Canadian Small Business Women

Connection, Synergy, Community

3 actions to take today to make the last quarter your best quarter yet

At the beginning of the year, we spend time dreaming, planning and goal setting for the coming year. If you’ve worked with me, you know that involves mapping out each of those goals and what it’s going to take for you to achieve them. You also know that we follow that up with assigning deadlines spread throughout the year in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly increments.

It may sound like a lot of work at the outset, but it’s instrumental to the overall health of your business. It ensures that you always have a complete roadmap to refer back to and keep you on track as you go along your way balancing these goals with the demands in all the other areas of your life.

But even with all the planning and road mapping in the world, we all know that life can still creep up. New opportunities can present themselves that, while beneficial at the time, take you a smidge off course from your goals for this year. Detours may need to be called as an unexpected roadblock jumps into your path. These things happen!

And, knowing that these things happen, I encourage all of my clients to book a check-in with themselves and their business at the end of each quarter. By getting these sessions into your calendar in January, you are making a commitment to your business to check-in on your progress and make sure that the goals you’ve set happen.

So what do you do in this session? As we go into the last quarter of the year, here are the three steps I want you to take:

Check-in and assess where you are

The big question to answer here is: Where are you in relation to your plans for the year? How far have you come, or strayed, from the goals you set out to achieve in January?

  • Sales are the lifeline of our business: Are you at least 75% of the way towards your revenue targets? If you aren’t, do you have some solid sales initiatives in place to get you there? Are there any natural busy sales season for your industry that you are planning on capitalizing on this quarter? Without sales, you don’t have a business. You have a hobby, which is why this is a MUST area to check-in on during your session.
  • Spending time planning and taking on goals that will level up your business is critical to its growth and ongoing success: Where do you stand on these goals? Was this the year you were going to create an online course? How is that coming along? Maybe you wanted to implement systems to help you streamline the administrative side of your business. By this point in time, you should be executing the system you’ve designed, and thinking about what kinks need to be worked out in order to finalize.

 

Evaluate your efforts so far

This step is all about answering the questions: What have you been spending your time doing? What’s worked? What has fallen flat? What do you need to do more of or stop doing?

 

Plan for the rest of the year

Once you know where you’ve been, it’s time to make some hard choices. What do you have to do to get you to your goals for the year? Some of the answers may push you outside of your comfort zone, and maybe that’s why you’ve been reluctant to ask these questions. But the hard truth: is that by not asking, it’s likely you’ve been holding both you and your business back.

Take the answers to these questions and start outlining what your next steps need to be. Break those tasks down, map out the steps to complete them, and assign deadlines in daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly increments.

And, most importantly, do these two things: Put a system in place that works for you to consistently TRACK YOUR EFFORTS, and book time in your calendar to FREQUENTLY CHECK-IN on your progress.REMEMBER: You can’t change what you don’t know about or lose sight of. That’s why we track.


Samantha King is a busy mompreneur and homeschooler with two young children and a couple of businesses at home. When Samantha’s daughter was diagnosed with autism, she had to learn how to keep her priorities aligned within her family, while operating her business at the same time. She is excited to share her knowledge to empower entrepreneurs by giving them the tools they need to do something they love while building sustainable, profitable businesses.  

Contact Samantha:

Tel: 416-885-6841

Email: samantha@fempirebuilders.com

Facebook: @FempireBuilders

Twitter: @FempireBuilders

Instagram: @Fempire_Builders

The year in review…

sandra

Several years ago I started the New Year’s Eve ritual of celebrating my accomplishments. I find it’s a great way to end the year off on a positive note and carry over that positivity into the New Year. Last year, in addition to celebrating my accomplishments and setting my intentions for the upcoming year, I also took stock of the habits that contributed to my success, and those that kept me from making the year an even more productive and successful one.

We’ve all heard it said that the definition of insanity is doing the same things and expecting different results. It was with this in mind that I started to take a look at the habits that served me and those that didn’t. It was especially important for me to review these things at the end of last year, since the second half of the year was the start of my journey as a full-time entrepreneur.

Along with reviewing our habits, the end of the year is also a great time to consider what worked and what didn’t, both personally and in your business. We want to continue to do the things that worked, yet we shouldn’t hesitate to question whether or not we could do those things even better, more effectively. We also need to review the things that didn’t work and figure out why. Not to beat ourselves up about our failures, but to learn from them, and figure out what we need to do next time so that we don’t end up with the same results.

Obviously we don’t have to wait until the end of the year to do these things, but the New Year is a great time for new beginnings. For many of us it’s also the start of a new fiscal year, so making changes and improvements in January will allow you to measure your growth year over year as you continue to build and grow your business.

Whether 2014 was an awesome year or just so-so, there is always room for improvement. Taking stock of the current year provides you with the opportunity to celebrate the progress you’ve made and tweak the plan to make the upcoming year an even better one. It’s about a constant evolution. If you had a great year, the next one can be even better. If you didn’t achieve as much as you wanted to do this year, know that there’s always room for improvement, it’s just a matter of retooling the strategy and your mental game.

Make a commitment to learn a new skill, release the habits (and anything else) that doesn’t serve you and develop the habits that are helping you get closer to your goals! If we want to achieve the best we can in our respective businesses, we have to be at our best. Take the time to evaluate the game plan and make the changes necessary to knock it out the park in the New Year!

May the New year be one of great health, peace and abundance!

Sandra Dawes is a certified life coach specializing in helping women who feel unfulfilled with their 9-5 follow their dreams and pursue their passions. She holds an Honours BA, an MBA as well as a certificate in Dispute Resolution.She has completed her first book,Embrace Your Destiny: 12 Steps to Living the Life You Deserve!
Connect:
www.embraceyourdestiny.ca
www.facebook.com/embraceyourdestiny
www.facebook.com/embraceyourdestinythebook
www.twitter.com/sandradawes