How to set measurable goals: six fields that turn a wish into a plan

"A good profit." "Happy customers." "More time for the family."

Every owner has written goals like these, and every owner knows the quiet disappointment that follows a few months later, when nothing has changed and nobody can say whether anything should have. The problem is never ambition. The problem is that a wish cannot be steered. You can only steer by a number you can see, against a line you drew in advance.

Andrew, the coffee shop owner who runs through Steer, Don't Guess, starts his list with "growth and joy". By the end of one evening he has crossed it out and replaced it with five lines that would change how he ran the business for the next year. What happened in between takes fifteen minutes, and anyone can do it.

A wish can't be steered, and a list without an order can't settle a clash. The Jirgenson Model gives you the answer: goals in a fixed order, each with a real number and a line where normal ends. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).

What are measurable goals, really?

A goal is measurable when, on any Monday morning, two different people looking at the same data would agree whether you are on track.

That bar is higher than it sounds. "Increase revenue by 10% by December" has a number and a date, and still leaves the important questions open: increase from what, counted where, and at what point should someone start to worry? A goal that cannot answer those questions will be argued about every week, and a goal that is argued about is not steering anything.

How to set measurable goals: the six fields, filled in

Here are the six fields, each with the exact entry Andrew wrote for his margin. Read the right-hand half of each one as you go; by the end you will have a complete goal in front of you.

1. Parameter: what exactly do we measure? Andrew: margin. Not "profit", not "how the month felt". One word everyone in the shop understands the same way.

2. Definition and source: how is it calculated, and where do the data come from? Andrew: operating profit as a percentage of revenue, taken from the accounting system into which the till data are exported. Without this field, two people will bring two different margins to the same meeting, and both will be right.

3. Target and deadline: where, and by when? Andrew: 15% by the sixth month. This is where most goal setting stops. It is barely halfway.

4. Current value: where are we now? Andrew: currently 9%. Without this line, a goal remains a wish. Andrew had believed for years that his margin was twenty per cent; only when he counted waste properly did the real figure appear. The full story of that discovery is in busy but not profitable, and it is the strongest argument I know for never skipping field four.

5. Permissible deviation: where does normal end? Andrew: once the goal is reached, no lower than 14%. This line decides in advance what a bad week looks like. A dip to 14.5% is not a crisis; a slide to 13% is a signal. Without it, every wobble triggers panic, or nothing ever does.

6. Rhythm and owner: who looks, and how often? Andrew: Andrew checks it every week. A number nobody looks at is decoration.

Put together, the six fields read as one sentence:

Margin, meaning operating profit as a percentage of revenue, taken from the accounting system into which the till data are exported; 15% by the sixth month; currently 9%; once the goal is reached, no lower than 14% is permissible; Andrew checks it every week.

That is what a measurable goal looks like. Notice that fields four, five and six are precisely the ones most templates leave out, and precisely where plans quietly die.

A measurable goals example: one owner's whole list

One goal is a start. Andrew's full list after that evening, with time counted in months from today (M6 means six months from now), looks like this:

The order of the rows is a decision, not a ranking of importance. It answers a harder question: if things got bad and he had to give goals up one at a time, which would go first? His own hours went last on the list, the first to be sacrificed. The reserve went to the top, because without it the shop closes and nothing else matters. I call that the refusal order, and it is the reason a list of goals can survive a bad month.

The one-minute test

If you remember one thing from this page, remember this:

• "A good profit" has no number.
• "15" has no unit.
• "15%" has no deadline.
• "15% by the sixth month" is a goal.

Number, unit, deadline. Run it over your current list now. Goals that fail it are usually not wrong; they were simply never finished.

Goals vs methods: the mistake hiding in every list

Andrew's first rough list had eight items. Three were not goals at all: "launch loyalty cards", "hire a second barista", "buy a new coffee machine". Those are methods.

The fix is one question: what for? Loyalty cards exist to bring customers back, so the goal is the share of regular customers. The barista and the machine both exist for quality. Eight items became five, and the five were better.

This matters more than it looks. A goal answers "what do I want to achieve?"; a method answers "how will I do it?" Write a method into your goals and you have committed to one path before you have even seen the map.

Six areas, nine goals at most

To keep the list from leaning to one side, work through six areas: finance, clients, sales, processes and quality, people, and development and the owner. Take zero to three goals from each and no more than nine in total. An area may stay empty, but on purpose, with the reason written down.

The sixth area is the one owners forget: their own time, health and money. If you are building a business at the cost of your own life, that too is a goal, and it is better chosen consciously. And why nine? Because for a person working on paper, ten priorities are no longer priorities. They are a list.

SMART goals vs the six fields: a fair fight

SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) are the most popular goal-setting tool in business, and for good reason: they kill vague goals. So let us give SMART its best shot and then put the result through the six fields.

Here is a perfectly good SMART goal for a coffee shop (an illustration, not from the book):

Increase coffee sales by 10% by 31 December.

Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. Five ticks. Now the six fields:

One tick out of six. And there is a seventh problem SMART cannot even see: if sales grow by 10% because you discounted every drink, the goal is met and the margin may be gone. A list with a refusal order catches that in advance, because the margin sits above sales and wins when the two collide.

So is this a SMART goals alternative? I would put it differently. SMART tells you whether a goal is well written. The six fields tell you, every week, whether it is being met, and the refusal order tells you what to protect when goals pull against each other. SMART gets you to field three. The rest of the road is where the business is actually run.

Where this does not reach

Six fields make a goal measurable. They do not make it the right goal, and they do not make a set of goals compatible: "the lowest prices, the best coffee and a thirty per cent margin" can pass every field and still be impossible as a set, which is why goal lists need a separate check against your own costs and capacity. Legal, safety and contractual requirements stay outside the list altogether. They are constraints, not goals you can trade away.

Fifteen minutes and a sheet of paper

No software, no workshop, no consultant. A sheet of paper, ten to twenty minutes, and the honesty to write down a current value you may not enjoy seeing. When Andrew finished his list, he felt solid ground under his feet for the first time in two years. If your goals have never given you that feeling, it is fifteen minutes away.

The whole of Chapter 1, with the refusal test and examples for a business, a freelancer and a teenager saving for a bicycle, is free in the free sample. When your goals are on paper and you want to steer by them through zones, levers and forecasts, the full book is on Amazon.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

• Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
• Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
• Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
• GitHub: experiment folder
• Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
• ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552