Is your New Year resolution list looking familiar – Eat healthy, Drink less, Exercise more, Take time out etc.?
As we tend to focus on our personal wellbeing and goals for the year but what about the health and vitality of our businesses?
Here are 12 ways you can make sure your business is fighting fit moving into 2021.Take a long hard look at what you achieved in the previous year and make plans for the new one. It is a good time to have a meeting with your team to pool ideas on what went right and what can be improved moving forward.
- Take a long hard look at what you achieved in the previous year and make plans for the new one. It is a good time to have a meeting with your team to pool ideas on what went right and what can be improved moving forward.
- Make sure you have a handle on Cashflow coming into the New Year. Cash is king and often post-Christmas people can find themselves in a shortage situation. Consider renegotiating your terms with suppliers and make those people affected aware.
- Be both conservative and realistic with your forecasts – and update these regularly, say, monthly. Forecasting will require a certain amount of estimating, but your figures should be based on facts.
- Do some shopping around. Review suppliers and their costs. It is easy for suppliers to steadily increase their costs and no longer provide best value for money. Check out the competition.
- Instigate stricter credit controls. Make one person in your team responsible for chasing debts and make sure this key job is always a high priority.
- Regularly update your business plan. It should be constantly reviewed as market conditions, including new competitors or new technology, change. Make a resolution to do this at least once a quarter.
- Delegate tasks to capable staff. This means that you can concentrate on the longer-term development of the business.
- Conduct appraisals with your team. It is a good time to review whether position descriptions are still the right fit and to start thinking about structure and future recruitment plans.
- Review the past years marketing and plan for the New Year. Take a snapshot of your number of prospects, your conversion rate and average sale value for each month in 2020 and compare that to 2019. Were there seasonal down turns or opportunities you missed that can be capitalized on this year.
- Revisit the goals you originally had for the business and your lifestyle – are you on track to achieving them or do you need to make some changes or seek outside help?
- Get Working on yourself, when you open a business you are expected to know this stuff but very few of do, identify the gaps in your knowledge and get learning!
- Get Help! Very few of us can do all this on our own! And why should you? Get some help, have a MOT from A4B and make 2021 your best year yet.
