You can meet your goals for your business this year.
Consider these resolutions as ten steps to your success
in 2005.
1. Develop a business plan or strategic plan. You won’t get
where you’re going unless you know where you want to be and
let your employees know as well.
2. Constantly Promote Your Business. You can’t execute one
marketing effort each year and expect your business to grow.
Plan marketing efforts quarterly or even monthly and plan
time for follow through and tracking of results.
3. Create action plans for each person in your organization.
Make sure every employee knows how his or her job relates
to the company’s overall vision, and that each has
individual objectives and goals with measurable standards
and timetables.
4. Survey your employees. Sometimes the biggest employee
dissatisfactions are the easiest things to fix. Know what
changes your employees would like to make in their work
lives and do your best to increase their quality of work
life (and usually their productivity as well).
5. Survey your customers and suppliers. Maybe the way you
are doing business is costing you relationships with
suppliers and customers. Know what bugs them and make it
easy to do business with your company.
6. Set up business performance measures and get only those
key indicator reports you need to run your business. Don’t
waste your time and staff time compiling reports you never
use. Know what you need to know to run a successful
business, study those reports every month, and use them to
take action.
7. Do a human resource compliance audit and stay out of
legal trouble. Unless you have a fully staffed HR
department, you may not be aware of all of the compliance
laws regarding employees. Have an audit done by an outside
professional and prevent problems that could result in
million dollar lawsuits by unhappy ex-employees.
8. Know your top 10 customers – what more can you do for
them, where can you find more just like them. List your top
ten customers by sales volume and let everyone in your
organization know who they are. Are they in a particular
geographic region, of a particular type – what is similar
about them? Do everything you can to build on those
relationships.
9. Get a coach or mentor, or join a business support group.
Build accountability into your own personal planning by
asking others to help you turn your dreams into reality.
Enlist people who you can trust to give you objective
feedback and create deadlines for your planned successes.
10. Make a list of the year’s accomplishments and celebrate
your successes with your employees. Don’t forget to
acknowledge and celebrate each of your milestones. The best
part of creating a plan is to know when you’ve reached your
goals, allowing some time to pause and appreciate the
accomplishment, and begin to create your next set of goals.
===========================================
Jan B. King is the former President & CEO of Merritt
Publishing, a top 50 woman-owned and run business in Los
Angeles and the author of Business Plans to Game Plans: A
Practical System for Turning Strategies into Action (John
Wiley & Sons, 2004). She has helped hundreds of businesses
with her book and her ebooks, The Do-It-Yourself Business
Plan Workbook, and The Do-It-Yourself Game Plan Workbook.
See www.janbking.com for more information.
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