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Have you made any New Year’s resolutions this year? Maybe you don’t do that. Perhaps you subscribe to the belief that making resolutions sets you up for failure. Whether you make resolutions or not, there are some goals that you should attempt to make a part of your 2022 game plan.
1. Get a firm hold of your finances in 2022
While you don’t need to be a financial wizard to run your own business, it is always a great idea to have a solid understanding of your business and personal finances. Sure, outsourcing the daily grind of financial management lets you make better use of your time. However, it is never good to let someone else better understand your company cash flow than you do.
- Make realistic and fact-based financial projections for the upcoming year. Analyse the potential for future revenues, costs, and required assets.
- Set measurable financial objectives to track your progress.
- Sort out your debts. Credit is not always a bad thing, but there are different types of debt, and you need to prioritise getting rid of bad debts that will harm your business and personal credit rating. At the same time, make an effort to improve your private credit rating, as that will help you if you need to apply for business development credit.
- Cut your unnecessary expenses.
Ensure you understand the basic accountancy skills and apply them to your figures. If things don’t add up right, query them. Don’t assume that your accountant, finance team, or bookkeeper have a handle on things. If it all goes to the wall, it will be you who is accountable.
2.- Make your health a priority (physical and mental)
No one said that starting, running and owning a business would be easy. However, if you build a successful company by ruining yourself, the business won’t last long. Sure, everyone knows that running your own business requires a lot of time and effort, but that is no reason to neglect your health.
If you’re otherwise healthy, ensuring you stay that way is crucial. Eating the right foods, getting enough sleep, and taking time to exercise are just a few simple ways to keep yourself in top shape physically.
Additionally, taking time to relax and recharge is also critical to keeping your mental health on an even keel.
Even if your physical health is fine, but you don’t take care of your mental health, you could burn out just as quickly as if you neglect your physical health.
3.- Learn Something (new)
While the last two years have been an abundant source of reasons to learn something new, much time has also been given to staying afloat rather than broadening horizons. Whether you learn something new in your current field or completely deviate to get a fresh perspective, that is up to you.
When you master a new skill or learn a new language, it fuels creativity and can inspire you in other areas of your life and business. Consider your hobbies as an inspiration to learn something new. If you love fashion and couture, you might consider taking some design classes or learning how to make your own individually styled garments. If you love cookery shows, history or astronomy, maybe you might want to get into the kitchen with some new ideas, research an exciting period, or get a telescope and learn about the stars.
4.- Give back to your community (and maybe get more in return)
Let’s not frame this as a way to get more, but as a way to give things back to your community. Your community is where you find your clients. Your clients are important to you. Some of them become friends and maybe even like family.
Whether your community is online or a physical location, the people around you and your business are those who will use your services, benefit from them indirectly, or will recommend you to others. When you give back to them, they can see you for more than just a company they like, but also as a socially conscious entity with which they feel comfortable.
5.- Refresh your business and marketing plans for 2022
“Life is change, growth is optional.” You might know this quote from Karen Kaiser Clark, but do you apply it to your business? I hope that before you even started your business, you devised a business plan, but that doesn’t mean it was a one-shot deal. As your business progresses, things change. You might need to tweak the business plan and your development model as times evolve. And that is entirely normal.
To say the last couple of years has been “weird” is an understatement. If you built your business model before the pandemic hit, the chances are it is completely outdated.
6.- Get on top of business and industry trends emerging in 2022
One of the best ways to ensure your business grows with the demands of your industry is to keep well-versed in the emerging and developing trends in your area of expertise. Waiting until a movement is already well established before you consider incorporating it into your business is the best way to get left behind.
Proactively keeping up with developing trends is how you can help your business grow and stay ahead of the competition. While you are keeping up with emerging trend, you can sound out your clients and even trial some new ideas, while your competitors stick with to their routine.
Staying up to date with developing industry trends will also help you to attract new clients and customers. People that want to try something new will come to someone they know is on the ball and ready to implement new things. It’s an upward spiral.
7.- Extend your network
If you’ve every been in business, been searching for a job or looking for a good deal, the chances are that you might have heard the phrase “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” And while this stinks of nepotism and “the old boys club” in the workplace and the world of business, it is accurate.
Extending your network, both in the real world and online business world, means you extend your access to new business opportunities. While you might not think it is the best thing in the world to connect with competitor, they could open up doors and introduce you to contacts that will benefit you and your business.
8.- Reassess your processes and practices for 2022
The beginning of the year is an excellent time to assess (or reassess) your business processes. You might have extremely detailed and rigorously documented business processes that have worked for years, but are those processes still necessary and valid for the way you do business?
Do you have outdated contact procedures or detail sharing between branches? Maybe you use multiple systems where only one would do perfectly well, but you have never really taken the time to break down your processes and realise it.
When you have a system that has truckloads of redundancy and repetition, you aren’t being productive as much as being bureaucratic. If you see that your intricate system is simply a collection of repetitious and pointless tasks, think about what else you and your staff could get done in the time you’re wasting. What else could you do, what new things could you achieve?
Sure, if it isn’t broken, there’s nothing to fix. However, there could be room for improvement.
9.- Don’t fear making changes
New beginnings are begging for changes, but change is not always good. However, don’t let the fear of change prevent you from making them. Sometimes you need to make a change and see how it goes to determine whether you were on the right track, to begin with.
Fear of change is what keeps us stagnatinging the same old rut, but consistency and continuity is what keeps us rolling forwards. It seems incongruous. However, you can’t fight change, you have the learn to live with the inevitability and use it to grow.
Moving Onwards and Upwards through 2022
Whatever your goals are for 2022 you need to be adaptable. One of the primary reasons for the failure of New Year’s resolutions is that people feel like they have failed if they don’t immediately make the breakthroughs expected from their initial resolve.
Whether it’s a determination to get fit, lose weight, start a business or change your career path, a new year’s resolution gives you a whole 365 days to do it, or at least make significant progress.
Flexibility is key. You can resolve to do something, but if it isn’t working don’t be afraid to change direction or find another way or another goal. The only resolution that you need to keep is to keep moving forward and growing, both as a person and in your achievements. Make 2022 the year that you resolve to keep growing and prospering