With a New Year come new possibilities for personal and professional growth. It’s a great time to revise your goals and create new ones. Sticking to the overarching goals that you have may be the best course of action, but a bit of fine tuning never hurts. That’s why it’s always good to reevaluate your approach when a New Year is at hand. Let’s go through a few things to set 2020 business goals.
Quantify Everything
Having lofty goals is always a good thing. However, you shouldn’t price yourself out of growth in the first place. Hence, it’s always good to review finances in the beginning of the year. This will help form a clear picture of what is necessary and expendable.
For example, if you’re planning a new hardware upgrade for the office, it may eat in to other crucial expenses. If you’re planning a software upgrade, you may be able to save money on it by outsourcing. However, these options will only present themselves once you quantify every purchase, sale, and revenue stream.
This is perhaps the most important thing to do before setting 2020 business goals.
Schedule a Team Building Exercise Every Quarter
We all need to be reminded what it is to work as a team every once in a while. The modern office environment which confines employees to cubicles is hardly conducive to teamwork. Hence, team building exercises are very necessary. This activity doesn’t have to be a collaborative project. It can be a dinner, or a barbecue. It can also be a visit to an ice cream parlor or a bowling alley. Try arranging a one day gaming tournament if your co-workers are into that.
You can always go for general outings, but that doesn’t always work. It’s too general and not enticing enough to make people attend. Instead, try spicing things up by arranging small games that workers can play together. You can also try to engage your employees by asking them to share experiences or playing video games with them.
An activity every quarter will help employees become more comfortable. It may also result in them discovering team dynamics that may ultimately benefit the company.
Hire an Online Business Manager
Online Business Managers are hired to take your business global. In every sense of the word, online business managers will help to manage the part of your business that rests online. In the near future, with smartphones and the internet completely taking over, you won’t have a choice.
2020 is the rise of a new decade and with it come a lot of new technologies. The advent of IoT, 5G, artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc., means that things will be more automated than ever. To take advantage of this, better CRM technologies, better automated response systems and security protocols will have to be setup. You simply can’t do this without an online business manager.
Apart from the incorporation of new technologies, OBMs can help you get rid of dead weight. For example, they can help you get rid of old hardware that can’t keep up with new systems. They will also help you upgrade to smarter solutions that will save company finances to invest in more high-value additions.
Online business managers will also help you shift the workload of repetitive, unproductive work. For example, they will help to outsource work that is not feasible on a budget or tasks that waste valuable employee time. In this regard they will help you reach out to virtual assistants. These can help you to get repetitive, low value tasks off the table.
Miscellaneous Tips
These are just a few tips that you should repeat every year, regardless of which decade you’re entering into.
Remember Q4
The New Year is a fresh start. This means a clean slate, a chance to start over, etc, etc. However, it’s easy to forget Q4 in the rush of things. You shouldn’t give that a pass no matter what. You should be objective and tough about the things that went wrong in the last quarter. Don’t brush it off thinking it was a onetime thing. The fact that it happened at the end of the last year should make you more worrisome. It shows that your team probably slacked off and missed things because the year was ending.
Whatever the reason was, it’s probably best to check on why certain failures occurred and to eliminate that reason. If that’s not possible, you should do your best to mitigate it.
Review the Last Year
Following up on the last quarter, you should review the last year that just occurred. Take account of the frivolous expenditures that occurred, and the operational failures that happened. Single out the reasons for the inefficiencies which occurred and what solutions you tried that never worked.
You could even try making a few charts or a presentation out of it. Remember to make it a team exercise because one person can always miss something crucial. Different perspectives should be welcomed instead of shut out.
After you’ve done reviewing the last year, you should analyze the plans for this year. If there are any similarities between the two, you should revise the new plans keeping in mind what you’ve learned.
Set an Annual Goal
This is quite obvious. One should always have an annual goal in mind. Whether it’s a revenue goal, or an outreach goal, you should have one. This helps a company keep its eye on the ball. It helps the company move forward and to keep hitting its goals every year.
A word of advice should be to break down the goal into small steps so that achieving it is not ‘foggy’. This means that you should have a roadmap of how to achieve that goal. It shouldn’t just be a pipe dream. It should be a quantifiable, achievable goal.
If you use these tips to set your 2020 business goals, you’ll probably get more realistic and achievable results.
Need help setting and achieving your goals? Grab my FREE Simple Goal Setting Worksheet that can help guide you to better and more successful planning.
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