New year’s resolutions. We’ve all made them, and broke them, often before the end of January. The start of a new year always brings a fresh approach to life; both personal and business. Perhaps the time off over the Christmas and New Year break refreshes the mind and encourages optimism for a successful year ahead.
So, how do you ensure your new year resolutions don’t fade after the first few weeks of the year?
Here’s a twist that can make your resolutions more durable, more beneficial, and less prone to that embarrassing quick fade.
Align goals to your business
Try aligning personal goals to your business goals. This can deliver more benefits than you might have anticipated. As an example, let’s say your goal is to take a month off in September this year for a family holiday. You’ve booked your tickets, so your goal now has a deadline, and you’ll need to have your business ready by then to operate without you. So, what’s the next steps? Here’s a few things to start with:
- Start delegating more tasks to other people in the business
- Create an operating manual so everyone can follow clearly defined procedures
- Improve the accounting system so you can have easy access to the health of the business while you’re away
Notice how aligning your personal goal of a holiday with business goals provides both purpose and motivation to empower your original resolution. Your goal of taking a holiday now has a positive influence on your business, helping to achieve business goals that have probably been in the pipeline for some time:
- Learning to delegate means the business becomes less dependent on you, allowing you to focus on other business or personal goals. Additionally, the business becomes more valuable to others when it comes time to sell
- Capturing business processes in an operations manual should lead to greater efficiency, cost saving, and more consistent customer service. Documented processes will also make it easier and faster to train new staff, and help with any growth plans your business may have. You’re also adding significant value in the eyes of a future buyer.
- Improving the accounting system, such as moving to a cloud-based program like Xero, will lead to more transparency over the business financials as data is in real-time, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world
Final thoughts
Keep it simple. Break down your goals into smaller steps, each with its own deadline. It will seem less daunting and you’re more likely to achieve your overall goal if it’s broken down into bite size chunks.
Use graphic. Using visuals, whether that be a chart, graph, calendar or images gives you a visual way of tacking your progress, which is a powerful motivator that keeps everyone on track towards the finish line.
If you’ve got some goals that you’re not sure how to tackle, reach out for a chat and let’s make sure this is the year to achieve those goals.
(08) 6381 2404
