Many of our clients at Coworking Connection are hardworking entrepreneurs, taking advantage of our productive workspace and amenities to help them knock business their goals out of the park.
If you are also an entrepreneur, you know that this is a time of year for business reflection: how did you do, and how far will your business go next year?
Read on for our entrepreneur’s end-of-year guide to help you evaluate this year and plan for the next.
Evaluate Your Goals (and Use a Victory Log!)
Take a look back at this year’s goals.
What did you accomplish?
Where did you fall short?
Getting an accurate picture will help you analyze what worked and what didn’t, while also setting you up to plan for a successful year.
Remember that our brains tend to dwell on negative experiences more than positive. To prevent your brain from viewing this exercise as a way to bully yourself, be intentional about remembering your accomplishments.
One way to do this is to create a victory log. Write down all of your accomplishments — even the small ones. For example, when you started your business, securing a business loan or making your first sales call were huge victories. You hadn’t done those before!
Additionally, write down the big victories, such as landing your biggest client so far, making enough money to hire an assistant, expanding to another city, and more.
This will not only tell your brain that these memories are important, it will be a helpful reminder for you when you feel like you haven’t accomplished much.
Add to your victory log as you go. You’ll be amazed at how you’ve grown when you look back, and you’ll also feel proud of what you’ve done.
Evaluate Your Calendar
In addition to evaluating your goals, take some time now to evaluate your calendar for the past year. Where did you spend your time? What tasks took up the majority of your time? What tasks do you wish you had more time for?
This is an important way to analyze your productivity as well as your strengths.
For example, if you wrote down a 9:00 team meeting for every Monday but rarely made it to the office in time, you might want to ask how important that meeting is for you? How difficult is it to get to the office on time? What needs to change — should you reschedule the meeting, or can you manage the meeting topics over email in a more efficient way?
Or maybe a review of your calendar will help you see that you’re spending the majority of your time doing administrative tasks, and it is time to hire an assistant.
Evaluate Your Measures
How do you measure success? Have your measurements changed as your business has grown? It’s important for measures of success to change as your business changes.
If you had a rough year due to the never-ending pandemic, health problems, or a slow economy in your city, it wouldn’t be fair to hold yourself to the same measurements of 2019, for example.
Likewise, if your business continues to grow, it wouldn’t make sense to use your first milestones as your measurements of success. Move those milestones down the road and give yourself something bigger to reach.
Look Ahead to Your New Goals
Now that you have a more accurate picture of how you did this year, it’s time to look ahead to how you want to do next year.
Set realistic goals based on your broader goals, your evaluation of this year, and your forecast for next. Be sure to create an action plan for each goal, and break that plan out into doable steps.
Then — and this is important — put your action plan steps into your calendar. This is one of the greatest ways to ensure you reach your goals. When big goals are broken down into action steps — and when those action steps have deadlines — and when those deadlines are written into your calendar, you are much more likely to accomplish what you set out to do.
Additionally, when you’re writing your action steps into your calendar, ask yourself:
- What resources do I need to complete this step?
- Who do I need to help me with this?
- How much money will this step take?
- How much time will this step take?
- What skills do I need? Do I have them? If not, should I hire this step out?
Look Ahead to Your Market
This is also a good time to analyze your market. How has it been doing, and what is predicted for the coming year? Get a broad understanding of this, and then dig deep into your specific corner of the market.
Ask yourself:
- Have you added any new products or services? Are you going to be adding new products or services soon?
- How have your customers’ needs/wants changed?
- Have your customers changed their communication preferences?
- Are customers reporting satisfaction with your company?
- How are you remaining relevant and unique to your customers?
This is a good time to ask for feedback from your customers to inform your future decisions.
Say Thank You
It’s never a bad idea to say thank you to your customers and business partners. This is a good time to show your appreciation for their business and collaborations. Send a thank you card or personalized gift as a way to stay connected, stay relevant, and stay top of mind.
If you need distraction-free, professional space to follow this entrepreneur’s end-of-year guide, to work alone, collaborate with partners, hold sales meetings, or host events as you work toward your business goals, get in touch with Coworking Connection in Murrieta and Temecula. Give us a call at 1-800-762-1391 to set up a tour, or stop by.