Читать книгу Business Plans For Dummies - Paul Tiffany - Страница 70

Who needs goals, anyway? You may be the type who plans a trip by filling the SUV with gas, stopping at the ATM for cash, and flipping a coin as you head out of town and reach the first intersection. Ah, life, adventure, the thrill of the unknown! Why waste time trying to decipher a map when you’re just out for the ride? Maybe your approach is fine for a quick getaway break, but for a company, failing to set business goals can lead to more serious consequences — real serious.

If your business opportunities are so obvious and so overwhelming that you don’t need to define a particular course of action to reach your ultimate destination, you’ve won the business planner’s lottery. Be like the first-in folks with Bitcoin: just get out there and scoop the loot as fast as you can. Such opportunities are relatively rare, however. You’re more likely to run into one hazardous crossroad after another in your quest for gold, and a lack of careful planning can be dangerous indeed. Note the following examples:

 Planning blunders have been partly blamed for fiascoes involving certain infamous product introductions, including the Ford Edsel in the 1950s, New Coke in the 1980s, and the Apple Newton PDA in the ’90s.

 Motorola ultimately lost more than $5 billion on Iridium, its ill-planned low Earth orbit mobile telephone satellite system. By 2000 the venture was bankrupt.

 In 2004 Google launched Orkut and in 2011 it introduced Google +. These online services were designed to give this innovative firm entry into the highly lucrative social media platform market. But by 2014 Orkut was gone, and in 2019 Google + was pulled, unable to compete against established incumbents like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Even the biggest can fail when they don’t do the heavy lifting required in business planning. Moreover, just because a company is successful in one sandbox doesn’t give it a free pass to play in another. Clearly defined goals and objectives can keep you from deviating down those deceptive rabbit holes, no matter how intriguing they may appear at first glance. Watch where you stray as you might stumble instead. Ouch!

Setting business goals and objectives provides an important insurance policy for your business: the opportunity to plan a successful course of action and then keep track of your progress. One way to focus your thinking when it comes to goal definition is to use the “SMART” approach. That is, your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This is a nifty little guideline to keep you from running off the track with goal statements that are too broad or so over the top that no one believes in them. Good goal-setting is not simply box-checking by the business planner. It’s providing direction for your future.