How To "Spring Clean" Your Business

Sadie, your senior executive  advisor.

Get organized! Before you can do anything else you have to remove clutter, both physical and mental. If you cannot find what you are looking for or you are too distracted by everything you, will be unable to focus and work efficiently. Be productive, not busy.
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Office

• Purge your office: De-clutter, empty, shred, remove anything you don’t need!
• Pick-up & put away items that are not where they belong.
• Position equipment and supplies you use the most closest to you.

E-mail

• Clear it out. Spend time filing, responding, deleting e-mails from your inbox.
• Set up a folder/filing system for your e-mails. I can be as simple as:
  • Inbox – respond, waiting on a response, then move to another folder.
  • Today – needs a response today.
  • This Week – needs a short-term (not immediate) response.
  • This Month/Quarter – needs a longer-term response.
  • FYI – items you wish to save and reference later.
• Unsubscribe from unneeded accounts

 
Evaluate where are you spending your time? Are you working “On” your business or “In” your business? Working on your business is time spent growing, creating systems, processes, and automations. Working in your business is time spent doing the day to day work. If you find that you are spending most of your time working in your business it may be time to consider the following:

• What are you great at & where do you need help? This is question you must answer very honestly. Instead of working on where you need improvement why don’t you find someone who is great in those areas to help you?
• Are there systems, processes, and automations you can implement to help you work for efficiently?
• Is your business positioned for growth? As you bring on more and more work, can you continue to handle that work without hurting service/quality?

 
Update Business & Marketing Plans. This should be done as often as possible but at a minimum it should be done annually.

• Talk to your customers and potential customers. What are they buying? What problems do you solve? What other solutions can they choose?
• Review your financial results from what you thought would happen versus what actually happened. 
• Review activities, deadlines and planned results that are not identified in the financials. What are your milestones, assumptions, tasks, how do they measure up?