What Are You Doing in the Next Six Months?
7 Checklists to Prepare You for Success in 2024
In the next six months, 2023 will end, and 2024 will begin. This is weird even writing because it only seems like yesterday that this year started. For me, this year flew by at warp speed. How about you?
As we’re all churning like demons to finish the year, it is an appropriate time to discuss a few points to ensure that this year ends well and next year finds another gear for you. So, if you have a few minutes, here are some thoughts that might guide you.
Do yourself a favor and get a pen and some paper ready. You may want to take notes.
Financial Outlook
Stephen Covey famously wrote, “Begin with the end in mind.” What is the most important thing in business? Money.
An interesting point is that virtually everyone judges any company by their total revenue, which isn’t the most important number. Net profit is what you should be looking at the most. After all is said and done, how much money is the company making in profit?
That should be your focus. And while we could write an entire article on this topic alone, here are some checklist tips for you to use and deploy in your business to focus on the net profit aspect:
- Conduct an 80/20 analysis of your customers. Your top 20% of your customer list provides 80% of your revenue. Of course, the flip side is that the bottom 80% of your customer list only provides 20% of your revenue. You want to grow one and discourage the other. What is your plan for the rest of Q4 and the beginning of Q1?
- Review your pricing. Is it based on actual facts and math of how you run your business, or is it “made up” numbers you threw on a pricing grid years ago? (Worse is if you use “the average of everyone around me method.”) January is an excellent time to deploy a price increase. Create the price list so that, using the actual math of what it takes to run your business, you can hit your net profit goals. Have a clear direction on where you want to wind up on January 1, 2025.
- If you aren’t already, start getting 100% of the money for all orders when the order is placed. You will be much stronger financially if all the money is in the bank. Protect your cash flow. You are not a bank. Quit acting like one.
- January sales happen in October, November, and December. The time is now to fill up your schedule. If you wait until January, you probably won’t close that deal until February. The time is now to hustle.
- Sales are the lifeblood of your business. Not having the year that you imagined? Look at your sales activity, methods, and business plan. If you want different results, you have to do things differently. Diversify your sales channels and customer base. Focus on your sales activity and outcomes.
Operations
How did it go this year? Be honest.
Does your shop operate with a predictable schedule that is easy to understand? For the jobs slated to run next Thursday, will that actually happen?
If you are not where you want to be with having consistent, predictable, and repeatable results, what’s broken? Do you have standard operating procedures and easy-to-follow processes dictating what should happen daily?
Here’s an exercise for you. Can you walk up to anyone in your shop and ask them, “Hey, what are you doing next?” Do they know the answer? If not, what is preventing that from happening?
Here’s an operational checklist to consider:
- Interview every employee individually. Ask each, “If you could change one thing in the shop to make your job easier, what would you change?” Start implementing these ideas.
- Remember that 80/20 analysis? Usually, those bottom-dwelling customers crowd out the production schedule for more profitable work. Increase your minimums, or increase your prices (or both!), and focus on only producing profitable orders. Learn to say no.
- Anytime you hear an excuse as to why something didn’t happen the way it was supposed to, that is a signal to investigate how to improve something. Dig in.
- Insist on excellence. “Professionals like us do things like this.” Show people what that means.
- “Sorry, I didn’t have time” is another way of saying, “This wasn’t a priority.” Solve this problem.
- Better operations happen by being proactive. How far out on the calendar does your thinking go? If it stops with what’s on today’s schedule, you are in trouble.
Administrative
Administrative thinking and planning are often neglected parts of many businesses in this industry. Usually, more emphasis is placed on this as the shop grows. Many of the problems and a lot of the extra costs originate because of either poor or zero administrative planning.
If your business were a person, the admin part of the business would be the skeleton. It is what supports and holds everything together. While you might think this is a creative business, as it is often focused on art and images, it is mainly a logistics concern. Admin is the infrastructure that holds it all together.
Do you have the right people in the right place doing the right things?
Many challenges in the business begin with who you let on your team and how they are trained. What instructions and expectations are they given? Are their tools in good working order? Do they have enough time to do the job correctly? Will the folks you have on your team willingly do what it takes to be excellent?
This is essentially your company culture. Who defines that?
Some checklist administrative items to review:
- Do you have the right people? Grade them. Who is on your “A” list? Your “B” list? Maybe even the “C” list? If you have anyone on the “D” list, why are they still employed?
- What are you constantly doing to keep the “A” team happy and move everyone up a level? This is all about motivation and training. Write out a plan.
- Look at your systems. Is it difficult to put an order in the system? Do things automagically happen with automation? How can you do more with fewer people? Audit and list what you truly need for the future.
- When was the last time you updated your employee handbook? Do you even have one? Get a plan together to improve and update for 2024.
- Review all of your hiring and employee retention efforts for 2023. What worked? What didn’t? How will you improve how you bring in better people in 2024? Start brainstorming and make a list.
- Can you outsource functions to outside agencies or virtual assistants? Create a list of the tasks that could be handled by someone not present in your building. Research options.
- Is your employee performance review program working as it should? What could be better?
Customers
It’s been said, “This would be a great business if it weren’t for those customers.” Hey, I’m just kidding. But sort of not at the same time.
