2021 Goal Setting: 7 Questions You Can Ask to Accurately Forecast the Year Ahead

Each year, planning annual goals comes like clockwork. Like many businesses, my team and I  reflect on what went well the year prior, which goals we achieved and followed through on, which milestones we missed and why, and then look for ways to improve in the year to come.

This year, however, is a bit different. After a year like 2020, how do you begin planning for the future?

As a founder, one of my biggest takeaways from the past nine months has been that you should be prepared for anything–even a global pandemic. Here are a handful of questions I have been asking myself lately that may help you when trying to forecast the year ahead.

Strategy planning for a company, especially one with many employees across different locations, is a bit of a marathon.

In the past, these sessions of ours have been in-person. But this year, things have been a bit different.

My company and I tried doing a blend this year of having some people come into the office and others tuning in remotely, and it wasn’t quite as effective as I would have liked. My suggestion would be, if you’re considering doing any strategic planning, commit to being 100 percent remote or 100 percent in-person. 

Having too many cooks in the kitchen can be an issue.

After my company held our executive strategy meeting, we ended up doing smaller groups of meetings to keep different initiatives moving in a more focused way. For example, last year when we met in person, all the executives spent a whole day together. This year, we broke people into smaller groups more quickly, because, especially remotely, it didn’t make sense to have everyone in every meeting.

This ended up being much more productive. 

The smaller the list, the better. If a company has too many goals, it isn’t going to make meaningful progress toward any of them. Instead, it’s in your best interest to come up with three to five key areas you want to improve, and, if anything, refine down from there. 

This is a top-down approach to goal setting.

Once you’ve established your priorities, it’s important to then put people as owners responsible for making meaningful progress. For example, one of my company’s key areas of growth in 2021 is extending brand reach and engagement. The person we put in charge of that key area is our head of marketing. This individual then has a handful of key performance indicators (KPIs) that inform whether things are trending in the right direction–which can be communicated both up to the executive level and down to the team level as the year goes on.

The next question to ask is how you’re going to objectively measure progress. How is the person you’ve put in charge of that key area going to know when they’re successful?

One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make when it comes to strategic planning is they don’t spend enough time to identify how they will measure success. “Doing something better” isn’t enough. That’s vague. 

In my opinion, KPIs should be easily accessible data points that are looked at every single day.

The idea of creating new categories is extremely important in this moment in time when purchasing behaviors are changing.

When doing strategic planning for your business, don’t just think about the year ahead but how the progress you make in the coming year can and should further you in your vision for the next decade.

One of the biggest breakdowns I see in companies is when individual team members have goals that aren’t exactly aligned with the goals of the entire organization. It’s important that those in leadership positions invest the time to look at each individual’s goals and KPIs and ensure they are laddering up.