Is Your Business Ready for New Year Planning?

Here are 4 things to consider when New Year planning.

The holiday season is around the corner, which means your business is deep into Q4.  The fourth quarter is the most important sales quarter of the year.  What you do during this time not only determines your numbers for this year, but also impacts on next year’s goals and metrics.  Planning ahead is the key to starting off the upcoming year strong.  Growing businesses often face multiple challenges across many areas of business.  The goal is to be able to balance those challenges while you continue growing, improving, and scaling your business.  If you’re not doing these things, you’re setting your company up for failure.

Business Strategy

Being proactive and staying ahead of the game and ahead of your competition is important for organizations.

Developing a strategy that’s too conservative puts your organization at risk of losing your most valued customers to your competition.  However, if you risk it all, change too much, or stray too far away from your core services, you run the risk of losing your foundational customers, stretching your resources too thin, etc.  A thorough review of your business plan is necessary, ensuring it’s still showcasing your differentiators, unique value proposition, market strategies, and goals.  Knowing what to change and what to leave alone can be a tough skill to develop. Knowing when to take a risk is even harder.

Blockbuster Video, founded in 1985 is one of the most iconic brands in the video and entertainment space.  In 2000, the CEO of Blockbuster turned down an opportunity proposed by Netflix that suggested shifting their medium into the digital space due to it being a very “small niche business”.  The corporation reached its peak in 2004 with an employee roster of over 84,000 people.  A few years later in 2010, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy for not being able to transition towards the digital model.

Businesses need a long-term vision and clear direction to achieve their goals.  Executives can leverage the effectiveness and power of a SWOT analysis to identify missing links in their business strategy.  Having a business coach guide you through this process allows you to clearly identify goals and according apply strategies that will help you and your business thrive in the long run.

Recruitment

According to a report by Glassdoor in 2020, 76% of businesses struggle with recruiting and retaining top talent.  Your company is having the same issue, you just haven’t seen it first-hand. Businesses face recruitment challenges all the time.  Unclear hiring processes, not embracing diversity in the workplace, failing to provide a memorable work experience, not maintaining a healthy work culture, and much more.  Businesses with higher retention rates tend to have more engaged employees who, in turn, are more efficient in the long run.

To attract top talent, your management team need to master their hiring skills, rely on resources and tools, analyze existing hiring data, and even seek external help when needed.

2020 and 2021 have shown us that every company has recruitment and retention issues now more than ever.  Either your organization is working on these issues, or they haven’t uncovered them yet, but they are there.

An executive coach can help uncover these issues and steer you in the right direction while keeping your company’s focus in mind.

Management

Proper management ensures that each part of the company works towards achieving a common goal without confusion and chaos.  Effectively allocating time to the right initiatives is a craft and skill.  Proper time management is one of the most common challenges for leaders in every industry. Excellent productivity maximizes the potential of every employee, which affects the overall success of your business.

Training, delegation, and trust are three important factors to proper management.  Providing your team with proper training resources and tools helps clarify your business’ vision and encourage them to meet company goals. Being able to clearly offload your vision and have it fulfilled is imperative.  Finally, trusting your team to manage the projects without handholding is necessary.  If you feel yourself micromanaging your teams, approving too many projects or notice yourself in “the trenches”, it’s time to get help.

Sales

A sales strategy is a plan that helps you position your business in the market and towards customers in order to gain a certain advantage over the competition.  A proper sales strategy will show you the way you need to approach your target customers.  For your sales strategy to be effective, you will have to develop one that your team can follow long-term but are able to revisit and revise as needed.  It’s common to set short-term goals adapted for certain times of the year, however, they need to be aligned with your long-term sales.  Setting clear, SMART goals will give your team a clear plan of what needs to be done to achieve them.  SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and are time-based.  Using this as an outline will help you see the progress your team is making as you achieve company goals.  A business coach can easily help you determine and tackle those goals to help your company succeed.

Conclusion

The best way to prepare your business for the New Year is to plan ahead.  Now is the time to prepare for the upcoming year.  Revisit your company’s business strategy and evaluate your company’s current state.  Conduct a SWOT analysis to help give you an overview of what has and can be done.  Your organization would not be anything without your team.  Ensure your recruitment team is properly trained and has the right resources to scout and retain top talent.  Remember, motivated and engaged employees perform better and are more committed to their jobs.  One of the most important things to keep in mind is that your organization team needs to have a shared global vision.  The more aligned everyone is with your company’s vision statement, the more likely your organization will run smoothly and succeed.  Set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based.  Using the SMART strategy will save you the wasted time of not knowing what exactly it is you want to achieve and how to achieve it.  Start the year off strong by working with an experienced coach who can help you strategically reach your goals.

Need help getting started? Learn more about what your business needs to focus on by taking our Business Growth Assessment.

If you would like to learn more about coaching and how we can work together, you can book a FREE consultation here: https://calendly.com/jasonballard

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