Why is spring cleaning your business important? It is important because in most cases, as busy business owners, the activities that we partake in the design, build, and fund our business become ritualistic. You are on autopilot just doing what you think you should be doing or what you were told to do. You usually don’t take the time to actually process and analysis the activities for effectiveness once you are making money. But you know that you can be making money in your business and still be wasting a ton of resources that can leave you in a less than a stellar place.
So, when spring cleaning your business, you should take a full day or two and strip the ritualistic habits you participate in and take a magnifying glass to them. Make sure that they are working effectively and yielding the outcomes you actually desire.
Here are some steps you should take to start spring cleaning your business now:
Audit Your Activity – It is important to know what is happening in your business on a consistent basis because it can directly affect your bottom line. Things that are on your To-Do List consistently and are being moved from week to week – month to month, are a sign of a greater problem than just poor time management. Audit your daily activities in 15-blocks to figure out where the time is being spent. This will let you know if you are indeed wasting time throughout the day, or if you just have too much to do are prioritizing. If this is the case, you then need to seriously think about outsourcing. Get the Time Assessment Worksheet here.
Assess Automations – There are so many tools that can help make managing your business more effective and efficient. You don’t need to be burdened daily with doing the repetitive tasks that suck up a significant portion of your day. I never thrilled about stopping what I am doing to post on social media, but I know how important it is to have a strong social media presence so, I use an app called Hootsuite to schedule my social media post a month at a time. It’s a little like, “setting it and forgetting it.” There are a ton of other tools that you can use as well to automate your business. You can find them here.
Evaluate Your Sales Process - What are your best channels for getting new customers? Are your upsell and add-on tactics working in your funnel? What products are selling and what products aren’t? After analyzing all of this, you then need to determine what needs to be tweaked and what needs to be archived for a while.
Reconcile Your Books – Knowing how much you are spending in and on your business is essential to profitability. You should really get in the habit of reconciling your books on a monthly basis if not weekly, but you should definitely do a deep dive once a quarter. How many times have you noticed months later that an app you had only intended to try for 7-days, you had been paying for 7- months, because you forgot to cancel your subscription? These little things can add up and become a drain for which your money goes down - never to be seen again.
Reorganize Your Systems – Before you can get to the processes you need to have your systems in place. How are you going to prepare the work to be done and who is going to be responsible for actually doing the work? If the systems are flawed so will your processes. So, if the work isn’t being done in a timely and effective manner, check out your systems and make some changes when Spring Cleaning Your Business.
Competitive Analysis - How do your products, programs, and services compare to your competitors. Start researching. Remember that analyzing your competitors’ products, services, and programs, along with their systems and processes for acquiring and retaining customers is not to trash them but to make sure that you are doing everything in your power to secure your piece of the market and present your unique value proposition.
Check your links—It took me hiring a new assistant to realize that the links that I had in my email signature, social media platforms, and email campaigns were antiquated. It is so easy to forget to do something so simple on a consistent basis because you have more important things to contend with within your business, but it is important to remember that a slight shift in the structure of a page or URL can send your prospects to page-not-found messages. This might result in that customer being disappointed and potentially not utilizing your services in the future.
Although this might seem like a lot to do when you have customers to service and money to make, trust me, it will make a significant difference in how you operate in your business and how much money you make.
P.S. These are not all of the systems and processes that you should be cleaning. This is just a drop in the bucket to get you started. Have you joined our weekly newsletter called “Change Agentz Chronicles? “If not, you are missing out on valuable information that can change your business. Join the Newsletter here.
Strategically Yours,
Tracy V. Allen