How to achieve your goals as a franchisee

Being able to set, work towards, and achieve your own goals is necessary if you're to succeed as a hard-working, self-motivated franchisee. When it comes to building a successful business, it’s often the case that your own personal targets are just as important as the franchise business plan. If you’re not able to set and achieve personal goals, you can have a comprehensive, foolproof business plan and still struggle to realise the company’s potential. Here, we take a look at ten ways you can achieve your goals and ensure your franchise investment is well rewarded.

Developing a plan as a franchisee

1. Set your goals
To reach your goals, it's first necessary to define them clearly. Unless you have a comprehensive understanding of what you're trying to achieve, it's incredibly difficult to know how to go about accomplishing it. When deciding on your objectives, it's crucial that you're not too vague or idealistic. Your goals should be both achievable and specific enough that you can measure your progress towards them.

2. Make sure your goals are diverse
When planning your goals, it’s a good idea to try and take a balanced approach. Usually, this means splitting your aims into two distinct groupings. The first should be considered ‘financial’ goals. This covers those objectives that are business-orientated or deal with financial matters. They may include things like reaching a specific customer satisfaction rating or increasing your monthly turnover by a particular amount. The second grouping should cover personal goals and reflect issues in your private life. It may include things like spending more time with your family or dedicating one day a week to a hobby.

3. Recognise what your goals represent
While some goals will be relatively straightforward, others won't. These more complex goals may be representative of a more substantial change you're trying to effect. For instance, you may decide to try and speak publicly (e.g. give a lecture or hold a seminar) at least once a month. While you might want to do this because you feel the need to offer more educational opportunities to staff, it may also be caused by a lack of self-confidence in front of large groups of people. If some of your goals do have a hidden subtext, identifying it can help you to make changes.

4. Prioritise
Not all of your goals should be attributed the same importance. Some will be more important and some less. Being able to prioritise is key to feeling satisfied with your personal development. While it can feel good to complete a lot of smaller, less critical tasks, you'll still be disappointed with yourself if your principal targets aren't met. Learn to rank your goals in order of importance and push hard to ensure that those at the top take up more of your time.

5. Make the goal less abstract and more actionable
To ensure you know exactly what you’re aiming for, it’s a good idea to try and turn more abstract goals into actionable goals. For instance, you may intend to spend more time with your family. However, this aim is relatively vague, and it's difficult to know when you've achieved it – how much is ‘more’ time? Rather than using this ambiguous type of goal, try and make it actionable. For instance, aim to pick up your children from school at least twice a week.

6. Measure progress
If you’re pursuing your goals over a longer timespan, it’s helpful to have a way of measuring your progress and judging how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got to go. The way you measure your progress will largely depend on the type of goal you’re striving towards, but some kind of metric can usually be identified – even if you have to get creative.

7. Adapt your goals
It requires a great deal of experience to set your goals so that they're not too easy or too difficult. In reality, most people will set a goal, start working towards it, and then have to reappraise and adapt it. This allows you to push yourself to a sensible degree and will prevent you from feeling disappointed with yourself for not hitting a target that was a step too far. Likewise, it will prevent you from not feeling satisfied when you exceed a target that was too easy.

8. Seek assistance
While your goals will be unique and entirely personal, it’s not necessary for you to go it alone. Everyone needs a helping hand, kind word, or nudge in the right direction, and the right piece of advice, at the right time, can be crucial to success. Don't struggle to meet your targets on your own, ask for help and utilise all the resources you have at your disposal. It’s often the case that the only way you’ll improve is if you learn from someone else.

9. Reward yourself
Once you’ve met your goals and are happy that they posed enough of a challenge, it’s time to reward yourself. Having worked hard to progress in both your personal and professional lives, you need to ensure that you recognise your achievements and appropriately congratulate yourself. While you may think that the satisfaction of having pushed hard to meet your targets is reward enough, there's no harm in treating yourself a little, too.

10. Start again
Finally, once you’ve gone through the whole process, it’s time to start again. This time, you’ll have a bit more experience and understand where you can improve the process and where it's working just right. You never stop learning, and one of the best ways to pick up new skills and expertise is to set targets and work hard to meet them.

Conclusion
If you’re buying a franchise, you'll need to develop a talent for setting targets. Running a franchise requires a great deal of self-motivation and targets are one of the critical ways most people spur themselves on to bigger and better things. If you follow our ten-step programme, it’s highly likely that you’ll soon fall into the rhythm of target setting and quickly experience drastic upswings in your business’ performance.