Setting SMART Goals for Business Growth in 2025

Strategy is the basis for business success. A lack of strategy results in a poorly defined business plan (or simply no business plan at all), which results in a lack of direction and a lack of understanding of what you’re doing or why. With a strategy in place, you can set goals for your business. The goal is to grow, but just wanting to grow is not enough—your goals have to be specific and rigorous enough to actually create an actionable plan around.
“The Monkey’s Paw,” W. W. Jacobs’s classic 1902 horror story, explains what happens when you don’t think through what you want and how you’re going to get it. In the story, the protagonist comes into possession of a monkey’s paw that will grant him three wishes. He wishes for £200 to pay off his mortgage (housing was slightly more affordable a hundred years ago). The paw giveth, and the paw taketh away: days later, he is informed that his son has died in a horrific accident at work, and the company grants him £200 in bereavement pay. The man’s wife then wishes for his son to come back to life, and that night, they are roused by the sounds of their zombified son banging on the door. The man uses his final wish to make the knocking stop. It stops, and when he finally answers the door, no one is there.
Today, “monkey’s paw curse” has become shorthand for the dangers of clumsily or imprecisely worded wishes, a version of the old saying, “be careful what you wish for; you might just get it.” The same can be said of business goals. Set the wrong goals, get the wrong results. Set goals that aren’t measurable and you won’t even know if you achieved them. Set goals without giving yourself a time frame and you’ll still be working toward your 2025 goals in 2030.
If you’re setting goals but not seeing results, you may have wished on the monkey’s paw with an imprecise or fuzzily worded goal. Avoid the trap of fuzzy goals by making sure all of your goals are SMART goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-Bound
Let’s take a look at what each of those terms means and how they can help you make better business plans.
Specific
“The Monkey’s Paw” shows us the importance of specificity in goal-setting. The protagonist just wanted an extra £200. He didn’t say specifically how he wanted that money to come to him, so he ended up getting it in the worst way possible. A lack of specificity is also why so many New Year’s resolutions fail. “I want to lose weight” is a wish that is destined to go ungranted, but “I want to lose 20 pounds by the end of the year by consulting with a doctor to figure out the best way to achieve that goal, and I will put these measures in place (whatever they may be) to hold myself accountable” is specific enough to act upon.
Measurable
You’ve set a goal, but how do you know if you’re on your way to achieving it? What does getting from here to there look like? To answer this question, you’ll need to make sure your goals are measurable. “Our company will grow this year” is not a measurable goal, but “We will increase revenue by 10%” is. Remember that metrics can be qualitative as well as quantitative. “Increased customer satisfaction”, for instance, is hard to measure.
Achievable
You might want to increase revenue by 10% this year, but do you have the resources, capacity, skills, and personnel to make it happen? The goal of these questions is not to limit yourself to goals you can achieve right now. Determining whether or not something is achievable should not be driven by fear: “I don’t know how to do that,” “We don’t have the expertise for that,” etc. It’s not about limiting yourself; it’s about putting a structure in place that allows you to safely, confidently step into the unknown.
Relevant
It’s one thing to set goals that are measurable and achievable, but you must also ask yourself if the way we are measuring success, or even if the goal itself, is relevant. This seems like an obvious point. If you’re running an online-only boutique, you’re not going to aim to increase foot traffic by 25%. But relevance applies as much to the other categories as much as it does to the overall goal. For example, if you want to increase revenue by 10% by the end of the second quarter, is there any reason you chose the second quarter and not the first or the fourth? Is that specific time relevant or arbitrarily chosen? You may have set a measurable goal, but is that metric at all relevant?
To illustrate this point, let’s return to the example of “increased customer satisfaction.” If you decide that receiving 25% more five-star reviews on your website or feedback form is your metric, you might end up taking actions that increase the number of five-star reviews. You might offer discounts or coupons in exchange for one—a practice that, if not illegal, is often unethical and against the terms of service of many platforms. You might ask your employees to remind customers to leave a five-star review, or you might send out email reminders after a customer makes a purchase.
While these actions could certainly increase the number of five-star reviews, such a plan may result in lower customer satisfaction as well as lower employee satisfaction: customers will feel pressured to leave a review they don’t want to leave, and employees will be unhappy pressuring customers into leaving positive reviews.
Time-Bound
If you’re the owner of a microbusiness, you might dream of one day stepping back from running every aspect of the business on your own. That’s the beginning of a goal right there: grow enough so that you can delegate some day-to-day operations to others. You’ll have to decide exactly how much growth is “enough,” how you’ll measure growth, if it’s possible to get to the point where you’re not overwhelmed with responsibility (it certainly is), and if all the individual parts of the goal, and the goal itself, are relevant. But if you don’t introduce a timeframe for completion, you might find yourself slowly rolling that boulder up the mountain for all eternity. If the race doesn’t have a finish line, it will never end.
Making your goals time-bound also means setting periodic benchmarks. If you want to bring in, say, $1,000,000 in revenue this year, you might break that goal into $100k in Q1, $200k in Q2, $350k in Q3, and $450k in Q4, adjusting for seasonal fluctuations and the time it will take to put your new strategy and processes into place.
Avoid the Bad Planning Monkey’s Paw
Starting a business requires a leap of faith: you’re investing your time and money and risking your livelihood and reputation on something that isn’t a guaranteed success. Taking the next step of planning for growth can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. No matter how monumental the task in front of you seems, no matter how shrouded in shadowy what-ifs, you can overcome it by setting goals and strategizing. SMART goals remove the unknowns and unintended consequences that result from fuzzy goals and put you on the path to growth.
Are You Ready to Do Better Growth Management?
StrategyWerx is all about growth strategy and management. That means giving you the tools you need to develop sound strategies, structure your organization to lay the track ahead of the train, and implement the tools you need to grow. Ready to learn more about how we do that? Book a free consult and bring your questions. See if you like working with us on our dime, and get some good advice in the process.