All Entrepreneurs Should Start the New Year with these 3 Tips.
Now that the New Year is in full swing, it’s time to head back to the office to create fresh, smart, and effective ideas that will grow your organization.Regardless of the size of your company or the industry you’re in, if your goal is to increase profits in the coming year, you will want to focus on these topics now.
- 100-Day Plan.
The 100-day plan has become a tradition for newly elected American Presidents. The plan consists of achievable short-term goals that adhere to a President’s long-term vision for the country. Entrepreneurs should write their own 100-day plans to advance their organization’s productivity and profitability. The plan should establish 100 tasks, requiring business owners to consider the specific steps and resources that are needed to bring them to fruition. While there’s a time and place for visionary long term planning, the 100-day plan allows entrepreneurs to design and pursue attainable objectives and start the year off with a burst of energy. When the 100-day finish line is reached by mid-April, entrepreneurs will know if they should be celebrating or if they need to readjust their calculations.
- Declutter
Having clutter in your work environment is costly, unproductive and simply a challenging way to start each morning. Money is lost in missing files and documents, clear thinking is lost in an unorganized space and a sense of balance is lost in the chaos the clutter causes. And while a complete clean up of your company’s workspace seems overwhelming, it is a necessary task. To make it happen, set aside a Saturday when your team can come in, rent a dumpster and high capacity paper shredder, and destroy unnecessary documents, presentations and files, and toss out old equipment, brochures, books, product samples, and other unproductive items. Once your space has been cleaned and organized, consider a cloud-based backup system that allows for fast and convenient recovery of your organization’s electronic files and a system that accounts for every thing in the office having its’ own space. Simple things like labeling shelves or drawers will help make this new organization sustainable. The decluttering will not only allow your team to operate more efficiently, it will also help your office to look more streamlined and professional.
- Fire the person you know you have to fire.
Maybe you’ve tried to intervene to help turn things around, or you’ve ignored the problem in hopes that it would eventually take care of itself. But however you’ve handled the challenge of having weak members on your team, you know that they’re there and that they’re dangerous the to the health of your company. If you didn’t have the heart to do any purging during the holiday season, the time is now. The costs to your company in reduced productivity, low employee morale, additional supervision, damaged client relationships, and lost revenue that are caused by misplaced employees can be as high as $190,000 per year, so make a decision now to either remedy a situation that’s fixable --- or to clean house.* Lyneir Richardson (contributor)