For a lot of businesses December can be a busy period, and reaching the end of the year often feels like you’ve made it over the finish line and can finally relax for a little while. But, utilizing this time wisely and working on reviews and planning for the year ahead will help to ensure that your business is even more successful in 2018. So what’s on your end of year checklist?
Review
One of the first steps on your end of year checklist should be reviewing all your major achievements for the year and sharing it with your staff. This not only give you and your staff a sense of accomplishment for the year, but also makes it a lot easier to figure out what projects/goals need to be improved. An important but often underrated part of this review should be reviewing your client relationships. It is much more cost effective to retain a client than to get a new one so sitting down and getting some feedback from your clients about what they want from you and how you can improve your working relationship can go a long way to saving you heartbreak in the future.
Product
Reviewing your product range can be really helpful when trying to figure out what products to discontinue or to increase production of, and doing it at the end of the year after the Christmas rush will help paint a picture of what your most successful products are. Is it worth having 10 color or flavor varieties when one is always sold out and the others are sitting in the warehouse? Do you need to increase/decrease the price of a certain product? Do you need different serving sizes for your product? Which high margin products should you be advertising more? All these questions need to be asked and doing a proper review of each product’s sales figures will help clarify what you need more of and what you need less of.
Staff
There’s no better time to review your staff than the end of the year. December is usually a good time to review staff performance because it coincides with when you’ll be handing out end of year bonuses, so doing your review at this time will mean staff get the bonuses they deserve and feel appropriately compensated for their hard work throughout the year. It’s also a time of the year when there is a lot of changing of staff, whether that be permanently leaving or going on a holiday over summer, so reviewing how busy you’ll be and how much staff you’ll need over this period is really important if you want to be prepared. This means knowing when important staff member are not going to contactable, and having protocols and systems in place to deal with any emergencies that might occur while they’re away.
The end of the year provides us with an opportunity to improve, an opportunity that should not be ignored. If you’re too busy running your business to put all these processes in place then a business consultant could be what you need. Speak to us today if you think Haines could help take your business to the next level.