Now that you’ve gotten to the stage where you’ve brainstormed your SWOT, PEST, Vision, and Mission; we’re ready to create outputs in the form of goals and objectives.  Thinking about your business in big buckets, you may have a revenue component, an operations component, and an administrative component.  

From here, you can then closely examine your SWOT to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in each of these three big buckets.  Now, looking at your PEST, are there external factors that would influence these three buckets – this is the time to add them in.  The goal is to start grouping ideas into these buckets to see where you will need to focus your attention in your business.  

Output Example

For some people, it might be about building on something you’re already great at. Continuing working on a goal you’ve had in mind or creating a brand new set of goals/objectives.  This is where the work you’ve done on your vision will have to align with your goals in each of these buckets.  Lastly, the mission you’ve created will also have to line up with the three big buckets.  Here’s an example of this coming together for a fictional auto service franchise:

For this example, I have only listed one bullet point for each PEST and SWOT quadrant, as space was limited.  However, when you do this exercise, you will have multiple bullets for each quadrant.  

Focused Goal Setting

Seeing what our Vision and Mission are for the business. We can create Goals that are fundamentally based on making us a community leader. This will be done by providing our first-in-class services with honesty and integrity by only selling what the customer needs.  

1. A Revenue goal is to grow 2023 sales by 5% by implementing a new digital multi-point inspection report.

2. An Operations goal is to build an EV program focused on getting these vehicles in for tire rotations every six months.

3. An Admin goal could be, improving our hiring practices by working on posting co-op placements at local high schools. 

These three big buckets and the corresponding goals take into account the work done in the PEST, SWOT, Vision, and Mission stages. To then provide goals specific to what the business wants to achieve.  The next step is to take these big goals and break them down into tactical objectives.  

As you can see, creating a strategy is about getting all your ideas pulled together to output clear goals.  Now that we’re able to develop goals, we can move on to how to turn them into tactics.  There are many ways to get to this point. I’m providing what is the simplest path based on my experience.