You’ve replaced that hideous sweater your aunt gave you for Christmas, taken the tree down, packed up the decorations and recuperated from the weekly campout from your relatives. Now, it’s time to focus on your business again. But how do go about preparing for the new year? This ages-old question is best answered by following several key tips that can get rev up your team and company objectives and get you on the road to achieving even greater success in the new year.
Assess Your Team
You need the right people in place to succeed this year. Do you have them? If not, assess employees’ strengths and weaknesses and determine the areas in which they need developing. Initiate training programs to get people up to speed. You also need to determine if you have enough employees to meet your objectives. If not, hire new ones. Use an experienced search firm, if necessary, so you can better vet candidates.
Review Your Organizational Structure
Most new businesses have flat organizational structures. If your business is growing you may need to rethink your current structure and make changes. A couple organizational structures for growing businesses include functional and product structures. In a functional structure, you would build teams under functional areas such as finance, marketing and research and development. Product structures are for firms that sell many product lines. These companies build management teams around specific product lines.
Set New Goals
Review your sales and profit goals and determine if they need revising. Study industry trends to pinpoint average industry growth. Revise your objectives to reflect these trends. Objectives are not always monetary. They can include improving customer service or minimizing waste. For example, you can conduct customer surveys to monitor customer service. In market research, many companies use scales from 1 to 5 to measure variables, with 5 being the highest and 1 the lowest. Customer service variables can include professionalism, timeliness and accuracy.
Apprise Employees of Objectives
Hold meetings and send communications to inform employees of all company objectives. This will better ensure that everyone is working toward common goals. Allow employees to ask questions about the new initiatives and get their input for even greater potential success. Always make the goals measureable. For example, you goal may be to increase sales by 10 percent. Set a timeframe for accomplishing all objectives.
Update Website and Social Profiles
If you’ve added products or services and didn’t get around to updating your website, now is the time to do it. Consider streamlining your website with videos or interactive modules to spur interest and traffic. Make sure your website is imprinted on all business cards, flyers and letters. Revise your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Review Your Budget
Many companies use the build-up approach to budgeting. That is, they determine which projects from the previous year they’ll include the following year. Use that as your basis, then add any new projects you foresee in the new year. Meet with your management team and determine which projects are essential and those that aren’t. Search for new vendors or get new bids from existing vendors. Determine where you can negotiate better deals and cut down on expenses.
Be Positive
Don’t let past failures stymie future success. Learn from your mistakes and move on. Most importantly, instill a new positive mindset for the new year. Eliminate doubts and challenge yourself to accomplish great things. Any confidence you exude will be reflected in your employees.
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