Preparing New Year Business Goals

As a business owner, when the end of year is near, I start to think about preparing New Year business goals. Every small business owner should take a look at successes, failures, and new things they can do to help their business thrive in the upcoming New Year.

Why Set Goals for the New Year?

You may think you had a great business revenue year, and perhaps you did, but don’t all of us want more? Wouldn’t you like to have a larger customer base, find a way to keep up your repeat customer rate or offer a new product or service? What about a new or revised website for your business?

Beyond the most common New Year business goals, there are other goals to consider. Issues like revisiting your employees; your vendors, insurances, and operating expenses are also items that should be looked at when planning your goals for the following year.

Think of setting goals each year as a way to revamp your business or give it a feeling of starting anew. Failing to set goals could leave you in a slump if you aren’t prepared to make some goal and resolution changes.

Put Goals in Writing

Whether this is your first time to set New Year goals or you are revisiting goals, put them in writing. Not only will this help you evaluate how well you did with goal setting, you can keep track of each goal and mark it off your list. Written goals can also identify areas that failed and provide opportunities for change.

Your current policies and procedures should also be reviewed and if you don’t have any written policies, now is a good time to begin writing some. Do you have an employee handbook? If not, set a goal to write one.

By putting goals in writing, it will give you a better opportunity to determine what works and what isn’t working as well as increasing sales revenues and profits.

Start With Budgeting Expenses

Take a long hard look at what your current expenses are. Can you identify areas that are excessive or non-essential? Start with your Income Statement where you can quickly identify sales, cost of sales, and net profits.

What expenses seem high to you and what areas can you afford to cut? If you spent a lot on business travel expenses, did you receive a return on investment for those expenses? For example, if you attended a trade show, did you connect with new vendors and find ways to get wholesale discounts? If you did, then you did well in that area.

Analyze every expense including payroll. Remember that payroll includes wages, federal, state, and local taxes as well as worker’s compensation taxes, and department of labor taxes. Did your payroll expenses rise from the prior year? Normally they do because of wage increases or bonuses; however, did your sales volume warrant the increase? If sales volumes were down, set a goal for sales employees to reach to achieve bonuses or wage increases.

Telephone and utilities are often big expenses for businesses. Do you just settle for what the utility companies offer or have you visited your local utility companies and asked about discounts or programs to help you save money? If not, this is the time to do it.

Advertising is another expense to analyze. How well did your advertising campaign do throughout the year? While advertising is important, do your sales revenues reflect what you paid to advertise your product or service?

Take a long look at all of your expenses and see which ones should be decreased, stay the same, or changed.

Please read on to Page 2 to help you set goals for employees, sales, profits and lifestyle goals.

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