Do You Really Need Bigger Business Goals?
What if your next business goal doesn’t need to be bigger?
We’re surrounded by messages telling us to think bigger. Five-figure months, million-pound years, 10x growth, bigger teams, bigger clients, bigger everything. The premise is that bigger has to be better. But does it?
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to scale your business, and build something incredible – as long as that’s genuinely what you want, rather than what you think you’re SUPPOSED to want in order to be successful.
It’s worth pausing every so often though to ask yourself where that goal came from. Is it something you really want, or is it something you’ve gradually absorbed because successful business owners seem to be aiming for it?
Take your next juicy goal and think about what achieving it would actually create. Maybe doubling your turnover would give you more profit, allow you to invest in the business or give you the financial freedom you’re looking for. Great.
But it might also mean more people to manage, more responsibility, more complexity and more cash tied up in the business. It will almost certainly mean more risk and more management. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. It just means you need to understand what you’re choosing.
Because sometimes we think we want a bigger business when what we actually want is more profit, more freedom, better clients, more time doing work we enjoy, or a business that doesn’t depend on us for every decision.
And sometimes the answer absolutely IS that you want to build something much bigger.
If you’re not sure what you want next, or you feel like you’ve lost touch with the goals that you started the business to achieve, it can be really useful to give yourself some time to stop and think. Go back to why you started the business in the first place. What did you want to build, create or change? What did you want the business to give you?
Your answers may have changed over time, but it’s worth checking that the business you’re building now still connects with what matters to you. Because it’s very easy to start with, “I want a business that gives me more freedom,” and somewhere along the way end up thinking, “I ought to have a £1m business.”
Because the one thing you really want to avoid is creating a big fat, juicy, impressive, profitable business and then realising you don’t really like or enjoy what you’ve created.
And let me be clear here – I’m not suggesting that bigger is bad and smaller is good. But I do think we should stop assuming that bigger is automatically better.
Don’t outsource the definition of your own success.
This is what I’ve explored in this week’s business tips video – the first video in my new Bigger Versus Better? Series.
This week I’m looking at where our business goals come from and how to decide what we actually want our businesses to become.
Watch the video to explore the question: Do you really need bigger business goals?
