What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

By | September 23, 2025

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals – Not only will you grow your business enough to justify hiring someone (or multiple people), but you’ll also determine your future business growth with new team members.

However, no matter how experienced you are as a manager or leader, you quickly realize that without the right small business goals, your employees can be just employees, not team members.

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

You want them to be as inspired and motivated as you are, and to do that, you need to really work on your vision and goals.

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Most small business owners, when working alone, tend to keep their goals in mind, not really thinking they need to write them down.

However, now that there are additional people on the team, it is really important not only to list these small business goals, but also to make sure that they will be able to inspire your team and put your company on the right track.

So today we’re going to look at how you can set small business goals to inspire and motivate your team.

One of the most important things to realize is that you really have two types of goals: long-term goals and short-term goals.

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Your long-term goals should be set for 3-5 years and should clearly define your company’s mission. Here you need to find a way to express the main reason why you started the company.

What is the main purpose of the company? What problem are you trying to solve and who are you solving it for?

It may seem scary and mysterious at first, but once you start thinking about it, it becomes concrete.

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

When you think of your goals in these terms, they become a natural summary of your business rather than a lofty, vague idea that won’t inspire anyone in particular.

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Profit goals are any goals or set of goals that aim to increase profits by a certain percentage for a certain period of time.

The service goals are to improve customer satisfaction with customer service as well as significantly improve customer retention.

Goals may include acquiring new customers faster, making sales, solving customer issues, and increasing the efficiency of service calls.

Social goals include philanthropic initiatives to continually give back to the community. This includes donations or volunteer work.

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The idea of ​​corporate social responsibility is related to social goals because the business will focus part or a large part of its attention on helping others.

Development goals focus on the consistent development of the company. This can be achieved by hiring new employees, opening branches in different locations and many other ways.

Setting growth goals, like any other goal, will require you to know your current financial and overall business situation in order to create and achieve specific goals.

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

In fact, there are more than two types of goals. Mid-term goals can be thrown in there, as well as the legendary BHAG – a big, hairy, audacious goal that’s almost: win or go home.

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In the book, they take a closer look at which types of goals produce the best results. When companies are willing to risk it all on their BHAGs, they succeed.

An example is the Boeing Corporation, which in the 1950s poured all its resources into becoming the dominant player in the commercial aircraft market. In fact, Boeing is currently working on its current BHAG, which is expected to impact the aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) market.

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This means that it is no longer enough to have modest or vague goals. Your goals should be repeated to everyone in your company in a sentence or two. Anything more than that is likely to be vague, confusing, or insufficiently inspiring.

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Westinghouse’s targets are full of vague and essentially meaningless slogans. It’s not a sentence, it’s not memorable, and it’s certainly not inspiring.

An important thing to remember with these BHAGs or similar long-term goals is that you must always be focused but flexible enough to change in the market.

For example, whatever the goals of housing and construction companies were in 2007, by 2008 they had changed dramatically due to the Great Recession.

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

You and your employees must be committed enough to focus on your long-term goals and commit with all your might, but smart enough to realize when it’s time to step back or switch teams to discuss changes to long-term goals.

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The most important thing to realize about short-term goals is that they take into account the BHAG or long-term goals of the small business and make them manageable.

For example, if your BHAG is to lose 50 pounds by the end of the year, you’ll need to break it down into monthly goals or even weekly or daily goals.

This may include going to the gym on certain days, eating a certain number of calories, eating only certain types of food, investing in sports equipment, etc.

If your BHAG is to lose weight, you need to break it down into small goals like going to the gym, eating a certain amount of calories, etc.

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To answer this, let’s turn to the famous SMART goal system, often associated with Peter Drucker.

Your goals should not be vague as explained above, be it long term or short term. You should always have a certain figure in mind.

In our weight loss example, the goal is not just to “lose weight”, but to actually lose a very specific 50 pounds (BHAG) or 4 pounds a month.

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

You must measure your progress. If you can’t measure it, how do you know how well you’re doing? If you just want to be a “better leader” (objective unclear), how do you measure that?

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In our example, we can measure this by weighing ourselves. If you lose 50 pounds in a year, that’s about 4 pounds a month, which is 1 a week. You can weigh yourself once a week to see how well you are doing.

You need to make sure that your goals are not only specific and measurable, but also achievable or realistic. If you’re thinking of hiring your first employee and your company is only two months old, setting a BHAG of $50 million in sales per year may be unrealistic, giving you a short-term goal of $4 million per month.

In our weight loss example, one thing to achieve is losing one pound a week. It’s hard to lose three, and you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

An important aspect is that your purpose should be relevant – in other words, directly related to your core business. For example, Boeing’s past and present BHAGs are very specific and related to their core business.

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However, if my BHAG is to lose 50 pounds and my short-term goal is to start a food blog, it will not be relevant to my primary goal. In the real world, many small businesses aim to increase their blog visitors, but instead they should be focusing on getting better leads and higher conversions.

You also need your goals to have a time frame. This will give you the necessary pressure to create tactical steps to achieve your main goal through short-term, time-bound goals.

For example, if you’re setting measurable goals, you’re probably also setting time-bound goals. In my example, £50 a year, £4 a month or £1 a week is solid and timely.

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals

Without this time factor, you are essentially forever focused on your short-term goal and therefore your BHAG, making it pointless.

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One of the best ways to engage employees and inspire them to your goals is to ask them to help you set some goals.

This may not apply to BHAG goal setting as employees will still need their boss to be the deciding factor. This means that when it comes to the direction of the company, you must define your main goals alone or with other partners.

Nor should new employees be expected to make deep contributions, as they may still be entering the business and lack specific knowledge.

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However, this doesn’t mean you have to go it alone when setting smaller goals.

You should receive ongoing feedback from your employees or management on key issues that affect them (especially since you may be a bit distant from these tasks now that you’re not doing everything).

When you ask employees to contribute, you’re asking for their knowledge based on their experience. This is especially useful for setting more specific and better short-term goals

What Are The Four Types Of Business Goals