The new financial year is upon us and it gives business owners and entrepreneurs the perfect chance to create some new goals for the next 12 months. While it’s a busy time of the year, I can’t stress enough how important it is that you don’t fall into the mouse trap of having uncertain objectives. It’s important to set some time aside to clearly plan ahead. This will ensure you get the most out of your new financial year goals.
Create yourself a Theme
Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
I truly believe in setting a theme for each new financial year. Creating a different theme for each year pushes to achieve all of those goals in order for you to move on to new goals in the next year. It also ensures that you’re always moving forward.
So, how can you come up with your theme for the year?
Start by reviewing what you achieved last year. Although you may not have set an official theme, I’m sure you’ll notice a pattern of what you were focused on and what your achievements had in common.
Perhaps you were focused on increasing your online followers or redeveloping your style of content to a more targeted market. Whatever your achievements may be, you should next consider how you achieved them. What was your marketing strategy? Why did it suit that particular goal and what made the year a success?
A true business owner also admits to his or her failures and learns from them. So, it’s also important to consider what you would have liked to accomplish but didn’t. Remember that it’s ok to have a couple of bumps in the road, but it’s not productive to beat yourself up over them. Determine why you didn’t accomplish certain goals and how you can do things differently for the next year. Perhaps you gave yourself too many unrealistic goals to focus on. This highlights the importance of picking a single, strong theme.
Reviewing the previous year allows you to determine what needs to be prioritised and put all of your efforts into achieving full results.
You need to clearly map out action plans for each time frame.
Why is it important to have a theme?
Having a theme keeps you organised. Even more so if you outline your clear objectives and how you will achieve them in a document. As a businessperson, you need to have a clear understanding of everything that’s happening within your business. What is the market you are targeting? Where are your leads coming from? What works and what doesn’t?
Having clear objectives makes it easier to measure results and success. This will help you tremendously at the end of this financial year and the start of the next one. It’s never too early to think ahead!
It’s one thing to have a goal, but it’s another to set a time frame for it.
Sure, it’s easy to set goals for yourself at the start of the year – whether that may be personal goals at the start of the regular year or business goals at the start of the financial year. It’s easy to remind yourself of what you want to achieve. However, your achievements will only be as effective as the time pressure you put on yourself to achieve them. Having a bucket list is great…until you reach the end of the year and realise you don’t have enough time to complete them all.
Time pressure pushes you to work harder, faster and more productive.
Time pressure also encourages you to revisit your goal. That way, you can build up to the major goal throughout the year. In order to do so, it helps to break it up and create mini-milestones to work your way to achieving the goal.
What to do after you’ve come up with a theme?
At VIS®, we focus on a 90-day marketing action plan which helps our clients hit year end-goals.
So, here’s the burning question, what should your theme be?
While this is one of the most important things to address, I’ve left it last for a reason. That’s because your theme will be different for every business. So, it’s time to think about what your business and clients need.
Essentially, you’ll want to generate more leads, more sales, and more opportunities. However, this isn’t a narrow path. You should look at your business as a whole and narrow it down from there.
Look out for your clients. What do they need from you? What can you do to add more value to them? Is your product or service the best that it can be?
Look out for your employees. How can you boost the morale of the company? How can you keep your employees even more motivated than last year? Remember that business is all about teamwork and if your employees are united, you’ll be able to work on your theme a lot easier.
So, are you ready to discuss your business theme and action plans for the next 12 months?
Let’s talk!
Book your 30-minutes FREE Consultation at https://bit.ly/2GgBJ3k.
