Setting Business Aims And Objectives

Ask two shop owners on the same street what they are trying to do and you can get answers that sound identical and mean completely different things. One says she wants the business to do well. The other says she wants to be selling from three shops by the end of next year, each taking at least 40,000 a month. Only the second of those two women can tell, on any given morning, whether she is winning.

That is the whole of this topic. In this lesson you will separate an aim from an objective and learn the objectives the specification actually names, from survival to shareholder value. You will see why the objectives a business sets depend on its size, its competition and what kind of organisation it is, and why they change as it grows. You will look at what the public sector is trying to achieve instead of profit, at the many ways success can be measured when profit is not the point, at why governments spend public money encouraging people to start businesses at all, and finally at the reasons so many new businesses do not survive their first few years.