With 2018 quickly drawing to a close, this is the time for businesses to start preparing for how they are going to attack 2019. As a business owner, it is important you start the process of preparing for next year now! If you think it can all be done at the start of next year, you are already behind the eightball.

It is time to start thinking about and planning for a successful year, now.

This is the year of the …

Ask yourself, in 12 months time, where do you see the business? Whether you are aiming to launch a big project, refine your operations or increase your client list, you should always be striving for something.

A common tactic that many entrepreneurs use, is defining a theme for the year. This theme is used as the ‘guiding light’ for all business activities over the next 12-months. For example, maybe 2018 was the year of sales, while 2019 is going to be the year of the rebrand.

This practice is great as it allows you to narrow your focus and put all your resources and attention behind one main goal. While, there are a bunch of tasks and obligations that you could be addressing, trying to satisfy all at once, may produce inadequate results. That is why we suggest taking it one step at a time by focusing on one or two core themes for the year.

Review what worked well

Have you had a successful year to date? If so, there is no doubt you will want to carry those results and momentum into next year. If this is the case, now is the perfect time to review your operations. Start by looking at the results and data the business has produced in 2018.

Maybe a product saw an unexpected upswing in sales, maybe a marketing campaign took off or did all your new hires exceed expectations? If a certain aspect of your business exceeded or reached expectations, make sure you understand why.

By looking at the data first, you should then start to work backwards to see why that certain aspect was so successful. This will allow you to then slightly tweak it and get ready to roll it over for the start of next year.

And what did not work

However, not everything you do in business will be a home run. Naturally, there will be certain parts of the business that were underwhelming. As part of your full-scale review, make sure you dig deep into the functions that were unsuccessful or unprofitable.

There are a variety of reasons that may signal something was not working. From a financial perspective, maybe there is a lack of revenue being generated. Or from a company perspective, maybe something is causing friction within the office. Conversely, it could be a combination of several factors.

By taking the time to analyse and understand what is not creating revenue or tangible results, you will be in an informed position to streamline your operations. Ideally leading to nonprofitable functions being discontinued so you can focus on profit-generating tasks.

Narrow your focus

Now that you have established an overarching theme for the year and reviewed what is and is not working, it is time to create a plan for how you will achieve your ultimate goal.

Instead of trying to achieve a million and one things, narrow your focus to several key tasks that if achieved will be a positive impact on your business. Thus, if your theme for the year is to grow your workforce, concentrate on what you need to achieve in order to be successful. This may mean prioritising strengthening your culture, expanding your office space or investigating outsourcing.

The ability to focus on a core set of goals does not mean walking away from other goals altogether. Instead, it is a simple question of which goals can be postponed, while you chase the priority one.

Over the next few weeks, take the time to do a complete review of the last 12-months and start to build a strategy around how you want 2019 to pan out. By doing this now, you will be in the best position to either start the processes now or start the first day you are back in the office.

As the year quickly draws to a close, now is a great time to investigate alternative means for growing your business. Outsourcing is one such means. Regardless of your goals or themes for 2019, outsourcing is a vehicle that will help you get there. At Deployed, we have a long history of building successful and profitable remote teams for Australian and New Zealand businesses.

Get ahead of your competitors and don’t leave it to the last minute, now is the time to get the ball rolling. If you are interested in how outsourcing with Deployed can help your business, let’s talk. Get in touch today.