You’ve walked the walk, talked the talk and converted sales to profits. You have had ups and downs in the business but still you prevailed. In short, you fought the good fight and kept the faith. We are now sixty-three days to the end of the year and you are wondering what else you can do to finish the year with a bang.
TIPS FOR ENTREPRENEURS:
ASSESS YOUR EXPENSES
Dig into the financial books carefully and see what areas could do with a little tweaking to save on expenses. Check your assets and liabilities and evaluate whether it’s necessary to keep up with monthly machinery maintenance costs or deciding to buy new machinery to stretch you for a couple of years before they start demanding maintenance. Also check out your lenders and vendors and their competitions, your competitors’ vendors and lenders too. There will always be a way to haggle and get better pricing when you do careful comparisons of products/services/costs without necessarily compromising on final product/service quality. Here, you are looking at closing the year on a good footnote but still maintaining a great pace ahead of the competition by reducing many expenses to accommodate next year’s budgeting.
END OF YEAR FLASH SALES AND DISCOUNTS
Apart from Black Friday, every buyer at this time of the year always seems to catch buying fever or get a bit unpredictable in their buying history. In short, take advantage of impulse buying and promote your products and services through offers. Clients are always on the lookout for discounts and flash sales. Offering discounts and flash sales to close on a good financial backing isn’t such a bad idea. This though, can only be possible if you had a good run from the beginning of the year. If you were marred with losses, discounting might lead to more losses. This ENTREPRENEUR article offers simple and easy-to-use selling tactics that can drastically increase your end of year sales https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250289
CASH AT HAND
Having cash at hand at this time is really important for you. Apart from miscellaneous expenses, unplanned and/or forgotten purchases and transactions might pop up at the end of year frenzy. Having more cash at hand insulates you from unnecessary hassle of waiting for checks and taking bank/atm trips for withdrawals.
MAXIMIZE SOCIAL MEDIA REACH
Common in a lot of traditions, the end of the year usually includes spending time with family in the upcountry far from urban cities where they can easily access services and products. Social media platforms offer a means to reach out to these people. If you do deliveries or can deliver services to them, even better. Let them know of such offers and how they can reach you from the social platforms.
REVISIT YOUR NEW-YEARS RESOLUTION
End of year is the perfect time to go through your vision board and check whether you were able to achieve your goals and objectives of the year from the beginning up to now. Recalibrate and resort to improving if you slacked and haven’t yet achieved your year’s resolution. One of the best approaches offered is through cutting your goal into small achievable chunks of steps to be carried out from yearly-half-yearly-quarterly-monthly- and -daily. If the goal cannot be achieved with the remaining time of the year, now would be the worst time to kick yourself in the butt for the failures.
Maintain the vision and set ways to achieve them as early as now before starting the new year. Using the method I mentioned above combined with the experience you gathered earlier in the year, you are now a step closer to reaching your new year’s goal with the roadmap you just made. You can start as early as now working on next year’s plan. This will also help keep your head straight and give you the push to continue as soon as the year starts. As witnessed by most entrepreneurs, lack of closure can be too nagging forcing you to continue with the project much easier than completely starting from ground zero as soon as the new year kicks off.
GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK LAST WEEK OR TWO OF THE YEAR
After hard grinding the whole year, you will need a time-out to think, reflect and relax and also catch up with friends and family. This time should be sacred and spend it close to those who matter the most to you. It could be the only time that you really connect with them and can also help offset the few lonely nights you had to spend in the office so as meet or beat deadlines.
TIPS FOR 9 – 5 PROFESSIONALS
SEND THANK-YOU NOTES TO YOUR NETWORKS
This might not mean a lot to you but reaching out and expressing your gratitude to your network shows that you care. It is a great way to remain memorable in the minds of those who bring value to your work. Send them thank you notes and if you can afford, send tokens of gratitude too. These will do wonders for both of you in the long run. And that is how your business can grow through referrals.
START WRITING YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
You’ve had a great run during the year. While getting close to the end, develop your plan for next year. Create a roadmap of what to do as soon as the year starts. You do not have to make a new year’s resolution when the year has started. Starting now can also help keep you in check while indulging and taking care during the December holidays and all its decadence it offers.
TIE-UP LOOSE ENDS
Before jumping to the bucket-list, clear up your to-do list. Those activities that you haven’t done up to now might just be as good as never to be done. Cross them off your list and reduce mental clutter of having to remember trivialities. But if you can do them, then cross them out as soon as possible.
Do you have a huge spam list in your emails? Unsubscribe from those newsletters that do not offer you value to your life.
BRUSH UP YOUR RESUME
By now, you have figured out where in the career ladder you want to be and in what industry. Revisit your resume adding up the skills and experiences you have gathered so far and remove the old ones that won’t serve you in your desired career anymore. As you’ll be doing this, start your research on the networks you should join and the people you’ll need to contact to help you get your career to the next level in the coming year. Start sending them requests for appointments and meetings with them as soon as the year starts.
REVISE YOUR ONLINE PROFILES
While brushing up your CV or resume, remember to brush up on your online profiles too.
PLAN ON HOW TO GET THERE
You have brushed-up on your resume and have amended your online profiles. You feel ready for the new job in 2020. But do you have the skills and experiences to land the job? If not, work on increasing your leverage and how to stay above the competition. One way to achieve this is by booking short courses to do part-time and attending seminars and conferences to give you the necessary skills and experiences to land that dream job.
TAKE TIME OFF
For as long as you’ll remain human, a year will prove to have its ups and downs. Beating yourself up for the failures and mistakes or unachieved goals will not help but drive your morale and esteem down. Instead, take some time off to relax, reflect and recalibrate for 2020.
feature photo credit: Getty Images