People have been making New Year’s resolutions since time immemorial. And most of us make numerous personal ones. But what about New Year’s resolutions for your business?
What do you want to accomplish this year professionally?
Where do you want your business to be in December 2010?
I can think of a lot of things that I’d like Aqua Vita to accomplish this year. But here are a few resolutions we have for 2010 to make us better than ever.
1. Create monthly editorial calendars.
I am a planner. However, I am also a chronic procrastinator. (Go figure at how this works together, but it does. It also explains 90 percent of my college experience.)
This means that when I plan something out, I can wait until just about the last minute to knock it out, and I knock it out awesomely. However, if I don’t plan, I completely forget about it and then I have one of those panic attacks that happen about fifteen minutes after the deadline goes whooshing by. (Unlike Douglas Adams, I don’t much like that sound.)
So, with definite deadlines and a plan, I’m going to ensure that our blog not only updates on time, but brings you excellent content with every post. I’ve already gotten a head start on this one, with an editorial calendar that covers the first three months of 2010.
2. Spend 8 hours a week on AV exclusively.
This is difficult to do when you’re in a service industry. You spend so much time doing things for your clients that, more often than not, you forget to do things for your own business.
I would love to take at least one day a week to work on Aqua Vita Creative. Marketing, blog planning, social media, developing internal systems, whatever needs to get done to make us more efficient and more remarkable.
And while we’re talking about marketing…
3. Build client personas.
It’s something you hear from every marketer: you need to create a persona of your perfect client so that you know exactly who you’re talking to with your copy. Marketing materials without a definite audience wind up being too generic to be effective.
I know this. However, it’s only been in the past few months that we’ve sat down to start hashing out just who our target audience is. This year, our goal is to have two or three clear client personas built before the end of the first quarter.
4. Send all clients monthly reports.
Good news: We’ve done a great job with keeping in touch with all our clients and keeping them abreast of the work we’re doing. Bad news: They don’t necessarily have any reports to that effect (and neither do we).
Monthly reports are fantastic, wonderful things. Both you and your client know where you stand at the end of the month, and it makes it easier for both of you to offer suggestions and refinements. By the end of the first quarter of this year, we want to be sending these beautiful monthly reports to all our clients so that we can constantly improve our work.
5. Eliminate inefficiency and make shiny new systems!
“Efficiency” is one of our major goals for 2010, and we’re doing that two ways. One, by trashing inefficient processes. For example: doing remote deposit checking instead of having to drive to the bank every time we need to deposit a check. Two, reworking the way we create proposals and contracts so that they take two days instead of two weeks.
We want to put in place systems that allow us to spend more time doing productive things – working on our stuff, handling client accounts – and less time doing data entry, scheduling, pricing, and administrative tasks.
6. Hit up a bunch of tradeshows and conventions.
All right, we’ve spent enough time with our nose to the grindstone, working 14-16 hours days to get the company up and running. Now, it’s time to turn our focus to education and networking.
Whether it’s for our industry or an industry that we’re working with, we want hit up some tradeshows and conventions where we can hang out with people face to face. It gets kind of lonely staring at a computer screen all day.
And now…a bonus resolution!
7. Constantly upgrade technology and skill sets.
Getting a new business up and running is a whirlwind, to say the least. When you’re first starting out, you care less about how recent your software is and more about whether your checkbook will be in the black or the red at the end of the month.
However, once you’re established, it’s time to take your eyes off the aforementioned grindstone and turn them toward making your business more awesome. This means taking the time to upgrade skill sets and technology to make you more effective.
For example, a major purchase for me this year will be a new computer. I want to run the latest versions of the Adobe Creative Suite, something that pushes my current PC to the limits. Upgrading my machine will make me more efficient, as it saves me load times and lockups.
What are some of the New Year’s resolutions that you have for your business? Where do you want to be on December 21, 2010? Tell us in the comments below!
Are there any topics you’d like to see us cover in this blog? Shoot me an email at michelle at aquavitacreative dot com.
Picture by Optical illusion
