5 Steps to Spring Clean Your Business.
Kick out the Cobwebs. Bring in the Flowers!
We spring clean our homes. We spring clean our wardrobes, and many of us spring clean our garden beds to get ready for planting delicious summer herbs, vegetables and of course, beautiful flowers. Just as important is a good spring cleaning of our business! If you’ve survived the hustle of the busy holiday retail season, New Years, Valentine’s Day and find yourself looking down the calendar at all you want to accomplish this year, a good spring cleaning might be just what you need to reassess, re-energize and re-engage with your goals and your customers.
Step 1: Uncover your Business Plan
Some Indie business owners are fabulous at both creating- and working to, their business plan. But some of us build it, or partially build it, then put the plan in the file and never look back. Being disciplined about reviewing your business plan gives you an opportunity on a regular basis to dedicate time to assessing your strengths, your opportunities for growth, and the competitive landscape. As a former consultant, I had a chance to help companies develop their plans. I love the software, LivePlan for doing this. An affordable online service which provides templates, contextual video assistance and best of all it has collaboration tools, executive summaries and accounting integration for your staffing and financial plans. You can tell at a moment’s notice how you are doing against plan and updates are super easy. It is lightweight enough to use on a regular basis, but you can dig in and get super detailed if you like. They have a terrific blog designed for entrepreneurs.
90-Minute Miracle: Set up a Mastermind group with 5 or 6 people to brainstorm your most critical problem, your biggest opportunity, or anything you want to devote time to for your business. It could even be about how you create more balance in your life and still grow your business and provide great customer service.
Step 2: Refresh your KPIs
Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are the hand-full of metrics you want to monitor on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. Big businesses use KPIs to report up the chain and to track progress against a strategic plan. But small and high-growth businesses need to track KPIs, too.
In many cases, key performance indicators are posed as questions that need to be answered, and the answers provide the indication. – Kristie Lorette, Demand Media
This spring set aside some time to review your business from a reporting standpoint. Go beyond the standard monthly finance reports and dig into the data about your products, your customers, your marketing messages, social media platforms and distribution chain metrics. Craft your questions, define what you expect the answer to be now, and determine what you need the answer to be for success.
90-Minute Miracle – Identify three actionable insights and map those actions into Q2 activities.
Step 3. Tend your Product Offerings
Early spring is a time for amending the soil, pulling out plants that didn’t make it through the Winter, and taking stock of what’s working and what’s not in the garden. It is also a chance to review your product offerings. All products have life cycles and need to be monitored and managed. Some need to be managed out of existence. There are four standard phases of a product lifecycle: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. You will invest the most money in a product during the Introduction and Growth stages. That investment money unless you’re just getting started, should come from your products in the Maturity Phase. Products in the Decline phase will stop generating revenue over time. Making sure you have new products coming into your product line keeps your business healthy.
90-Minute Miracle – Assign your products the right lifecycle phase. Plan to balance your portfolio in the coming quarters.
4. Survey your Customers
Free and affordable survey tools abound, with Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo being two of the most popular. Surveying your customers will tell you surprising things. Like the words they use to describe your product to their friends (which make great keyword choices and email marketing headlines.) Survey design is its own science, but you can build successful and useful surveys following a few simple rules. Keep your surveys short. Keep the survey focused on one topic or theme, and thank your customers in advance. Think about how you will use the data. Do you want free-form answers you’ll need to read? Or do you want to give pre-determined possible answers for easier analytics? You can have different surveys for your first-time buyers than for your regular customers and if you use distribution channels, sort questions by customer source to see if you need to market differently to each channel.
90-Minute Miracle – Research survey solutions and build a three question survey to send your customers.
5. Go Shopping
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and do some shopping. Search out your competitors. Buy their products. Read their blogs. Peruse their social media channels. By tracking what your competitors are doing, you’ll also be keeping up on emerging trends and topics. Explore the experience they provide their customer and pinpoint how you can do better. Whether you want to create an ‘opening the box’ experience or want to wow them with a fabulous story about the product they’re holding in their hand, your customers will keep being your customers if they have a great experience. With so many products being sold on Amazon, it is a little easier to get pricing, ingredient lists and have Amazon deliver their product right to your door. And yes, this is my favorite step in this Spring Cleaning your Business blog.
90-Minute Miracle – Identify five competitors and three areas you want to learn about, i.e. price, shelf appeal, customer service, product line, new products, etc. Then do some shopping and compare their products to yours.
In less than 10 hours, you can make a big difference in moving your business forward. How do you Spring clean your business?
