With just days left in 2017, you may not have gotten to finalize your New Year’s business resolutions. What’s more, don’t forget to determine your plan to implement these changes or meet these goals. It’s not enough to have a goal; keep yourself accountable with actionable, measurable steps.

To finalize (& implement) your New Year’s business resolutions, follow these steps:

• Review your business goals for 2018. (Haven’t finalized your 2018 business goals. Don’t stress – start here!) With input from your team and a review of last year’s goals and accomplishments, your goals for 2018 will set the course for the next year. If you let them. Remember, you wrote this for a reason with an eye on your larger mission statement and company purpose, so let your goals be the catalyst to get you there!

• Determine a process, habit, or strategy that will help you to achieve each goal. Take each goal, one at a time. Consider what processes you have in place currently that will help you to accomplish it. With new goals, this is likely to be an area of opportunity to hire a new employee, introduce new software or programming, or implement a new business process. Whatever it takes (within your budget) to accomplish your goal, is fair game!

• Define how to implement said process. With the processes you determined to implement above, how are you going to do it? With new strategies, be sure to adequately train and coach your employees through a new responsibility. Strive to stay involved as these new strategies are being implemented to confirm they are working as planned and are, in fact, moving you towards your end goal.

• Schedule time to work on these goals. Set aside time each week to review your progress toward your 2018 goals. Are the new processes being implemented as you expected? There may be a few bugs to work out in the beginning, but with attention and care you’ll see things begin to streamline themselves. Check in with your employees regularly on their efforts towards the larger goals. As the people on the front lines, they are great agents of change and likely have good insight into ways to increase efficiency.

• Set deadlines for yourself. Be hard on yourself. Set deadlines for yourself and your team and stick to them! I recommend setting check-in points. For instance, with one month, two weeks, one week, etc. until a particular goal is to be accomplished, where are you? Are you on schedule? Is something holding up your forward progress? What can you do to get yourself back on track?

For more insight and tips on how to finalize, implement, and ACHIEVE your 2018 New Year’s Business Resolutions, give us a call at Piccolo Marketing at 615-348-7768. No better to start off the New Year than on the right foot!