Milestones are the key to scaling your business forward as it’s the bridge between the day-to-day efforts and your business’s vision.
To put it in perspective, if everyone can accomplish one thing in addition to his or her daily job, that’s dozens of improvements every quarter, or hundreds, depending on the number of employees.
The underlying growth factor of scaling your business is having everyone in your company accomplish one additional thing aligned with the company’s focus every 90 days. In other words, each person has one critical milestone or critical number that aligns with the company’s high-level goals for that quarter. If you have a clear and measurable plan, it will be a lot easier to point your business towards your business’ end vision.
SETTING MILESTONES TO ANCHOR YOUR VISION
Every business is on its path to scaling to the next level, which presents its unique challenges, obstacles, and critical success factors. Some companies may aim to re-establish their business strategy. Some may seek growth potential or perhaps react to a crisis situation or plan a new service or technology that will disrupt the market. Whether your company follows any of the above, the fact of the matter is that creating milestones to how you want to scale your business should be tailored to your business’ unique situation in the market.
Milestones should be clear, include a budget, timeframe and team or person responsible, and outline the critical number quantifying the milestone’s success.
Examples of milestones to scale your business:
- Increase of leads in your marketing pipelines
- Increase of sales closed based on leads generated
- Higher more sales, marketing or administrative staff, to support your annual goals
- Increase your brand awareness through the strategic use of marketing channels
- Increase the retention or lifetime value of your customer or client
- Increase the number of added value services, products or offline/online content
NO PLAN IS EVER COMPLETE WITHOUT A DEADLINE ATTACHED TO IT
The milestone deadline is the date or week the milestone is ready to launch or go live. As mentioned, milestones are high-level objectives that align with your company’s vision. Each milestone should break down into a separate project detailing the sub-tasks, timelines, and people involved in the project.
The milestone canvas focuses only on the high-level milestones, not the day-to-day or week-to-week process to complete the milestone. Milestone deadlines enforce a sense of accountability for those working to accomplish the milestone and keeps them engaged to ensure completion.
A MILESTONE WITHOUT A BUDGET IS LIKE A CAR WITHOUT FUEL
Planning the budget of your milestones is often an overlooked yet important aspect when developing your milestones. The budget for a milestone is the combined costs of all activities executed to achieve the milestone (design, development, research, marketing, upgrades, materials, third-party services). Understanding such costs will aid in your decision-making and provide clarity on prioritizing which milestones are feasible in the near or long term future.
Knowing what your business can financially afford to execute the milestone fully will determine how realistic your objectives are in a given timeframe. You never want to invest the money, time, and energy in a milestone only to find out that you don’t have enough resources to complete it halfway into it.
KNOW YOUR CRITICAL NUMBERS
Your milestone’s critical number is the most important measurable achievement that contributes to the company’s vision. Imagine the many tasks or objectives lined up like dominos. Find the lead domino, that critical domino that reflects the success of all effort. That is your critical number. Simply put, your critical number for each milestone must be instrumental in advancing your company’s high-level vision
Your critical number does not have to be a dollar value; it can be a percentage in increase, quantity of deliverables, or a number of leads or sales directly attributed to completing the milestone.
Avoid creating milestones where the critical numbers are too high. It’s better to break down milestones that aim to achieve smaller or medium-sized numbers (relative to your business) because it’s much easier to focus on and reduces the complexity of having different teams or departments work on one milestone to achieve a massive critical number.
Knowing your critical numbers is essential to scale your business and provide the best chance for success. With transparency and clear communication around each critical number, you will ensure everyone within your organization is aligned and accountable along the way.
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