"The moment you find what you truly enjoy doing, is the moment you should start focusing all your efforts on that particular thing. In the long run it will eventually pay off."

- Steve Jobs business,business,business,business,blog,blog,blog,blog,blog,blog,blog, entrepreneur blog, blog

Business success is so often contingent on the passion, vision and leadership of founders who relentlessly pursue their goals. As last week's blog discussed, motivation is vital for work productivity. Now we face an interesting challenge of the world on shut down due to the corona virus.
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This has affected markets unexpectedly, for instance right now there is a 100 million shortage on condoms as the Guardian reports here. Small businesses struggle to adapt to this new, strange world we live in.

Business owners can benefit from going back to the basics, foundational tactics that help every new entrepreneur starting out define the parameters for goal achievement.

Just like any scientist, advanced in their profession, may always fall back on using the scientific method they learned in undergraduate classes - there are tried and true methods for improving business. Let's talk about goal setting and achievement in this framework - keeping in mind we'll need to pivot how we do business for these troubling times.

SMART & Stretch Goals 2020 Quarantine

As business developer Mike Gingerich mentions, setting SMART goals is key for starting 2020 off on the right foot. Stretch goals are goals that are just beyond your current reach and abilities but are definitely worth pursuing as long as you don’t get burned out taking on too much. Now, for a long time we believed that stretch goals unconditionally fueled performance.
And it turns out that stretch goals can create superior performance. But there's risks associated with setting stretch goals, or challenging goals.business,, business,business,business,business,business,business,business,business,business,business,business,business,business,blog,blog,blog,blog,blog,blog,blog,
Stretch goals or especially aggressive goals, can engender unethical behavior - as people cut corners to make an unrealistic goal on a deadline.

Good people can do unethical acts to meet deadlines.That’s where SMART goals are a great way to balance your time and energy.

SMART Goals Defined

▪ Specific
▪ Measurable
▪ Agreed-upon
▪ Reasonable
▪ Time bound

You have to ensure that folks have the needed skills to reach a goal. If they don't, help to mentor them, or seek  mentorship & support to make sure that not only are these goals reasonable - but the view of these goals in your perception is realistic.

▪ Short timelines lead to dissatisfaction

After setting the deadline and your team starts working towards it, it's important that leadership examples the desired behavior. You want to be a role model. Reward teammates (or yourself) appropriately after accomplishing those goals. Goals are most effective when you secure employee's public commitment to goals. 

Skill Sets Must Match Job Duties

A fireman is a heroic profession and as much as the nation is grateful for their efforts you wouldn't automatically assume they know how to do open-heart surgery or be an astronaut. Yet - many employers place job candidates into roles their innate skill sets aren't matched for. This leads to job dissatisfaction from the employee side and a lack of quality work - leading to employer dissatisfaction. That topic deserves a whole blog post which I'll get to in the next couple weeks. But for our purposes let's apply this to SMART Goals.

Do assessments and make sure that people have the necessary skills to achieve a particular goal. If they don't, you might want to provide necessary mentorship, support and training to make sure that they view these goals as reasonable.

Now once you set that deadline and the team starts working on it, be a role model. The most demotivating thing you can do for your team is you set this tough deadline, and then leave early or take a 5 hour lunch. 


SMART goals framework is very popular among many, many organizations. Take Amazon, for example. Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is personally overseeing over 400 goals, and they’re all in the SMART goal framework.It is absolutely imperative that your SMART goals are aligned with that vision and strategy for your team.

We’re in a time of change right now and small businesses (and large) face new decisions for how you run your operations and customer support and acquisition. Being able to work well with retail shut downs, city shut downs is going to require adapting your business model to this new environment.

I would encourage more collaboration, and networking in order to effectively pivot. This is going to involve going more online with business operations and customer support. Various tools will help you achieve this:

Zoom - for video conferencing, meetings, customer support, Zoom webinar
Slack - to communicate via chat and virtual interface with your team
Chatbots - solves initial customer questions visiting your site & can transfer to human agent chats
Dropbox - cloud based storage of large media and other documents
Social media - more Facebook Lives, more aggressive targeting strategies, scheduled events

Want to improve your pivot-skills? Great I have some homework for you: Use the SMART goal framework and apply it with developing your business adapted to COVID19 quarantine skills. Set a SMART goal in terms of developing your business model shift for these current times. Make sure that it’s consistent with the SMART goal dimensions.

Comment on this blog post, and discuss with your peers your progress, obstacles and wins. There’s a high probability we are all facing similar challenges and if we work together, we can maximize resource access for each other and our businesses.