Goals That Are Not Numbers

The pressure to quantify

Business advice insists that a goal must be measurable, which is sound where something is genuinely being measured.

Applied to a small business, it frequently produces a number chosen because a number was required: twenty percent growth, fifty new customers, a hundred reviews.

Nobody believes those figures, they were not derived from anything, and by March they are ignored.

Meanwhile the things the owner actually wants for the year, and could describe in a sentence, never get written down because they do not fit the format.

What people actually want

• To stop doing a particular kind of work.
• To take a proper holiday without the phone.
• To be less dependent on one customer or supplier.
• To stop quoting for work that never converts.
• To have somebody else able to do a thing.
• To finish the year less tired than this one.

Every one of those is a legitimate business objective, several have real financial consequences, and none is naturally a number.

Describe the evidence instead

The technique that keeps a goal accountable without inventing a figure.

Write the change in plain terms, then write what you would observe if it had happened.

Less dependent on one customer becomes: no single customer is more than a third of revenue by December, which is a number that came from the goal rather than the goal being a number.

A proper holiday becomes: two weeks in August where the phone was covered and nobody called me.

Somebody else can do it becomes: three procedures written and somebody has completed each unaided.

Those are checkable in December without pretending to a precision nobody has.

Some goals are just decisions

A category worth separating, because it does not need tracking at all.

Stopping a service, raising prices, ending a supplier relationship, or declining a category of work are decisions rather than objectives.

They are achieved by doing them once, on a date, and the useful form is a date rather than a target.

Raise prices in February. End the arrangement by March. Stop offering that service from the first of April.

Treating a decision as a goal to work toward is how it stays unmade for another year, since there is always more preparation available.

A worked example

A business wrote four goals for the year, all numeric, all invented: revenue up by a fifth, thirty new customers, fifty reviews, and a certain number of enquiries a month.

By March nobody could remember them, and none was being tracked.

The following December they wrote four different things: stop taking the smallest category of work, raise prices in February, have somebody covering the phone by summer, and reduce the largest customer below a third of revenue.

Two were decisions with dates and two had observable evidence attached.

All four were achieved, and the owner noted that revenue grew more than the invented target from the previous year, largely as a consequence of the first two.

His remark was that the numeric goals had described an outcome and the plain ones had described actions.

Where numbers genuinely help

Worth being even-handed, because this is not an argument against measurement.

Anything you are already counting reliably deserves a number: enquiries, orders, cost per enquiry, review count, or average order value.

Those are useful because the measurement already exists, and a target on top of it costs nothing.

The problem is inventing a metric in order to have one, which produces effort spent on measurement rather than on the thing.

The test is whether you were counting it before the goal existed. If you were, set a number. If you were not, describe the evidence instead.

What a number can do to behaviour

The reason this matters beyond tidiness.

A target changes what people do, including in ways nobody intended.

A goal of fifty new customers encourages taking work you would decline. A target for enquiry volume encourages advertising that produces the wrong enquiries. A review target encourages asking in ways that are uncomfortable.

Each of those is somebody hitting the number while making the business worse, which is a well-documented pattern and not a failure of character.

Before setting a target, ask what somebody determined to hit it would do, and whether you would want that.

Four is the limit

A practical constraint on the whole exercise.

A list of twelve objectives is a wish list, and by February it will have been replaced by whatever is urgent.

Four is enough to cover a year and few enough to remember without looking, which is the real test of whether a goal is operating.

Write them somewhere you will see them, and put one review in the calendar in June, which is the only checkpoint most small businesses need.

Anything that has not moved by June either needs a mechanism or was never going to happen, and both are useful to know in July rather than December.

The counter-case

Qualitative goals can be an escape from accountability.

Improve our marketing, be more organised, or get better at quoting are not goals, they are moods, and they cannot be assessed at the end of the year.

The discipline of naming observable evidence is what separates a legitimate qualitative goal from a comfortable vagueness, and skipping that step produces the worst of both approaches.

There are also businesses, particularly with staff or investors, where numeric targets are genuinely required and the argument here does not apply.

Describe the change, name what you would observe, and be suspicious of any goal you could not tell whether you had achieved.

Writing them

1. Write what you want in plain sentences.
2. Separate the decisions and give them dates.
3. For the rest, name the evidence you would observe.
4. Use numbers only where you already count.
5. Ask what somebody would do to hit each target.
6. Keep it to four.
7. Put one review in June.

Step two is the one that produces the most, since a decision with a date attached is achieved and a decision described as a goal is deferred.

Counting what actually matters is covered in counting enquiries instead of visits.

Frequently asked questions

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