As we edge closer to 2025, we’ve been thinking about how our clients, purpose-driven brands, set goals that are about more than numbers and p&l sheets. Driving meaningful change, being part of a movement, creating an impact – these missions take a different approach. Thoughtful goals that align with your values, and sparking growth for your business and your people, as well as supporting your mission. So we set out to share our take on how you can set achievable goals that balance these ambitions and drive sustainable success. 

This week’s article explores actionable insights on the art and science of goal setting, offering practical strategies and approaches to setting meaningful goals that have depth and align with your brand’s purpose.

Why Goal Setting Matters for Purpose-Driven Brands

A business with vision for the future, a heart-felt mission and clear goals are well positioned to thrive as an organisation. In an ideal world, your foundational business strategy and departmental strategies will be set, and this season you’ll be looking more closely about how as a purpose-driven business, you can make a bigger impact in the year ahead. Not only achieving growth in a financial or size sense, but also about aligning with values and fostering a culture of shared success on a community level vs just corporate or individual.

When pondered thoughtful and executed well, goal setting can:

• Provide clarity across teams and individuals.
• Create alignment between vision and day-to-day actions.
• Motivate your team with a shared sense of purpose.
• Refresh your core values and mission in the minds of your team.

1. Start with the Big Picture: Your Purpose and Vision

Every purpose-driven brand needs their ‘why’ as the north star. Usually part of the brand strategy, so worth revisiting before diving into specific goals for the year ahead. Take some time to reflect on your overarching purpose and vision:

• What is your long-term mission? 
• What does success look like for your brand? Define outcomes that align with your values, purpose and vision.

Once you’ve been reminded of (or have set a new vision) and you feel excited and inspired by it, imagine how this could be broken down into high-level goals for the business.

For Example:

If your brand’s purpose is to empower holistic wellness for your clients, your long-term mission might be to make your evidence-based wellness solutions more accessible. This could translate into high-level goals like:

• Expanding Reach: Launching a new online programme designed to educate and support 10,000 people in achieving better health by the end of the year.
• Driving Thought Leadership: Hosting a webinar every quarter that features wellness experts to position your brand as a leader in the industry.
• Building Customer Retention: Implementing a customer loyalty programme to improve your repeat purchase rate by X% from your core product range.

Start here by grounding your goals in your purpose – this way they’ll align with your mission, inspire your team and deliver value to your audience.

2. Cascade Goals Through Your Organisation

It seems a common pitfall in creating business goals is setting company-wide goals and forgetting that these can’t be a one-size-fits-all application. In reality, goals will be most effective when they are aligned at a department, team then individual level. Essentially, this is considering how the goals will affect (and be best affected by) different levels of your business, so you’ll want to tailor them accordingly. This helps with clarity and accountability at every level:

• From Vision to Teams: If your top-line goal is 10% growth, allocate 60% from existing customers (retention marketing strategies) and 40% from new customers (customer acquisition strategies).
• From Teams to Individuals: Break team goals into individual contributions based on roles and responsibilities.

By cascading goals, you’ll find more success as every department and team member understands how their work contributes to the larger purpose.

3. Balance the Business and Human Lens

It’s easy to slip into a more masculine / analytic stance when setting goals, so it’s worth including a reminder here to take a pause to look at your goals through both a business and a human lens:

• The Business Lens: Focus on measurable outcomes tied to impact, profit,, growth, or efficiency.
• The Human Lens: Consider the skills, capacity, and motivation of the team members responsible for achieving each of these goals.

This is particularly important to keep in mind upfront as well as when you’re checking in on progress with your goals. If a team member struggles to meet their targets, the first port of call is whether they have the resources, training, and clarity of instruction to achieve it. Being proactive in this way helps reduce the barriers to success from the beginning.

4. Embrace Transparency and Alignment

Clear, honest communication is always critical in business and personal life. It’s especially important when it comes to setting and achieving goals. Your team is more likely to engage with the goals when they understand them fully. In particular you’ll want clarity on these things:

• Why goals matter: How do they align with the company’s mission and impact?
• How they’ll be measured: Set clear KPIs and success criteria for each goal.
• What’s in it for them: Recognise and reward contributions to create a sense of ownership.

Clarity from the get-go helps your team connect their work to the organisation’s broader mission and as a purpose-driven brand this is even more important.

5. Set Stretch Goals with Resources to Match

Ambitious goals can inspire growth and progress, however if they aren’t matched by the supporting resources they can inspire overwhelm and inertia too.  If you have any suspicion or uncertainty about whether a goal will be unattainable at the current capacity, speak to the related team to brainstorm solutions together:

• Look at what options there are to invest in training and development to upskill your team.
• Look to oursource or subscribe to new tools to increase capacity.
• Be available for mentorship and coaching sessions to support your team in stepping up to the new challenges the goals bring. This supports and builds confidence.

When we have ambitious goals and important missions, lowering standards isn’t an option. What we then do instead is make sure the team are inspired and equipped to meet them.

6. Iterate with 30-60-90 Day Check-Ins

Similarly to a 90-day marketing streak or campaign, goals need reviewing regularly to make sure you’re on track and can course correct as needed. We recommend planning goals in more detail in 90-day chunks and then review them at the end of each month.

• Split the goal into action items for each of the next 3 months
• At the end of each month review progress and ask:
  • Was it completed? 
  • What are our learnings? Insights for next month?
  • What works well. Any big wins?

These regular checkins keep everyone on track with their goals and provide opportunities to celebrate small wins as you go.

7. Measure Qualitative and Quantitative Impact

While financial metrics are of course important, purpose-driven brands with missions need to measure impact beyond the bottom line. This looks like;

• Qualitative Goals: Assess improvements in culture, team morale, and community impact.
• Quantitative Goals: Track metrics like revenue growth, customer retention, donations or reduced costs.

Using these two lenses helps to make sure your organisation remains true to its mission and wider impact goals, whilst also achieving tangible results.

8. Create a Culture of Accountability and Growth

It’s a long-term approach which can really create magnificent businesses. When you inspire your teams to contribute their best beyond goal setting, by creating a mutual understanding of personal growth resulting in business growth and wider impact:

• A Growth Mindset: Encourage learning and development as well as an understanding that failing is more than ok – it’s a valuable way to learn faster and gain more feedback on what steps to take next.
• Accountability: Hold individuals responsible for their contributions while providing the support needed to succeed. Communicate regularly to make sure they have everything they need.
• Collaboration: Emphasise that success is a team effort, aligned with shared values.

By creating an environment that is both supportive and challenging, you have a chance of building a thriving workplace where your team grows personally on the journey to growing the business and working towards your mission together.

Purposeful Goals for a Purpose-Driven Future

Goal setting can often sound too lofty or too boring. It’s something we personally love. When approached with balance and grounded in values, it can drive purpose, inspire growth in the team and create a meaningful impact.  By cascading goals, balancing metrics with human considerations, and ensuring goals align with values, purpose-driven brands can achieve extraordinary results.

At Good Karma Consultancy, we love this process of planning and imaging a better future and how to get there. We love helping businesses like yours craft strategies that align purpose and profit. If you’d like our support in having an impactful 2025 we’d love to hear from you – you can apply to work with us using this link.