Ensuring success through creating plans for your business is a step where your vision captures the future. Welcoming another year means reflecting the lessons that the past years contributed to your business.

Moreover, to be able to reflect and grow more accurately, planning makes everything sit in its rightful place. There are tips to consider when preparing for your business this coming 2018, here are some that might help you.

Starting A New Revenue Stream for your business creates a more versatile atmosphere on the terms of advertisement and creates new options for your business to have investments.

Hiring the Right Sales Person that shares same tour vision towards your business seems to be more critical since you are entrusting your business to someone that you do not know yet. When hiring a person, one quality that employers should see is with the personality that they possess.

Reviewing Your Online Presence for determining your rank towards gives you the idea about your customer’s awareness towards your business. Your online presence predicts how visible you are in the market, and this also suggests that being visible online means you have more awareness of your customer’s needs.

Considering Automation Tools as an investment for your business can help you handle the processes on your online presence and helps you to manage your time more accurately.

Scanning Your Environment means that you are aware of the competitors that your business has, and this creates your awareness towards your customer’s behavior. Being aware of your business environment makes you easy access to know more about the strategies on how you can plan your business.

2018 is fast approaching, and with planning beforehand makes you adjust and embrace the new year for your business. If you want to know more about these different tips on how to prepare your business for 2018, check the infographic below by Healthy Business Builder.

Transcribed infographic:

Prepare Your Business for 2018

As we approach the end of another year, it’s time for businesses to kick off their holiday promotions and prepare to close out 2017. Part of being a successful business owner is establishing a clear and actionable business plan, and that includes planning in advance for the new calendar year. But what’s the best way to go about this process?

If you want your business to succeed in the long term, you need to plan to avoid the pitfalls of the previous years, embrace the changes that have to happen, and most of all take action to accomplish these changers that will take your business to the next level.

The following five steps will ensure your planning is a productive process, and help you achieve the sustained business success you desire:

1. Start a new revenue stream

One of the harsh realities of business growth is that you will likely need an additional source of funds to employ more people, to invest in a new product line, to improve existing services and so on.

Nevertheless, having more than one source of revenue helps secure your business financially. Moreover, it also drives innovation and hone th overall customer service delivery of your organization.

Here are six different ways to create new revenue resources that you can use in your company.

• Introduce a new service to your market.
• Bring your business online.
• Offer premium courses about your products or services.
• Expand your customer base.
• Create service plans/retainers.
• Conduct public speaking/events.

2. Hire the right sales people

Another essential factor for a successful, scalable business is to hire the right salespeople to support your sales goals and objectives – and help you achieve them. Ideally, yo should find people that are willing to grow along with you and your business.

People that understand what you want to achieve and are ready to do their best to take you there.

Finding amazing and talented salespeople to hire is not easy. But you can take the following considerations into account to help ensure that you can attract the right sales person Into your company:

• Their ideal strength and experience you need.
• Your sales compensation package.
• Your sales training and development program.
• An effective sales manager to oversee the performance of the team.

3. Review your online presence

The Internet has become the go-to destination for holiday shoppers. So, before the year 2017 ends, make sure that your online presence is in tip-top shape so prospects looking for your products and services see only the best in your business.

Here are some tips that will help you assess and revamp your online presence before the holiday season starts:

• Update your PPC campaigns with your latest offers.
• Make sure your local listings are updated and accurate.
• Get active on social media.
• Audit your website – navigation, user-friendliness, contact information, SEO, etc.
• Respond to negative reviews.

4. Consider automation tools

If you want your business to be more scalable, you need to automate tasks that generally take up too much time and energy. Automation tools are now more accessible than ever, no matter the size of your business, or your budget.

Though these automation tools may require significant upfront investments, they will be ultimately worth it, as they will allow you to create efficient processes that will free up your time to handle the important things that you can’t pass over to artificial intelligence.

Consider investing in:

Marketing automation:

It will not only allow you to save time, but it will also help you get better results for your business – more leads generated, better lead nurturing, and more conversions.

Plus, it’s very accessible to small businesses and startups as there are free plans from top tools such as Jumplead and Mailchimp.

Social media automation:

Spend less time marketing your business on social media by getting a social media management and scheduling tool.

Accounting:

Accounting is a very time-consuming process. Look into getting accounting software to help you manage it at a fraction of the time, send bills, and invoices automatically, calculate your taxes easily, and more.

5. Scan your environment

Once you have taken a closer look at your business, you can move not o evaluating outside factors that could affect your business plans in the upcoming year.

• What economic, political and competitive factors have the potential to positively/negatively impact your ability to achieve your growth targets?
• What are the latest business trends that affect your bottom line?
• How are your competitors performing? How are they marketing themselves and do they have plans to expand?
• Will this business become an outsourcing industry? And by whom?
• What technologies, not yet conceived of, will out-innovate me?

A new year is always a great time to make positive changes to improve and to grow. And if you’re a business owner, why not use the opportunity to grow your business and take it to new heights?

Get your business plan ready, put together your new goals and objectives, and start working towards achieving them.