We know you’re a badass boss running a successful business. You rock! But even the most successful businesses can benefit from a good and thorough spring cleaning every year. Spring is the perfect time to change those tired old habits that could be messing with your bottom line. (Yep, you might be strangling your profitability and not even know it—yikes!)
Learn how to take a good, hard look at your operations and reorganize your efforts for strategic, long-term growth with these five tips:
Tip #1: It’s Time to Make More Time
Taking the time to step back and figure out where your time is going is essential to a successful business. Many businesses don’t measure how their time is spent, and how it’s possibly being wasted. And time is money, right? So, it’s a good idea to use this spring cleaning period to map out your workflow from start to finish, in order to find what’s possibly slowing your company down.
Once you understand what tasks you need to focus on yourself, you can delegate or outsource the smaller things to others. When you make time to be creative, come up with new initiatives, strategize, or do other important growth-oriented tasks, you’ll see your business flourish.
Tip #2: Clear Out the Clutter
Have any of your products or services outlived the market demand? Do any of your business activities no longer add value to your organization? We know it can be difficult, but if you eliminate these things and focus on what will be hot in the coming quarters, you’ll be sure to rock what’s to come!
And that’s not all—clearing out the clutter can apply to emotional baggage at work, too. Spring is the perfect time to refresh as a team. If mistakes have been made or goals haven’t been met, one of the best ways to address these issues is to have a candid discussion with your employees, come up with a working plan to reduce or eliminate the issues in question, and then let the past be the past so there won’t be any more distractions. Clear the clutter, and clear the air!
Tips #3: Makeover Your Brand
When it comes to spring cleaning our homes, we’re quick to buy a cute throw pillow, update our furniture, or even slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls. But how often do you apply this sort of thinking to your business? No, we don’t mean painting the walls of your office (unless you want to), but it’s a good idea to take some time to consider if your brand is up-to-date and still appealing to customers or potential clients.
The colours, shapes, logos, and language you use to market your business represent your company’s value proposition. These elements also set the expectations customers have when they do business with you. Thus, it’s important to make sure your brand is still aligned with the products or services you offer and is still relevant to your target audience.
We know a rebrand can be a massive undertaking, and possibly very costly as well, depending on how it’s being done and who is doing it. But perhaps all your brand needs to stay up-to-date is a few tweaks here and there, and maybe you have the resources to do these small adjustments in-house, saving you some money. In any case, if your brand is no longer resonating with people, it will be less costly to fix the problem now than to never address it and risk your bottom line.
Tip #4: Try New Things
We’re sure you have a tried and true way of attracting customers, and that’s great! But branching out and trying things you’ve never done before is always a good idea, and what better time to do it than spring?
Have you leveraged the power of social media for your business yet? If your business is not on social media, it should be! Once it’s there, you could try connecting with potential clients and customers on the various social networks. Or perhaps your business could benefit from more traditional methods of reaching new people, e.g.: joining a business networking group, hosting an in-person event, or attending a tradeshow. If you’re a smaller business that sells a physical product, why not consider a pop-up shop every once in a while? Get creative!
While some of these things aren’t exactly brand new ideas, they could be new for you, and giving them a spin could give you access to a previously untapped market for your business. You might even get a leg up on your competitors who haven’t thought about using these techniques!
Tip #5: Don’t Go At It Alone
When it comes to spring cleaning your home and yard, it’s not unusual to hire housekeepers, window cleaners, landscapers, or other professionals. Sometimes there is just so much to do, and you don’t have the time (or possibly the skills) necessary to do the work yourself. So why not apply this same logic to your business? We understand that as an entrepreneur it takes a certain level of tunnel vision to stay on top of things in your business. However, that intense, targeted focus can make it hard to take a step back and spot potential problematic areas that could use improvements.
Whether it’s bookkeeping chores, fulfilling orders, or dealing with customer support, getting an outsider into your business and talking them through a task can be highly beneficial. By simply explaining your common processes out loud, you’re guaranteed to spot weak points in execution. Not only that, the external feedback you’ll get will identify easy solutions you might never have thought of alone.
Every business can benefit from an annual review of its operations, and what better time to do it than spring? Think of spring cleaning and all the benefits that come with it as your reward for getting through another long winter. It’s the perfect opportunity to fine-tune your processes so you can continue to rock your business all year long!
We’d love to know which spring cleaning tips you’re going to try and which ones we may have missed, so drop us a comment below.