It’s a fresh year, give your business a little refresh. Schedule in some time for the following 9 activities, so you are starting your year with less mess and more focus. Your future self will thank you! 🥹

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Review the past year + plan for the year ahead

No surprise with this one, having set goals and a solid plan to help guide your year is so powerful. Without a plan, it’s hard to be intentional with your time and efforts. There are lots of ways to approach goal setting for your business and no “right” way.

Grab Guide Your Growth to develop a system for reviewing and planning for your business YOUR WAY!

Think of Guide Your Growth less of a course, but more of a guide to help you evaluate and plan for your business. 

This guide is meant to help you take a step back from your business and evaluate not only how your business is running (your operations) but also what you want out of your business. 

It’s meant to be customized by you, for you to take what resonates with you and add your own questions and evaluations. 

Guide Your Growth is your first step to creating a planning process that works for you and helps keep you and your business aligned to your vision. 

This is your guide to evaluate, set goals, plan and keep your business on track YOUR WAY. Learn more here!

Review your public-facing information

AKA your website + social media profiles. Make sure all your point-of contacts are up to date and reflect what you are offering. And don’t forget to check links and contact forms.

A lot can change in our businesses over a year, make sure your website + social media is keeping up. Here are a few items to review:

• Side-bar and header items
• All footer links-TEST your social media links (I find so many people have broken links) 
• Pop-ups
• Make sure your plugins are up-to-date
• Pinned posts on social are up-to-date
• Links in bios on social

Get a full list of items to clean-up and reset in your business operations in the ​End of Year Reset Checklist​. It’s all about getting your digital life decluttered! I use the 6 Essentials of Business Operations Categories to organize it so you can work through it section by section. There are 50+ checklist items.

Clean up your files!

The start of the new year is the perfect time to get your files cleaned up and organized. Your files should be organized so you can easily find your documents. Get rid of any files you no longer need, and backup your files to a cloud or external drive.

Here are so more tips on getting your digital files under control.

📋 Make it routine: As part of my monthly checklist I back-up my computer and clean off my desktop + downloads folder.

Clean up and clean out your email list

Your email marketing list needs at least a yearly review. Review all your email automations, is all the information up-to-date? Do all the links work? Do you need to update your graphics? If you have a ton, make a plan to do this in stages, starting with your welcome email sequence. Assign yourself a sequence a week to work on.

Do you have a bunch of cold subscribers hanging around? It’s time to ditch those subscribers who aren’t reading what you are sending. The new year is a perfect time for a fresh start with your list. Read this post on how to do that.

📋 Make it routine: Each quarter clean out cold subscribers.

Make your inbox a happy place

A fresh inbox will undoubtedly help kick your new year off right. Get rid of newsletters that aren’t serving you and just like cleaning up your digital files, delete folders you no longer need and get rid of old emails. Read this post for a full tutorial on how to clean up your inbox.

📋 Make it routine: Each Friday I strive for inbox zero, and make sure I catch-up and clean out my emails so I can start the week fresh.

Conduct a tools audit

Don’t let your tools lag behind in your business, you work hard, and your tools should do. Also, make sure you aren’t paying for tools you no longer use. Read more about how to conduct your tools audit here.

📋 Make it routine: I think it’s a good idea to check-in on your tools every 6 months. Plus make sure to set reminders before your tools renewing if they renew annually. You don’t want to pay for another year of a tool you aren’t using. 

Reset your editorial calendar

Content creation is a big part of my year and takes a sufficient amount of time. If content creation is a big part of your business, then make sure it’s as organized as possible.

If you don’t already have a system for your content creations, then you need to start one ASAP. I personally use Trello to manage my editorial process + calendar; you can read more about that here.

Do the damn thing

You know the thing you keep saying you will tackle, maybe it’s setting up a better invoicing system, or getting your bookkeeping organized. If you have had something that keeps coming up on your list of things to take care of, do yourself a favor and go ahead and schedule in time to do it.

STOP pushing it off for “when” you have more time because let’s face it if it didn’t’ happen last year it’s likely to keep being on your list this year too.

Either set aside a day to tackle it OR set aside an hour a day for the next week or two depending on the scope of the project.

📋 Make it routine: Each month choose one item off your list of “need” to do. It might be big or small, but don’t let the same issues and frustrations keep coming up in your business week after week without addressing them. Do the damn thing!

Gift yourself time to reset

Most important to this list is to actually give yourself time to clean up and reset your business operations before the start of the new year.

To give yourself time to set back and evaluate what is working and not working in your business.

To allow yourself to take a step back from your day-to-day operations and look a the full picture of your business.

And ask yourself deep down if you are running your business the way you WANT to be running your business.

If you need help giving yourself a deep reset to your business, I encourage you to learn more about Guide Your Growth.

Guide Your Growth is all about realigning yourself to why you started your business in the first place, taking a step back and evaluating what is working and not working in your business operations, what you like and don’t like about your business, and your overall goals and vision for your business.

The only way you should be running your own business is YOUR WAY. I hope you have the best year yet ahead of you!

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