As you get within touching distance of a New Year, you are presented with an amazing opportunity. You can either watch your business get a year older or you can help your business become a year better.
A year better
To make your business a year better, you need to do two things:
- Collect every business lesson you have learned this year.
- Invest what you have learned into 2011.
In real terms, this means making a few tough decisions. It means accepting that there are things you do (and have probably done for years) which are not helping your business, but are somehow “comfortable”. Success comes from doing what is right, rather than what is easy, which is why so few people ever achieve real success. The easy route is exactly that: Easy. It’s also pointless, from a commercial development point of view.
People taking the easy approach do not get a New Year on the first day of January. They simply get another chance to relive the same old year over again!
The world is full of business owners, who complain but stay the same. They want things to improve, but they keep doing what’s easy, rather than fixing what’s broken. The challenge here, is that this form of neglect is so subtle. You see, these errors in judgement, repeated each day, seem to have little negative impact on us in the short term. It’s only when we pull back and look at our overall progress (or lack of progress) that we see the cumulative damage caused.
What areas of your business are silently begging for your attention?
Find them. Put a plan together to fix what’s wrong and work that plan! If you know there’s something wrong in a particular area of your business, but you are not sure what it is or how to fix it, speak to someone who has the answers you need as soon as possible. Expert advice from a great; accountant, business advisor, marketing professional or IT consultant etc, can help you turn things around and get your business moving forward.
Remember this wonderful old saying: “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always got!”