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66 August 2015 | beautystorebusiness.com your team together and brainstorm all the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats you can identify. By involving your associates, you help them understand the business better. Plus, they may mention some points that you had not considered or weren't even aware of. GOALS Hopefully, you already set specific, targeted goals for the store. As with SWOT, it's one of those topics that business students learn very early in their curriculums. They are taught how to determine business goals and study strategies for executing those goals. Your goals will tend to fall into two categories. First, financial goals are the most clear-cut. You want to set targets for sales, labor costs, expenses, overhead and inventory. A financial goal typically has a dollar sign associated with it; but it can also be a percentage, for example, reducing labor costs this month by 10%. The other type of goal is the strategic goal that focuses more on an action. You might have strategic goals such as creating a new-hire orientation, renovating the bath- rooms, identifying employees for future supervisory roles and changing the light- ing above the shelving. Whether strategic or financial, your goals should be carefully crafted. This means that you should avoid vague, open-ended goals. Simply saying that you want to increase sales would not be a well-written goal. However, stating that you want to increase sales by 5% in 90 days would be. Therefore, when you're writing goals, be very specific with what you want to accomplish and that it is measurable. Set deadlines for reaching your goals. Goals with no end dates will rarely be tackled. GRADUATING OK, so you may not actually be graduating from a university, but if you do the things mentioned in this article, you'll be well on your way to taking a business school approach with your store. A sound mis- sion statement, a well thought out vision statement, detailed SWOT analysis and viable, set goals will help you with all your other operational tasks. These fun- damentals provide you with the basics to manage a store. When these broad steps are taken, then everything else falls into place. A mission and vision that everyone understands and believes in gives direction to the business. With an in-depth SWOT analysis, you gain an understanding of the store—what you bring to the table and what you're missing. Finally, specified goals and the attainment of those goals move your store forward and give you a sense of accomplishment. So what are you waiting for? There's no time like the pres- ent to add these basics of business schools to your manager repertoire and graduate at the top of the beauty store class. ■ Dr. Steven Austin Stovall is professor of management at Wilmington College in Wilmington, OH. He can be reached at steven_ stovall@wilmington.edu. When writing goals, be specific with what you want to accomplish. Make goals measurable and set deadlines for reaching them.