Changing Objectives as Businesses Grow
An objective is not something a business achieves and then finishes with. It is re-set, again and again, and knowing why is what the question is actually about.
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Nothing is achieved and then finished 🎯
Ask a business what its objective is and the answer depends entirely on when you ask. In year one it is usually **survival**. By year five, survival is not an objective at all. That is the whole of this topic. Objectives are not targets a business reaches and crosses off; they are **re-set**, repeatedly, as conditions change. Exam questions here are almost always asking you to explain a re-setting: what changed, and what the business should do about it.
Five reasons objectives change 🗂️
Learn these as a checklist. Almost any case study in this topic is one of them:
Match each change to the reason behind it
- A rival opens on the same street and sales fall
- Customers begin expecting online ordering as standard
- A new law bans the packaging the business has always used
- The owner decides they want to open a second branch
- market conditions
- technology
- legislation
- internal reasons
Which one could you actually test? ✍️
An interactive activity.
Did they meet it? 🧮
An interactive activity.
Year one against year five ↔️
The bakery grew by 16 per cent, not 20. That is a miss, and a business at this stage has a different set of objectives from the one it had when it opened.
What should change? ❓
A business is two years old, has survived and is now reliably profitable. What is most likely to happen to its objectives?
- Survival is replaced by objectives about profit, growth and market share
- They stay the same, because the current objectives are clearly working
- The business stops setting objectives, since it is no longer at risk
- Survival becomes an even more important objective as the business grows
Order the shift 🪜
An interactive activity.
A changed objective changes decisions 🔧
Knowing WHY an objective changed is half the answer. The marks are in the other half: **what the business then does differently.** A change of objective shows up as concrete decisions - **entering or exiting a market**, changing the **size of the workforce**, widening or narrowing the **product range**, or moving spending between parts of the business. **So never stop at "the objective changed".** Say which decision follows from it, and the answer moves from description into analysis, which is where the marks are.
Three pressures 🧭
An interactive activity.
Which are genuine reasons? ✅
Select the TWO that would genuinely cause a business to change its objectives.
- A new technology changes what customers now expect as standard
- Performance last year came in well below the target that was set
- The owner prefers a different form of words for the same idea
- Objectives should always be replaced every year, whatever has happened
The summary 📝
Objectives are not achieved once and finished; they are _____. A new business usually starts with _____ as its main objective and later moves to profit, growth and market share. They change because of market conditions, technology, _____, legislation and internal reasons. A useful objective is _____, so you can tell whether it was met. And when a target is missed, the useful response is to judge why and _____ it rather than to abandon it.
Your turn 📄
An interactive activity.