along the way. Plus, breaking down each goal into more manageable pieces can prevent you from becoming overwhelmed or even giving up on reaching your long-term dreams.
To create a roadmap for your business goals, you can use the Aha! software:
Aha! is a program designed specifically to help companies get closer to achieving their long-term business goals. It helps users create an overall plan that will provide them with a bird’s eye view of their processes and what needs to get finished (and when). Aha! also offers roadmap tools for marketing, products, technology, consulting, and manufacturing. This means it can help you through some of the most important tasks your growing company has to tackle.
Whether you’re looking to expand your business or just trying to get off your feet, Aha! can help you create schedules, timelines, and due dates to streamline your project management process. By breaking down your long-term goals into smaller tasks, you and your team can stay on the right track and ensure you’re not falling behind. You can even integrate your Aha! account with other important monitoring and tracking apps, such as Salesforce, RedMine, Dropbox, and Trello, so you and your team can easily complete tasks and stay on schedule.
4. Keep Track of Your Progress and Align Goals with ClickUp
While the other apps in this list help create tasks and reminders for you to achieve your goals, you also need to monitor your progress from a high level. ClickUp, a project management software, whose goal is to be the “one app to replace them all” has built many unique features for businesses large and small.
In terms of achieving your goals, what makes it stand out is the way you can track progress and have transparency across the entire department or team. It’s an app that not only aligns your own personal goals, it also helps connect your entire company.
First up, you can create company-wide or personal objectives using the Goals feature. After you create a goal, you can associate specific tasks or create custom benchmarks that get automatically updated as you complete your day-to-day tasks. As everyone in your company starts working on their tasks, their progress bars slowly fill up. This way, you can encourage a little friendly competition!
Executives and managers will find the Dashboard feature very useful. With ClickUp’s Dashboards, you can merge important project indicators into one place. Create custom graphs, see your resource allocation, visualize bottlenecks, and even monitor who on the team is slacking. ClickUp has created a myriad of widgets that can be embedded in the Dashboard, and it also allows you to embed third party code.
Ever get through a busy day and wonder what you worked on? Or maybe working remotely has everyone disconnected, and you want to make sure urgent tasks that help you reach your goals. You can use ClickUp’s Pulse to view automatic activity reports powered by machine learning to easily see where your time is being spent. Now you can see activity across the entire company such as which users were online and which tasks were being worked on.
Conclusion
Setting your goals is often the easy part of planning your business’ future. The challenge comes when you try to make those goals a reality. Luckily, with the right tools, proper planning, and a strong work ethic, you can get closer to fulfilling your business ambitions every day.
Let’s revisit the three tools we’ve introduced, each of which can help you more easily reach your goals:
- Use ToDoist to create a digital to-do list and coordinate with your team.
- Try Coach.me to develop strong habits and track your progress.
- Create both small and large goals with Aha!, and schedule each step of the way.
- Get a high level overview of your own and your team’s goal progress with ClickUp.
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