What’s the Best Way to Jump-Start Your Business in the New Year?

CATCH-UP & ORGANIZE YOURSELF. Start your business off right for this new year, by catching up with all of last year’s work you haven’t yet completed. Make these your priorities:

1-CLEAN UP YOUR EMAIL INBOX. This is so important as we all get tons of emails every day and they pile up, and it can be a multi-step process if you’ve haven’t cleaned up your inbox in a long-time or you’ve never done it. 

• Unsubscribe. Look for multiple emails from a single sender, and unsubscribe to the emails if you don’t read them. *DO NOT MARK THEM AS JUNK if you know the sender, as it is not good for them to get a black mark against their email address. Don’t worry about missing out, as you can visit the sender’s website anytime to read the content and you can also subscribe again later on.
• Sub-folders. If you get many regular emails from the same sender that you want to keep receiving, but, you don’t want to clog up your inbox making you potentially miss very important emails, create a sub-folder for that sender and either A) When you get the emails, manually move them to the sub-folder OR B) Create a rule that will automatically move emails from that sender to the sub-folder you create.
• Order of attending to. Many options exist for next steps. Pick the one that works best for you:
• Start with the most recent email and work your way back (reverse chronological order)
• Start by attending to the oldest email in your inbox (chronological order), if the most recent emails aren’t pressing or you’ve taken care of them.
• Skim all of the emails and choose which ones to address first, second, third, etc.

2-CLEAN UP YOUR DOWNLOADS FOLDER. If you are like me, you download content from the internet regularly. If you don’t keep up with managing this folder, it can get full and eat up a lot of your space on your computer’s hard drive, which may slow down the functioning of your computer and/or prevent certain applications to work properly and/or prevent you from downloading new content. How can you clean it up?

• Delete the content you no longer need.
• Create folders and sub-folders in your Downloads folder, Documents folder or Desktop, then cut and paste the files (images, word documents, spreadsheets, pdfs, etc.) from your downloads folder to the other folder or sub-folder.
• If you have downloaded software applications, which take up a lot of space, and you have installed the applications, you can delete the application set-up (.exe) files.

3-CLEAN YOUR DESKTOPS.

• Computer Desktop. We all add things to our computer desktops to remind ourselves of important things we need to do or to access certain things more quickly – like images, folders, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. This is great in small to moderate amounts, but, too much can actually make you gloss over all of the icons and miss something that is really important or it can make you feel stressed out by looking at all of the things you have to do. To clean it up, follow the same steps as cleaning up your downloads folder.
• Physical Desktop. Keeping clutter around will make you feel disorganized, hence less confident and take you longer to find what you need. Clean it up now, then everyday thereafter for best results.

4-CLEAN UP YOUR FILES.

• Physical filing cabinet. When was the last time you did this? You may find things you forgot you had that would come in handy now and some things you don’t need anymore and can throw away or recycle. You will feel more confident and refreshed after doing this.
• Digital filing cabinet – i.e. “My documents” on your computer. It is important to do this at least once a month, and back-up your files to the cloud and on an external storage device such as a USB stick or an external hard-drive at least once a week. Just having your files saved on one device leaves you at high risk of losing all of your hard work and digital assets. Even having 2 back-ups is not enough. I recommend backing up your files to an external device and a cloud account for extra security.

5-POST PHYSICAL & VIRTUAL REMINDERS. Make a list on a piece of paper of important things you want to remember ongoing and post it on a sticky note on the side of your computer, on your desk, the wall or other location where you will see it over-and-over again, thereby helping you remember it. You can separate the reminders onto different pieces of paper (or sticky notes) if that works better for you. If posting digital reminders works best for you, do more of that. The point is we all start out with great intentions every year, then we fall back into some of our old habits that didn’t serve us well in the previous year. Declaring that you will change this year or even writing a note that you will do something differently this year is not likely enough to exact real long-term change. You need reminders, just like I do, unless you are super-human, and if you are, congrats!

6-SET GOALS AND SET REMINDERS TO TRACK PROGRESS. In order to reach a goal, you have to set one. With so many components to having a successful business, it is important for you to set multiple goals (called KPIs – Key Performance Indicators). But, that is not enough. To reach your goals, you need to track your progress at regular intervals and make adjustments in your processes and activities, so you keep moving in the right direction in the time frame you set out for yourself – this also means your goals have to be time-specific. You could again write out reminders on paper or add them to your digital calendar or digital sticky notes on your computer. It may seem that this is a waste of time, because if you are spending time setting goals and tracking your progress, you are not doing business development or client service to move your business forward, but, it’s not. Businesses that do regular check-ins on their business progress, meaning they take a step back to record and evaluate, then make modifications when and where necessary, generate more revenue and profit (i.e. make more money), than businesses that don’t. If you’ve never done this, do it now. Don’t wait another year, another month, another week, another day.

6-PRINT OUT PHYSICAL PICTURES OF THE THINGS YOU WANT – bigger house, vacations, specific vehicle, bigger company with more employees, etc.. and post the pictures where you can see them every day.. this can help keep you motivated to push through when you are tired or otherwise don’t feel like doing what you have to do to reach your goals. You could carry the pictures in your wallet, put them in your car, on your fridge, your computer desktop background, your phone or tablet display, on your wall, next to your bed, etc.

7-HIRE AN EXPERIENCED BUSINESS COACH, LIKE ME, who can help you see the blind spots in your business, create a strategy for further business growth, and train you in business development, sales, digital marketing, networking, public speaking or other areas. Note, not all Business Coaches are experts in all of these areas. Usually they are good at one or two areas. Learn more about my expertise, by reading my bio here: https://gtapreneurs.com/about

8-REGISTER FOR A GTAPRENEURS BUSINESS NETWORKING MEMBERSHIP. Networking for business is so important for getting yourself and your business known in your local or virtual community. You may find other business owners who want to buy from you or who you want to buy from or those you may want to collaborate with. There is an art and skill to networking, with one important factor being regular attendance, as meeting people repeatedly helps them to get to know you better and vice versa, forming relationships that can be a support system and motivator for you and can turn into clients. To view our business networking memberships, go to https://gtapreneurs.com/business-networking-memberships

• Rank better on Google and other search engines. This means you need to have a website, then have it optimized by a professional SEO Specialist, then do other ongoing work to compete with all of the other optimized websites on the internet that offer the same things you do.
• GTApreneurs’ SEO Specialist has 27 years of experience ranking thousands of websites at the top of the first page of SERPs (Search engine results pages).
• GTApreneurs.com ranks in the top 3 for many important keywords, in the top 5 for many others and the top 10 for others. So, I regularly get people finding our website without knowing about us before. They just do a general search for something that we offer, and Google brings up our website in a good spot where the searcher can see us.
• Book a free consultation to learn about our SEO services here: https://calendly.com/gtapreneurs

There are many other things you can do. Start from the top of my suggestions and work your way down.