Before we go anywhere else, let’s start here: Starting a business is a lot like waking up lost in the woods.

There’s a lot of familiar things around you, but without a plan of attack and a bit of strategy, things can go off the deep-end pretty quickly.

So that should be your primary target, to understand your goals and set a direction.

When it comes to your business, doing the same thing is just as important, so we’re going to talk about some ways to help you set the goals, and direction for your company.

Setting goals and a strategic direction is the same thing as spending the time to determine what direction you’re heading and what time of day it is.

Much like there are survival skills you can learn, there’s skills and methods you can learn as to how to properly set goals for your business, or the questions you should be asking yourself.

The trick is that there are no fool proof methods for success, but there are things you can do to better prepare yourself.

The direction of your business is the most important outcome you want to settle on, without direction you have nothing.

The direction of your business is your foundation; it keeps you from being pushed off course while providing a base to grow from.

You can have a great product, or service and people can be chomping at the bit to use it, but that initial demand will go away quickly without the proper direction.

So the real question that you, as a scrappy entrepreneur, need to ask yourself is both incredibly complex and simple, and it’s this:

Where do you want to go?

LET’S START SETTING GOALS NOW

When it comes down to direction, it’s not just about where you are, but where you want to go.

So you want to build a great company?

Let’s explore a couple of items to help you get a better sense of how to establish your goals.

Always build with direction:

Seems simple right? It’s a lot easier to type the words than it is to put it into practice. Your customers are important, finding out what they want out of your company, or how they use your product or service is important, but if you make it your “be all/end all” you’re going to be in serious trouble and quite quickly.

The second you rely on customers alone to dictate how you build your company you enter into this “be everything to everybody” mentality, a sort of “yes, we can do that” type system.

This can be good in the short term, but it very quickly becomes a “nothing to no one” type of scenario.

Cement your identity:

Without cementing your own identity, without identifying where you want to grow, or what direction you want to grow, you’ll either spend your time barely progressing, or worse, go nowhere at all.

The very first question you have to ask yourself then become, where do you want to go?

What does success look like for you? For your business?

It’s five years from now; your business has become wildly successful, why did that happen? What direction did you grow?

More importantly to all that, what were the factors that caused that, and what helps you qualify that?

Defining an end goal, even if it’s crazy ambitious is just as important as your start goal.

Why does your business exist?

Understanding why your business should exist is arguably the most important thing to know before you start setting goals, but it should always be the second question.

This is the fundamental pieces that we’ve been building towards here, building towards helping you understand why your business exists, and how having that knowledge helps you fool-proof your goal setting.

The reason you ask it second is that it should help challenge or solidify your direction choices. Think of it as a simple building analogy, the question of “where do you want to go?” is your architectural plans, “why does your business exist?” is you looking at those plans and pouring the concrete.

Don’t be scared when your answer changes.

This is the type of question that will continually evolve; your answers may change slightly every quarter or every year. But without this solid foundation of knowing the directions you want to grow and why you’re doing what you’re doing your chances of success plummet.

Is it a fail proof way to set goals for your business? No. There’s no such thing. All businesses fail in some way at some time. What this does is helps you set your base so you can recover from those failures, or minimize their impacts.

No. There’s no such thing. All businesses fail in some way at some time. What this does is helps you set your base so you can recover from those failures, or minimize their impacts.

This gives you a baseline and a foundation for setting your immediate and your future goals. This gives you a hypothesis to invalidate.