Beverlee Rasmussen CEC PCC It’s great to set new years resolutions for your business. It brings a renewed sense of purpose and motivation. Although as many of us know, it can be hard to keep a resolution past the first week, let alone for the next year!
Here are a few strategies to keep you moving forward with your goals.
1. Review your vision
Go back to the time when you first dreamed of owning your business. How do your business resolutions this year help you reach that vision?
Your vision, when written down and repeated over and over, is a foundational tool to inspire, motivate and lead others. Your vision keeps you going. It gives you the energy to get through the rough patches. And provides validation when things go well.
At Systems Business Coach® we have a powerful vision that drives our actions:
A world where all business owners have the skills, tools and confidence to positively contribute to a healthy world economy creating secure meaningful employment while maintaining personal prosperity and freedom.
Have you written your vision down? Now is your chance! When you start to doubt your resolve towards your resolution, look back at your vision. It will remind you why you are working so hard! Your dreams are worth it.
A fun activity you can do is to draw/collage what your business will look like this year. Here’s an example of the collage I made for 2023. Every time I look at it I feel inspired, and it reminds me of what I want to achieve.
2. Choose a theme for your year
A theme is a simple thing. It’s a recurring idea that shows up in all your business goals. When you have a theme for the year, it helps you prioritize and focus on big-picture goals. Such as your new year’s resolution!
Try to align your theme with your new year’s resolution. For example, if your new year’s resolution was to “design a new product”, then your theme this year could be ‘the year of innovation”.
3. Set goals for each area of business.
Chances are the resolutions you made this year fits into one of the five functional areas of business: leadership, team, marketing, finance and operations.
To reach your resolution, you will want an actionable goal for each area of business. Let’s go back to the example of “design a new product”. If this is your resolution, you may need:
- Leadership Goal – Create a clear product pitch to effectively communicate your new idea to your team
- Operations Goal – Find a supplier for the new materials needed to make the product.
- Financial Goal – The new product will increase revenue by 15%.
- Team Goal – Outsource a package designer.
- Marketing Goal – Have the new product featured on the local tv spot “Gadgets & Gizmos”
All these goals funnel into your resolution!
And of course, be sure to write your goals/resolutions down. As entrepreneurs, we tend to keep our goals in our head where they are powerful and vivid yet not very useful if we want to achieve them. Business owners moving towards prosperity and freedom must write down and share their goals.
4. Review your systems
A system is simply the way something happens.
Some small business owners think they don’t have systems, yet they do. Every action that is currently happening in your organization, either as planned or as decided by the individuals who do them, is a system. Right down to how you answer the phone. And those systems are producing your results.
Systems are HOW you will achieve your new years business resolution.
Do you have the systems in place to support your resolution?
If you want to design a new product, what systems are contributing to this goal? Perhaps you could review your assembly systems, your operational systems, or your supply systems. What are you already doing that works? Where are the gaps in the systems you currently have? If you could update or add any system in your business, which one would make the biggest difference in reaching your goals?
Take time to review your systems and adjust them to support your new year’s resolution.
Ready to achieve your new year’s business resolutions?
By following these steps, you can reach your resolution! Reconnect with your vision, choose a theme that inspires you, write down your goals that support your resolution, and adjust your systems so your daily operations move you toward your goal.
What’s your new year’s resolution this year? Will you share it in the comments?
Until next time, enjoy your Entrepreneurial Journey!
