10 entrepreneurial lessons from Steven Bartlett

Enterprise Nation programme manager Roisin Skinner recently interviewed Steven Bartlett, entrepreneur, Dragons' Den investor and founder of The Social Chain, on ways you can strategically set goals for your business.

The online session covered several topics, including why goal-setting is imperative to a business's success, how to set goals that align with your strategy, and how to put your business into action.

Business goal-setting tips from Steven Bartlett

We've picked out 10 of the many lessons we learned from our conversation with Steven Bartlett:

1. Visualise your life like a sand timer: if we could see our life passing by, we would get more done.

2. Split goals into three tiers: macro, medium and micro. You should create your medium and micro goals from your macro goal.

3. Set tight two-week deadlines for projects to make your business as efficient as possible.

4. If you manage a team, get them to set their own deadlines for the tasks they're responsible for.

5. If everyone is responsible for a task, then no-one becomes responsible. Make sure someone always has responsibility.

6. With responsibility comes autonomy; you must trust others.

7. People won't innovate if they feel like they'll be punished for experimenting. The Social Chain incentives and celebrates the team when the goal or experiment is complete, rather than just basing it on its success.

8. Every day you have 24 chips, one for each hour of the day. When you wake up, you have 16 left. You get to choose what you allocate to each chip and your time is the most valuable currency.

9. Every minute you spend doing something you don't want to do is at the expense of another minute. You need to be respectful to yourself about how you delegate your time, as time is limited and it's the most important resource we have.

10. Use tools like Microsoft To Do to help manage your time and Discord and Notion to collaborate with others.

Watch back: Goal setting with Steven Bartlett: How to turn business ideas into action

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