I recently heard an interesting anecdote about Ray Kroc, the milkshake mixer salesman who turned McDonalds from a single fast food restaurant into the humungous multinational corporation everyone either loves or hates.
Kroc was giving a talk to a group of business school students and he asks them what they thought McDonalds’ main goal was. Obvious answer: selling burger meals. ‘Wrong,’ says Mr. Big Mac to the surprise of his audience, ‘I’m in the real estate business and my goal is to own prime real estate on high streets around the world. Selling burgers is just a way of paying all those mortgages.’
Now I know that McDonalds is primarily a franchise business and actually runs - let alone owns - only a small fraction of their restaurants. But whether this anecdote is true or not has no bearing on the lesson to be learned about the importance of knowing what you want to achieve from your business. What’s more, your goals may not always be what you think they are!
Determine your business goals
If you are starting up a new company, you absolutely need to sit down and think hard about what you want to achieve with your venture. Put pen to paper and list your objectives and then break your objectives down into the sub-goals that you will need to work towards to achieve the main objectives. Once you do this, it is also a good idea to revisit your objective list from time to time and see what you would change.
If you’ve already been in business for some time, do this exercise now and compare your actual objectives with what you are doing to see if you are still on track. Maybe you have drifted off course or your original goals have changed. You could very well be surprised at the results!
Know out what you want from your company’s website
The same thing about goals and objectives applies to your website - what do you want your website to achieve?
Will you be selling your products directly online, or is your purpose to develop a strong relationship with your prospective clients and build their trust so you can sell to them at a later date (a good example of this kind of business is real estate). Is your aim to get your visitors to shell out $9.99 once for an e-book, piece of software or other product, or is getting them to subscribe to your blog or become active on your web forum more important to your long term goals of developing a strong client base?
Only once you know what basic goals you want your website to achieve, can you actually have your website designed to attain them.
So, whatever your goals really are - or should be - you’ll never know until you take a break from the rush of setting up or running your business and stop to ponder where you stand and where you want to be. Once you’ve done that, you, your employees, your website designers and everyone who is part of your team will be much better able to work together to turn those goals on your list into reality.
