Spring Clean Your Business With These 4 Tips
Now that warm weather is here to stay, many of us are ready to tidy up a bit and get a fresh start with spring cleaning. While you may be thinking of the physical sense, your business could likely benefit from some spring cleaning as well. This applies to every area of your business. Just like anything else in life, our businesses change with the world around us, and it’s important that we can keep up with them to maximize their success and minimize any potential headaches. Below is a list of some tactics you may want to include as you nail down your business goals this year.
- Goal Setting and Check-Ins
Hopefully, when you started your business you had a goal in mind; maybe you even had more than one. Now is the time to take a look at how close you are to achieving those goals, celebrate the ones you’ve attained, and get back to planning for others. Some of these may be worth finessing if your business has pivoted. There may also be new goals you want to add. As your business evolves, your goals should too. Taking the time to assess new short and long-term goals with your team and set up tangible benchmarks to measure your success can help keep you from getting discouraged or distracted when obstacles appear.
- An Overall Brand Health Check
With your goals re-aligned, it’s time to check in with your branding. Does your business still do and stand for what it did a year ago, or have you made some necessary changes to hone in on your brand? Having clarity with yourself and your team makes it easier to communicate clearly with outside sources, including stakeholders, customers, and other businesses. Once your team is clear on where you stand, you can check in with the aspects of your business that represent you – including your website, social media, and upcoming marketing campaigns – to ensure that all of your branding reflects the business you have now.
- Keeping Systems Tidy
While we all want to believe that everything is always in order, typically everyone has at least one chink in their proverbial armor. Are your files organized? Are your books up to date? What about your client list? Checking in with the systems you’ve put in place helps you see exactly where you’re standing to help you move forward. This process can also help you learn to navigate those weak spots and maybe even change those systems to ones that work better for you. Perhaps you work better when everything is digitized the second you get it, or maybe you need to set aside one afternoon a week to do it. Whatever the case, it is essential to make sure your systems are working for you and not the other way around.
- Physical Cleaning
It had to come up at some point, right? While cleanliness is not a virtue, many experts have touted the benefits of having a clean workspace, whether that be a communal office, or just the corner of your home that is carved out for business during working hours (the coffee table counts!). For many, having a clean workspace keeps distractions to a minimum because the objects around you remind you of work and not the other things going on in your life. This can increase your concentration on work and let you get back to those other aspects even sooner. Not to mention, having free space can give your imagination a chance to come up with creative new ideas for your business, which is always a good thing.
