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When answering the question, "what are the goals of your business," I’ve found it’s best to identify the top 3 goals rather than list everything you can think of. This way, you are forced to list your top objectives, and you can then take action towards those specific goals.

Be honest with yourself when coming up with your top 3 list. Don’t be afraid to think about money, for example, for fear of sounding materialistic. There are some people who just want to get rich and that's all there is to it. For most people, though, the real objectives come from considering what you’d do with all that money, such as travel, donate it, help friends, or buy a boat. So, try to avoid listing 'money' as a goal and instead think what you want the money to bring you.

Here are mine:

1. Flexibility to set my own hours. This one is pretty straight forward. I tend to stay up late and I hate getting up in the morning if I haven't gotten enough sleep. I don’t mind going to the office; I just want to be able to decide when! This is a simple, quality of life goal but it's been a major factor in what my business has become.
   
   
2. The ability to travel a lot, and I mean a lot. I take annual trips to Asia and a juicy vacation each summer, not to mention loads of 3-day weekends and quick trips. Ironically, I probably travelled more when I had a full-time job and was managing development teams all over the Pacific Rim. But, these days I get to travel on my own schedule, to the places that I want to go, when I want to go.
   
   
3. I like security. This is similar to saying that I want money, but not exactly. Rather than wanting money so that I buy things such as houses or cars, I like the idea of knowing that I have enough accumulated wealth to protect me in the case of an emergency, or to help a friend in need. 
   

Hopefully, your list will be comprised of 'quality of life' items that have the ability to truly make you into a happier and more fulfilled person. But, if you have a Ferrari or bucket or gold-plated iPhone on your list that's ok, too. It's your business, after all. Once you have your list, you can make much better decisions about how to invest your time and money into the business.

For example:

• If one of your objectives is 'flexibility' (i.e. the ability to take vacations and set your own hours), you might want to avoid having full-time employees or an office. Consider building a one-person online business, or hire bunch of contractors instead! Think about using a home-office rather than leasing your own space.
  
  
• If you are passionate about work you do (such as designing or programming) but despise paperwork and administration, you might want to structure your business as a freelancer, using your own name as your ‘brand’ instead of creating a new company identity. You can still incorporate and get the benefits of self-employment, but as a freelancer you have a much simpler and streamlined marketing and administrative model.
  
  
• If you enjoy managing people and want to have lots of employees, do your best to learn as much as possible about bookkeeping, taxes, contracts, and human resources so that you can ultimately hire and manage people to do that for you. If you are going to be the boss of a big company, it will be invaluable to understand the roles of the people that you hire. If you spend all your time designing or coding then try to hire others grow the business, you may find that you aren’t quite sure what they are doing let alone how to manage them.  

Another real value of understanding what your business goals are is that it helps you to easily decide what not to do. I was recently offered a very profitable government project, but since the job will require lots of on-site consulting and I’m trying to keep my flexibility, I turned it down in favor of work that I could do from home.

My desire to have a very stable and secure business has also led me to literally avoid all debt whatsoever. If I was devoted to growth, I’d probably have borrowed a few hundred thousand dollars to jump-start the business a few years ago but thankfully I realized early on that I want to keep it small!

Whatever your goals are, be sure that they really reflect what you want in the near and far future. Running a business is tough and if you are just doing it for the money (or if you don’t really know why you’re doing it) you may find yourself burnt out in short order.

It really helps to write down the goals, and revisit them from time to time to make sure that you are still focusing yourself on the right things, and goals haven’t changed. Most importantly, pick the goals that make you happy and make your business work for you as much as you work for it!

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