How many times have you started the New Year by making a personal resolution that seems to fly out the window as soon as your life returns to normality? You made your resolution with the best of intentions but it soon becomes just another thought you had while you were relaxing over your Christmas break.
Rather than focus on you, why not focus on your business instead? Make your resolution to check the ‘health’ of your business. It’s so easy to do. Most of us find early January to be our quiet time so it’s the perfect time to work ON your business rather than IN it.
Here are 5 easy steps to conduct a business review for the New Year. If you make it your resolution to do this every year, you’ll start the year feeling up to date and ready to face the year ahead.
1. Review your website ‘About’ page
Pop on over to your website and check that your ‘About Us’ page is still current. You’ll probably only need to change a couple of things such as:
- Adding an award, prize, nomination or extra certification you received
- Changing membership details to an industry Association
- Listing any additional clients you worked with or updating your portfolio of work
Remember to also change your social media Bios for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
2. Update your website footer for the current year
First impressions are everything. What do you think when you see a website with a copyright year in the past? It tends to scream, ‘Don’t look at me, I’m out-dated and neglected’! If you’re lucky like me, your web designer may have set this up so that it automatically updates. If not, you’ll need to log into your website’s back-end and change this for yourself. If this is all sounding ‘double-dutch’, contact your web designer for help.
Show your website visitors that your site is current and loved!
3. Update the Copyright year of your eBooks
Check any documents or eBooks you have online which display the copyright symbol and year and update them to the current year.
TIP: If you have a few documents, you may consider establishing a register to keep track of those that will need updating at the start of each year. Need help, let me know!
4. Review your computer filing directory
Although paper filing is no longer relevant for our virtual assistant business, we still need to keep on top of our filing requirements. Each January we review all our filing directories and archive what is no longer required e.g. past clients, old documents or templates.
TIP: You don’t have to permanently delete files but simply copy them to an external hard drive, then delete them from your system.
5. Review your email filing
This is the same as step 4 but for your email system. As much as we would like to move to a cloud-based email program, we still find Outlook does the job better than others (for our business). So another January job is to archive any folders that were created for clients or suppliers that are no longer required.
By following these simple steps, you’ll feel organised, get rid of the clutter and make a fresh start for your year ahead.
Wishing you all the best for a terrific year ahead.