Is your business set for the end-of-the-year, holiday rush? With more tasks and year-end deadlines, this time of year can get stressful. Chances are you are already preparing for the end of the year, but a solid to-do list can help you relieve some headaches and set your business up for success in the new year.
Evaluate Inventory
It’s time to prepare your end-of-year values for your accountant. What product didn’t sell that you can write off your business taxes? This can help improve your overall profit margin. Do you have items that are selling slower than anticipated? Move it off your shelves by putting it on sale or bundling it with hot selling products. Bundling products is a smart selling strategy – it creates value for the guests and makes them feel that they got a deal.
Your inventory checklist:
- Figure out which products are dead-stock/slow moving
- Create bundles and packages of slow-moving inventory with top-sellers
- Analyze your products and project ordering trends
- Perform an inventory count to make sure your inventory value is accurate for tax season
Marketing
Before you go out and spend your hard-earned dollars on new marketing campaigns, take the time to evaluate your marketing initiatives over the past year and analyze the data so you can be more cost-effective with your budget.
Your marketing checklist:
- Evaluate your social media using the built-in analytics to determine:
- Your social media platform with the highest engagement
- What types of posts (photos, promotions, blogs, video, etc.) performed the best
- Ideal posting times
- Decide which campaign was the least successful and remove it from your new year marketing initiatives
- Refresh the look of your email campaigns
- Make sure your client contact information is up-to-date
- Starting planning your campaigns for the Q1 of the new year
Set Goals
Goals help provide the momentum your business needs to grow, yet many businesses believe that the only metric to focus on is revenue. While revenue is important, it’s a result of all the things that occurred yesterday. When focusing just on your profits, there is little you can do to change all of yesterday’s missed opportunities to increase revenue.
At Millennium Systems International, we were the first to create essential key performance indicators (KPIs) that have a forward focus on growth. You may also know these metrics as our 6 growth indicators: New clients per month, new client retention, repeat client retention, frequency of visit, average ticket, and productivity. By setting S.M.A.R.T. goals based on the essential KPIs, your business can see long-term success in the New Year.
S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Specific: Well-defined to inform employees exactly what is expected, when, and how much.
Measurable: Provide milestones to track progress and motivate employees toward achievement.
Attainable: Must be achievable with the effort by an average employee, not too high or too low.
Relevant: You should focus on the greatest impact on the overall company strategy.
Timely: Need enough time to achieve the goal, but not too much to undermine performance.
Your goals checklist:
- Determine what goals you did and did not meet this year.
- For those you did not meet, what stood in your way? How can you improve next year?
- For those you met, how did you conquer it? How can you raise the bar even higher?
- Set new S.M.A.R.T. goals for the new year in each category below:
- New Clients per Month – How can you attract more new clients to your business?
- New Client Retention – How can you secure more new customers as clients?
- Repeat Client Retention – How can you keep more clients happy and coming back?
- Average Ticket – How can you increase the average amount a client spends at your business?
- Frequency of Visit – How can you increase the average amount of client visits per year?
- Productivity – How can you book more appointments?
- Re-booking – How can you secure more clients’ next visit at checkout?
- Service Sales – How can you up-sell, cross-sell more services as well as sell more add-on services?
- Retail Sales – How can you sell more products?
Download Your End of Year Checklist
If you like having a tangible checklist to make sure you’ve accomplished everything on your to-do list, we’ve got you covered. Download our free end-of-year checklist and stay on track for the last few weeks of the year, as well as set your business up for an organized start to the new year.
