Five, four, three, two, one. Happy New Year!

Ok, maybe it is not here yet, but it will be here soon. Before you can blink your pretty little eyes, we will be ringing in the New Year!

For all of us, a new year means another chance to start fresh. Specifically, a chance to start fresh in your business. Utilizing this fresh slate is going to require you to do some organizational planning for your business.

Organizational planning means taking your business, and planning and organizing it for what will happen in the year ahead. Essentially, you are looking at your business’ past performance, determining what did not work the previous year that you may want to eliminate, what did work that you would like to keep, and looking at how you organized your business for the benefit of yourself and clients within the past year.

Organizational planning is vital in any business, whether you are non-profit, for-profit, product based or service based. Organizational planning serves the purpose of eliminating the chaotic parts of running a business, by allowing you to be able to take the time that is needed and, plain and simple — plan ahead!

5 Tips for Organizational Planning for 2017:

1. Build a Time Management System

What does building a time management system have to do with organizational planning? Well, before you even get into 2017, your time must be organized.

Did you realize how quickly we are already nearing the end of 2016?
Do you realize that you probably wasted a lot of time doing nothing in 2016?
Was your business chaotic in 2016?

Then you must build a time management system. If you do not have time, then how will you even be able to implement a plan for your business? You have to build a proper time management system before you can even take a look at your business to plan and organize it for the year ahead. If you are not organized, how can you set up your business for success?

Check out my article on 5 tips on how to build a time management system.

2. Conduct a Business Review of 2016

Take a look at the past year. Determine what you did that worked:

• What products were not your top sellers?
• Did you have a business quarter that did better/worse than the others?

Reviewing your business in this aspect will help you to understand what products or services you should keep going into 2017, what programs you should re-launch, during which quarters you should be launching, and more!

Conducting a business review will save you the headaches of making the same mistake twice. Besides, who better to learn from than yourself?

3. Change Your Client/Customer Processes (if needed)

The biggest part of your business is your clients and customers. Without them, you just wouldn’t have a business. So how was their 2016 experience in working with you?

• How were their scheduling processes and onboarding processes?
• Did you retain any lifelong customers, or were you always searching for a new client/customer?

If you do not have good responses to those questions, then you may need to create a new plan for your client/customer process. You may need to organize a new workflow that allows the customer experience to be automated from beginning to end.

Doing this will really give you the professional edge. And, most importantly, it will give a client/customer experience that is well planned, thought out and organized.

4. Focus on One Business Quarter at a Time

There are four business quarters in a year, consisting of 3 months each. Let’s say you go into the year with a goal to make 100k. That’s awesome! However, before you know it, you are overwhelmed and confused.

So why not focus on those annual goals in quarters? Essentially, every three months you will be focused on making 25k. Splitting your annual goals into smaller pieces can give you enough time to achieve a goal and time to readjust your strategies if needed.

As entrepreneurs, sometimes it may be easier to focus on the pieces of the puzzle one step at a time.

Check out my book on quarterly planning for more information.

5. Plan your Daily Actionable Ahead

Every Sunday, my community and I have planning day. We call it our Planning Sesh-on or Sip & Plan Sundays. Regardless of what we call it, we get together and plan. We plan for the week ahead and look at projects coming up that we should start working on now.

Having a planning day is so important, as it allows you to take the time to allocate small tasks to specific days of the week, so that you can ultimately achieve those weekly goals!

So if the goal is to write a blog post of 1,000 words, then each day we create a daily actionable to complete 500 words. Within two days, the post is done and scheduled a week ahead of time.

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