Two Things to Do Now For 2013

Run­ning a suc­cess­ful busi­ness takes con­sis­tent plan­ning, mar­ket­ing, sales and ongo­ing man­age­ment. I’ve spo­ken to a few small busi­ness own­ers (new in busi­ness) who told me they were just too busy right now to work on their mar­ket­ing or busi­ness growth: ​“the phone just keeps ring­ing!” is a famil­iar phrase I hear. Great news, right? The phone is ring­ing off the hook, why con­tin­ue mar­ket­ing and plan­ning? Well, for these guys who have told me this, they work in a sea­son­al busi­ness. In anoth­er month or two, they will won­der if the cell tow­ers or phone lines are frozen when their phone stops ring­ing. Below are two, hope­ful­ly obvi­ous things, to do now to keep your busi­ness mov­ing for­ward. Two Things To Do Now 1. If you have not start­ed the process yet, begin cre­at­ing your 2013 bud­gets and plans now. Don’t wait til you have the time. It might be too late. You also don’t have to do it all in one sit­ting. Just cut out an hour this week and anoth­er cou­ple next week and get it done. Need extra help? Hire a men­tor or busi­ness friend(s) to help strate­gize with you for a few hours as well. After the bud­get is in place, cre­ate a mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar of events of when and who will get the task at hand com­plet­ed. 2. Book work now. If you are busy at the moment, start secur­ing work for Decem­ber, Jan­u­ary and even Feb­ru­ary if you run a ser­vice busi­ness. I’ve seen sales­peo­ple do this a cou­ple ways. Some of them will call up their exist­ing client base and ask if they would like any work com­plet­ed dur­ing the month of Jan­u­ary and if so, they’d dis­count the ser­vice. One cus­tomer took this approached for his paint­ing busi­ness and booked $80,000 of res­i­den­tial work just from call­ing up exist­ing cus­tomers. Oth­ers would go out and esti­mate a job and put the cur­rent price tag of the job: $5,400 if booked now. $4,300 if booked between Jan 2 and Jan­u­ary 31^st. Giv­ing the prospect options works very well! How­ev­er you decide to book work, get it going now. Maybe you cre­ate a cal­en­dar with the dates avail­able. When you go out to do a bid, show the cal­en­dar to a prospect and tell them the weeks that they can save mon­ey. You also don’t need to always dis­count. Just use your good instincts. If you think you can get a customer/​prospect to wait for a slow sea­son, go for it. The bot­tom line is this, run­ning a busi­ness is hard work. You can­not take a break. You’ve got to have all cylin­ders run­ning year round. So get things into gear and keep mov­ing your busi­ness for­ward into the new year. I’m curi­ous, how do you guys cur­rent­ly pre­pare for win­ter work? Let me know in the com­ments below. Side Note: If you need help with putting togeth­er a busi­ness plan, my friends at Sum­mit Ser­vices are offer­ing a spe­cial dur­ing the month of Octo­ber. It is worth every pen­ny. These guys are great. Check out their busi­ness plan­ning offer here.