New Years' Resolutions for Your Business by:Jan B. King

You can meet your goals for your business this year

. Consider these resolutions as ten steps to your success in 2005.

1. Develop a business plan or strategic plan. You won't get where you're going unless you know where you want to be and let your employees know as well.

2. Constantly Promote Your Business. You can't execute one marketing effort each year and expect your business to grow. Plan marketing efforts quarterly or even monthly and plan time for follow through and tracking of results.

3. Create action plans for each person in your organization. Make sure every employee knows how his or her job relates to the company's overall vision, and that each has individual objectives and goals with measurable standards and timetables.

4. Survey your employees. Sometimes the biggest employee dissatisfactions are the easiest things to fix. Know what changes your employees would like to make in their work lives and do your best to increase their quality of work life (and usually their productivity as well).

5. Survey your customers and suppliers. Maybe the way you are doing business is costing you relationships with suppliers and customers. Know what bugs them and make it easy to do business with your company.

6. Set up business performance measures and get only those key indicator reports you need to run your business. Don't waste your time and staff time compiling reports you never use. Know what you need to know to run a successful business, study those reports every month, and use them to take action.

7. Do a human resource compliance audit and stay out of legal trouble. Unless you have a fully staffed HR department, you may not be aware of all of the compliance laws regarding employees. Have an audit done by an outside professional and prevent problems that could result in million dollar lawsuits by unhappy ex-employees.

8. Know your top 10 customers - what more can you do for them, where can you find more just like them. List your top ten customers by sales volume and let everyone in your organization know who they are. Are they in a particular geographic region, of a particular type - what is similar about them? Do everything you can to build on those relationships.

9. Get a coach or mentor, or join a business support group. Build accountability into your own personal planning by asking others to help you turn your dreams into reality. Enlist people who you can trust to give you objective feedback and create deadlines for your planned successes.

10. Make a list of the year's accomplishments and celebrate your successes with your employees. Don't forget to acknowledge and celebrate each of your milestones. The best part of creating a plan is to know when you've reached your goals, allowing some time to pause and appreciate the accomplishment, and begin to create your next set of goals.

About the author

Jan B. King is the former President & CEO of Merritt Publishing, a top 50 woman-owned and run business in Los Angeles and the author of Business Plans to Game Plans: A Practical System for Turning Strategies into Action (John Wiley & Sons, 2004). She has helped hundreds of businesses with her book and her ebooks, The Do-It-Yourself Business Plan Workbook, and The Do-It-Yourself Game Plan Workbook. See www.janbking.com for more information.

jan@janbking.com

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