Many of us are making new year’s resolutions every year and promise ourselves to stick to it with all our life’s worth, just to find ourselves forgetting about it not even 2 weeks into the new year.
It’s absolutely human – but what if we could make some plans that we can stick to – no matter what. Won’t that be great? Especially if it involves having more success in our business?
Well, I believe that in order for any Virtual Assistant business to grow and reap more success, it is necessary to have some plans on how to improve on what we did previously. Maybe it’s true that any small step or change in the right direction can sometimes result in huge improvements. So, I’m currently thinking about our goals for the new year and am going to follow these 4 easy steps.
Step 1: Reflect on the past year.
The big question is – What happened in our business over the past 12 months. On face value it feels as if we had an excellent year, but in reality we need to evaluate some specific points such as
- Income: Did we reach our expected income?
- Expenses: Did we overspend or under spend on our budget?
- Marketing: Did we reach our marketing objectives and did we do everything that we’ve planned for this year?
- Clients: How many clients did we have, how many new clients did we get and could we retain our clients?
- Business Weaknesses: Were there any areas of our business that we struggled with?
- Business Strengths: Were there any areas that we had successes in?
- Operations: Could we easily perform all the work that we received – are there room for improvement?
- Is there anything new that we want to do or want to learn for the New Year?
- Do we need any new or different equipment and resources
Step 2: Evaluate Performance
Answering the above questions, will give a pretty clear picture of our performance over the past year and will also give some pointers of things to do the same or differently for the year to come.
We can even dig a little bit deeper and answer the following questions
- Why did we do well or why didn’t we do well?
- Where can we improve?
- What can we do differently?
- Who can help to make a positive impact?
- When do we need to implement changes?
- How will changes impact on the rest of our business?
Step 3: Set new Goals
Knowing how our business performed as well as the reasons for performing good or not so good in each area, will definitely help to determine what to keep the same and what to change for the new year. Now is the time to make those new plans.
Step 4: Write it down
Unfortunately it won’t help much to just have the information in our heads and not do something about it. That unfortunately will only raise the statistics bar of forgetting about all these wonderful plans early in the new year. I’m therefore a firm believer of writing it down.
Since I’m also working on my computer 24/7, 365 days a year (sometimes it just feels like that), it is easy to keep an excel spreadsheet with all those goals and plans. Then I can take it with me wherever I go and have it available whenever I need it. Writing it down also helps me not to forget about the important details of the plans.
A wise man once said: Planning will not guarantee success, but it certainly increases the probability of succeeding.
I’m going to put it to the test this year – what are you going to do? I’d love to hear your comments.
