The new year is just around the corner! With the new year comes many little things, such as celebrations, feasts, deals, and all kinds of good things. As humans we all want to set new goals to achieve every year, and businesses also sets new goals to achieve without any exceptions. It can be hard to determine the exact goal to go for, but everything starts with a simple question:
What does your business aim to
achieve in the new year?
Just to help you save some thinking time, here are 8 New Year Resolution Ideas, for any small business.
1. Learn How to Delegate More
When running a small business there tends to be a million things to do. Faxes to send out, email to reply to, accounts to settle, bills to pay, staff to manage, business meetings to attend, issues to resolve, trying to meet monthly sales targets, and the list goes on and on. This is tiring, and it has very bad negative effects on your health. Look at from this perspective, if you are laid out 'cold' for a whole week without any productive work being done, rather being slower in finishing your productive work rather than in 1 day, but in 2 days (perhaps). Your small business has staff that are paid a salary to do work for you, and these staff of yours are excited to learn, grow, and be part of your business. Giving a little bit of empowerment goes a long way. The conclusion is, delegate more and do it more often.
2. Give Something Back to the Community
Make the new year a year when you get involved in your community to give back, give a free seminar, provide free workshops, or even donate some money to a notable cause. Find something that you believe in and support it. Through your honest intentions you could potentially meet new clients, or spread positive awareness about your company. Along the way hopefully generating a large loyal following for your business.
3. Drop What is Not Working, and Move On
Having a conundrum that doesn't seem to go away? Maybe it is time to cut your losses and just move on. Some problems are not meant to be solved immediately, but rather it may be solved in due time. Drop what is not working and move on to something more productive, and potentially more profitable. Why waste your valuable resources, and time into something that is really not working? Put all of your talents and skills into something that would make money, and hopefully through that new venture, it generates more money than what the previous hold up cost you.
4. Learn Something New
Learning something new doesn't need to be limited to your industry, or anything related to what you do. It could be learning Photoshop if you are a service business, or learning engineering if you are in the design field. All of everything you learn will have a benefit in the future, like the two examples used, if you are a service business with some handy dandy Photoshop skills you could whip up beautiful posters that could be used in your advertising endeavors, and for a designer to know engineering, would also be profitable in the future when he/she wants to design anything that requires a little bit of engineering know-how. Pick up something new and don't worry about it, because in the near future, everything you have invested time into will somehow reap its rewards. How do you make more time? Well delegation works right? ;) (Not all education is expensive you can study new things here for free)
5. Set a Savings Budget
Your business is flying online with great new ideas. So hold on to your horses, because in all businesses there are always ups and downs to everything. There will be happy times and also very gloomy times. Set a savings budget, to make sure that you have a safety net to fall onto when there are bad times.
6. Create a Spending Cap
With money flowing in and out the tendency to overspend available monetary funds can be very tempting. Consider putting a spending cap on monthly activities, and for a more macro view a yearly spending cap to ensure that expenses don't exceed the benchmark you have set. This maximizes efficiency and allows you to make critical spending decisions to ascertain whether what you spend is truly making you a healthy profit.
7. Go Mobile
Now that your business should be somewhat underway (I am assuming that it is, because you are entering the new year with a business, that should mean your business is of age). Go mobile. The mobile market isn't something that you should question its viability anymore with figures flying showing statistics that mobile is probably the new future, as consumers and customers are looking for a more convenient portable way to access basic information. Why lose out on the mobile market when an investment into it wouldn't hurt you, but just grow and expand from your current market penetration.
8. Refresh Your Website
Your website is awesome, but when was the last time you updated it? Have new projects that you recently completed, your company has a new direction, the trend for websites have changed, and many more. These are some of the reasons to why you should heavily consider reforming your website, as your website is the face of your company in the digital atmosphere and first impressions as we all know it is a lasting impression!
photo by Harold Neal
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