As a business owner, your company goals may get a lot of attention—but what about your personal goals? Let’s take a deep dive into developing a personal and business vision plan and how to align personal goals with organizational goals.
Do Your Personal and Professional Objectives Align?
Owning a small to mid-sized business often means staying past 5 P.M. to get everything done or sacrifice personal goals to make your company successful. If this sounds like you, ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing now getting me closer to the personal and business life I want?” If the answer is no, you can adjust your course of action, so your personal objectives align with your professional goals by developing a personal vision plan.
How To Develop a Personal Vision Plan
The first step to ensure your business goals support your personal ones is to develop a personal vision plan—think five, 10, and even 30 years from now. What kind of life do you want? Think about your friends and family, your health, or where you would like to live. You should also consider your future finances, such as investments, donations, bucket list vacations, weddings, and college tuition. To turn your answers into a personal vision plan, write down your financial and lifestyle goals at each time frame. Another way to develop your personal vision in detail is to break it down into three parts:
Who Do You Want To Be?
Maybe you want to be a college professor, a published author, or mentor for other small business owners by the time you’re 60. Considering who you want to be now can help get you there in the future.
What Do You Want To Do?
Will you travel with your partner, do charity work, take care of your grandchildren, or run multiple businesses? Envisioning who you want to be impacts what you’ll be doing and what you’ll have to show for it.
What Do You Want To Have?
Is there a certain amount of money you’d like to have in the bank by the time you retire? Do you want to earn your master’s degree by the time you’re 40? Is it a personal goal to own your dream car in the next five years? Imagine the tangible things in your future life.
Discuss your ideas with your family and list the personal goals you’d like to achieve in five or 10-year increments. Then, you should have a clearly defined, documented personal vision plan.
How To Develop a Business Vision Plan
The next step to ensure your business goals support your personal objectives is to look at your company in the same time frame and determine where the company needs to be in order to achieve your personal goals.
Your personal vision, for example, dictates what size and type of business you want to build or the type of customers you want to attract. If you’re going to help your grandkids with their college tuition, how much cash will the business need to produce? If you want to travel by 55, it’s crucial to build a strong leadership team to run things when you’re gone. By developing your personal goals first, you can use them for mapping out the plan for your business’s future and align them.
Whether your goal is to achieve the same success as a well-respected leader in business or make a comfortable living to support your family, business coaching can help you get there.
Steps for Aligning Your Personal and Professional Objectives
Now that you have your personal and professional objectives mapped out, create a plan to align your personal goals with your organizational goals.
Here are the steps to align your business vision plan with your personal vision plan:
Create a Culture Statement
First, write a culture statement that describes your:
- Purpose
- Values
- Beliefs
You should be able to describe your company culture in a few sentences, one page at most.
Determine Your Purpose
Write down your purpose or the why behind what you do. Think about the passion behind why you do what you do to find your why.
Identify Your Values
Next, identify your values. Integrity, respect, and passion are values that can help you drive your business. Aim to list about five to seven values or value statements.
Identify Your Beliefs
Then, state your beliefs, sometimes referred to as your worldview. For example, the national pet food company Purina’s belief statement is, “For over 90 years, we’ve been guided by the belief that pets and people are better together.”
Develop Your Goals, Strategies, and Actions
After completing your culture statement, create your goals, strategies, and actions. These will establish a line of sight between where you are and where you want to be.
Set Your Goals
First, it’s time for goal setting. Start with long-term goals, or goals you want to achieve in 10 years or more. Next, consider your mid-term or five-year goals. For example, maybe you want to become a $50 million company in 10 years or double your workforce in five. After that, develop annual, quarterly, and monthly goals.
List Your Strategies
Then, start listing the strategies you plan to use to achieve your goals. To be a $50 million company in 10 years, one strategy could be to hire an experienced sales manager. Go down your list of goals and ensure you have strategies to accomplish each.
List Your Quarterly Actions
The final step to align your personal goals with your organizational goals is to list the actions necessary for someone in your organization to take to accomplish each quarterly goal. To improve accountability, include who will complete each action and by when.
Helping You Align Personals Goals With Organizational Goals
At Inspire Results Business Coaching, our team uses proven methods to help you align your personal goals with your organizational goals. We’ve developed a Single Sheet Business Plan and a Quarterly Action Plan to help you create and track your goals, culture, strategies, and actions and keep track of them. Contact us today to partner with a business coach who knows how to align your personal goals with your organizational goals.
