set long-term goals and constantly be thinking about the future of your business has an inordinate impact on the success and profitability of your enterprise.

All top executives are long-term thinkers.


They project forward five years and they think about where they want to be and what they will have to be doing at that time in order to achieve their long-term goals. They are constantly asking themselves how to set goals and better their strategic planning process to further their business success.

By setting specific goals, you can feel confident that you’re working smarter and making progress on the things that matter most.

Long-term goals help you move forward toward a specific outcome—one that will make a difference in the bottom line of your business. You’ll stay motivated as you achieve each short-term goal on the way to the big one.

Maintain Your Vision
When you first started your business, you likely had a broad, overarching vision or dream. But over time, it’s all easy to get bogged down in day-to-day operations and lose sight of that vision.

Long-term goals help you remember why you started.

They make it easy for you to continue moving the needle toward that ultimate dream or goal—the very reason why you launched your business in the first place. Long-term goals provide a clear action plan you need to make that vision a reality.

Improve And Develop Your Business Operations
Your business operations—everything you do day-to-day to keep your business running—need to be refined over time. The more smoothly your operations run, the better overall your business is going to perform.

Long-term goals are a great way to improve and streamline your business operations and see more money come in.

How To Set Your Long-Term Business Goals
There’s a simple five-part formula for developing a sense of direction that you can use for the rest of your career. It’s called the GOSPA Formula.

The letters in the word GOSPA stand for Goals, Objectives, Strategies, Priorities, and Activities.

to work toward first?

To help you decide, make a list of all your business goals. Physically write them out with a pen and paper.

Next, figure out how important each goal is to you. Consider creating a value system, such as 1-5, and assigning each goal a number based on importance. You can also rank your goals based on urgency. If you’re getting external pressure from someone else about a certain goal, or if that goal needs to be completed within a certain timeline for any reason, it might be more urgent than the others.

From there, you can decide which goals you want to prioritize the most. But this list doesn’t have to be set in stone. It’s okay to come back to your goals–say, once a month–and reevaluate. You can always change your strategy for setting long-term goals in the future.

Activities
The final letter in the GOSPA Formula is A, which stands for activities. These are the specific daily functions that are clearly delegated to individuals with standards of performance and set deadlines.

If you’ve thought out this process completely, each activity will be determined by the current priorities. Each achievement of your priorities will lead to the accomplishment of the strategy.

When your strategy is carried out, you’ll achieve your objectives and at the end of the time period, you’ll reach your goals for a specific level of sales or profitability.

One of the primary qualities of executives in high-profit businesses is that they are continuously going through the strategic planning process. They are always playing down the board. They’re always thinking about the future and about the various different things they can do, and how to set goals in order to make their desired future a reality.

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