All joking aside, customers need to be your top priority. But let me ask you this … are you serving the RIGHT customers? Not all customers are created equal.
As you have already completed the 80/20 exercise (right?), you know who your top revenue-generating customers are on that list. In that group, break it down even further. Who is the top 20% of the top 20%?
Those few types of customers are the ones you want to clone. Go ahead, do the math; what would it mean to your company if you found one of those for each quarter in 2024? Would you have a landmark year? I’ll bet you would.
With that in mind, here is a customer-focused checklist for you:
- From your top elite customer, what is the experience like working with you? Do yourself a favor and ask them, “Hey, why do you do business with us?” In fact, ask that of all your top 20% customers. If you see a pattern or theme, that needs to appear in your marketing.
- For these customers, consider the three areas where they can be found.
- Digitally - where are they online? What social media platforms do they use the most?
- Geographically - where are they relative to you? Where are THEIR customers?
- Socially - what groups, associations, organizations, or trade unions do they belong to? Are you a member?
- What problem do they have that you solve daily? In 2024, will that still be accurate? Is anything changing?
- Do you have a personal relationship with a real person at these top 20% customers? If your contact left, do you have a relationship with their backup or other people?
- Can you develop something sticky to solidify your business? This is a written contract or an agreement to do business with you for a period of time. Spell out the nature of your business relationship, financial obligations, what happens when things go wrong, and the terms of the agreement. Use simple language. The person who signs on their end has to be at an authorization level.
Data
The great thing about data is that it can provide insights. Data can be about anything that matters to you.
So, what matters to you most? Those big, hairy, audacious goals you will set for the rest of 2023 and every month of 2024 … what is the data that you need to gather and graph so you can illustrate your progress?
It’s been said that you can boil everything that matters down to a number. What is a good number, and what is a bad number? Spending some time figuring this out is how you can build an easy-to-understand dashboard that will help you make better decisions.
Some thoughts:
- Make data collection easy. The more difficult it is to get the data, the more likely you will give up.
- If you are not doing anything with the data, don’t spend valuable time collecting it. It doesn’t do your business any good to collect production logs to fill up a cardboard box.
- Double-check your math. If you are anything like me, you mis-key numbers in your calculator often.
- Use the data to be transparent to the stakeholders that gathered it. Show them how you are using the data to make decisions.
- Be consistent. Make this part of your work a habit.
- Before hitting send or publicizing your data, make sure it is correct, and your assumptions make sense.
Training
Things move faster when more people know how to do things correctly. In the next few weeks, you may have some downtime.
Sure, you can send folks home, and that makes sense if you are watching your payroll dollars. However, when you are busy later in the year when the avalanche of orders must be processed, there may not be time to cross-train your stuff.
Training is better when it is planned.
Think about this for a minute. Sometime in the near future, one of your key employees will want to take a vacation, call in sick, or move 1,300 miles away. Who knows how to do their job and handle it well?
Consider doing a Skill Gap Analysis and determine where you are vulnerable.
Also, consider where the market and technology may have changed. Are you using artificial intelligence as a big part of your business? If you are still waiting in the wings, you may want to consider dedicating some time to this.
Think about these things:
- Who will be teaching? Is this a staff member, supplier, or outside resource?
- For each employee, when will you schedule the training? Thirty minutes a week of instructional time adds up to 26 total hours at the end of the year. How many hours did each employee spend learning this past year?
- How will you track progress? Could you learn together?
- Think about creating a Shop Book Club or Library. Get your employees conversant with the top books and ideas.
- Tie raises and bonuses to educational goals.
Innovation
What new ideas are you bringing to market? You don’t necessarily need to invent anything. The mission here is to bring creative thought to how your company is functioning.
Try new ideas out. Will Idea A work better than Idea B? How could you streamline a part of your workflow?
This industry sees a lot of new ideas develop every year. New consumables, fabrics, technology, machines, methodologies, and software. Just because you tried something five years ago doesn’t mean that this year’s version operates the same way or produces the same result.
Separate your business from the competition by providing solutions for your customers that nobody has considered. Do things better.
Some thoughts on innovation:
- Don’t keep track of successes. Start keeping track of how many failures you produce. A result that you didn’t want is one more step to something better. It is a learning step. That failure is a good thing.
- Keep a notebook or a journal. Record what’s going on. If you try something different next time, what do you think will happen? Write that down. Did the result you were expecting actually happen? No? That’s ok. Record what you think you need to change.
- Be humble. Ask questions. Involve more people. Get more feedback.
- Somewhere out there, someone is working on the same thing. Can you find them and compare notes? What if you collaborated on the idea?
- Shoot bullets, then cannonballs. This means trying small tests and getting those to produce positive results in a smaller sample size. Try to get consistent results. Scale up from there.
Right now is a magic time in your business. It’s the end of this year and the beginning of next. Can you take advantage of this period to maximize your potential?
Here’s the thing. Some people will read this article and take it for the inspirational advice as intended. Others will think about it, maybe even try one or two things … but in short order, they will stop.
By March of 2024, the ones in the first group will be miles ahead of the ones in the second. The only question is, which group will you be in?