Are Your Small Business Goals Too Low?

National “Reach as High as You Can” Day is on April 14, and no, it’s not a day to make you feel guilty about not doing your calisthenics. For small business owners, it’s a day to ask if your small business goals are what is holding you back.

“How can my goals be holding me back?” you ask. When you first started your business, you likely had a very specific goal in mind. You knew what you wanted to be doing in five years, and you wrote your business plan accordingly. If you were aiming to get a loan or investors, you had to be realistic with your goals so you could convince potential backers that you could actually achieve those goals in a reasonable time.

But now that you are set up and well on your way to reaching those goals – You are, right? – ask yourself this question: What if your original goals had been 10 times bigger?

What would you have done to achieve those goals? What additional risks would you have taken? How more focused would you have been on moving your business forward?

The curious thing about goals is that they can turn into shackles that hold us back. If we low-ball our goals, thinking we’re being sensible, we limit ourselves to what we believe is possible. Your business goals are probably too small if:

• You aren’t feeling challenged every day by the work you are doing.
• You are comfortable with your daily routine and don’t regularly consider doing anything extra to be more productive or successful.
• Your unmet goals aren’t scaring you a bit. (If you know beyond any doubt that you will reach your next business goals without breaking a sweat, you have a problem.)

National “Reach as High as You Can” Day is an excellent annual reminder to check your goals and make sure that you are truly challenging yourself to better and more successful tomorrow.

Not only does this make your long-term improvements more exciting, it also makes you more resilient in the short-term, because you realize that you have something huge that you need to achieve ASAP. Next thing you know, you’ll be banishing procrastination for good and working out brand new ways to make your business more efficient so that you can reach even higher.