There is nothing magic about the New Year. Turning the page on your calendar doesn’t promise success for your water damage restoration business.
What the New Year does provide, however, is a chance. A chance to reevaluate your goals. A chance to take action. A chance be honest with yourself about what you want in the upcoming months.
What’s special about the New Year is that it is a hard stop followed by a new beginning. It forces business owners to take a look at what happened over the last twelve months and consider what that means for the short term future of their business. With that information, you can create a plan to take action on those goals. Here’s what you need to know about setting goals for the New Year and making sure you reach those goals.
Looking Back Before You Look Forward
Before you can set goals for 2018, you have to be honest about the last year and what it meant for your business. Gather together the records you have kept over the year and spend an afternoon evaluating the numbers. This is a chance to look at how your business grew in the last year and where you really struggled. It’s an opportunity to be honest with yourself about what didn’t work and celebrate what did.
Make Space for Your Dream
Don’t make the mistake of jumping right into the nitty-gritty of setting business goals. Give yourself a chance to dream big for your business. This can be done with a simple brainstorm session with your business partners, a mentor, or a friend. Run through everything you hope for your business over the next 12 months, no matter how ambitious. Then, once you’ve got it all out there, you can start to determine what is realistic. You can sort through your dreams and determine what is possible in the short term and what is better suited as a long term goal.
Turn Your Dreams into Goals
Now you can take the product of your brainstorming session and write them down as concrete goals. Good goals follow a timeline, in this case the end of 2018. Good goals are also specific enough that you can measure your success as time passes.
We suggest identifying anywhere from three to five main goals for your business in 2018 and writing them down. These goals are what should guide you through the next several months.
Turning Your Goals into Actions
You can set specific goals for your year, but without a plan for taking action it will be difficult to make progress. The best way to start moving towards big goals is to break them down into smaller steps.
In this case, it may be helpful to use a practice of reverse engineering your goals. Instead of starting with today and the first step, start with December 31st, 2018. Based on the goals you have set, determine what reaching that goal will look like at the end of the year. Then, work backwards month by month. Consider where you will need to be on December 1st, November 1st, and so forth to reach your goal.
For example, if you have goals for increasing your profit by a certain number in 2018, don’t get caught up in getting from here to there all at once. Instead, start at your year end goal and consider what one step back look like. What will your numbers need to look like when you close out November? Then, take one more step back, determining what your numbers will need to look like when you close out October.
Implementing Your New Plan
It is one thing to create goals and to break them down into steps. It’s another thing entirely to take action on your plan. Implementing changes in a workplace can be difficult. You may believe in your vision for 2018, but your entire team needs to be on board to make it happen.
Once you have a plan for 2018, hold a meeting with your entire crew outlining that plan. Explain to them the big vision and the steps you are taking to get there. This is a good chance to incentivize the changes you plan to make. If answering the phones 100 percent of the time is one step in your plan for increasing profits in 2018, for instance, you can offer a monthly reward for completed call logs. Or, if shortening the time between the first call and your initial on-site visit fits your goal to increase customer satisfaction, you can offer a reward to the employees who consistently show up on time.
Finding Support for Your New Years Goals
The beginning of the year can be overwhelming for business owners. You know where you want to take your company in 2018. You may even know how to get there. But you may not feel equipped with the right tools to take your first steps.
At More Floods, we offer support to water damage restoration business owners in the form of proven operational systems and marketing strategies. Using our tested and proven resources, you can implement your new goals with confidence. To learn more about becoming a member of our network, click here or call 1-866-667-3356 to chat with a member of the More Floods team.