Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition

Crafting Measurable Goals

Goals are those milestones you reach on your journey toward your vision. They help you know you're making progress and enable you to course-correct if things aren't turning out as you planned.

NASA knew how many miles it was to the moon and how fast the Apollo spacecraft could reasonably travel. Similarly, you should identify a goal and how long it should take your business to achieve it.

Unique from a longer-term vision, goals should be focused on shorter-term outcomes that you can easily quantify. Tie content and other people, two core elements of the elevation principle, into your goals.

Your goals should be:

Specific: Be as precise as you can with your goals. Rather than saying, “We want more customers,” document what kind of customers you are seeking. Try to address the who, what, where, and when questions with your goals. For example: “Before the end of the year, we want to build strategic relationships with at least two experts who have written New York Times bestselling books.”

Measurable: If you can't measure your goals, you'll never know if you've reached them. Numbers and dates are the keys to measurement. Make sure your goals have one (or both) of these to be measurable. For example: “In the next 12 months, our business will publish six pieces of original content in third-party publications with at least 15,000 subscribers.” With this goal you can easily measure progress.

Attainable: While you should push your business further with your goals, ...