Don’t let the restored in-person holiday bustle and focus on year-end planning for clients, detract from your year-end business planning!
Here are some tips for an annual audit and strategic planning process that will create positive momentum coming into the new year: 1. Revisit (or create) your long-term vision, including the ideal clients you serve, the firm strengths and capabilities you’ve built, the team and culture you lead and your role within the firm. 2. Based on that vision, identify the gaps and decide which elements, outcomes and goals you’ll prioritize in the coming year, which might include:
Strategic hires
Added credentialling, education or capabilities
Improvements to processes, technology or client experience
Financial improvements in terms of revenue or profitability
Impact related goals (community-based, number of clients served, etc)
3. Once you’ve identified primary initiatives and goals, ensure there is congruency across them:
Do they all work in synergy toward the vision laid out?
Are they all consistent with your firm’s brand, market approach, culture, and value proposition?
Are they areas you and your team will commit to prioritizing when it is time to execute?
4. Define the metrics you’ll use to track success.
5. Create a timeline, assign ownership and build time to work on and track these initiatives into the calendar NOW. Last, whether you approach life as a combined and inter-related experience or try to keep separation between the personal and professional realms, there are personal areas worth including in your professional planning considerations. Namely when it comes to the overall health of you and your team. Areas where you might want to look for and consider opportunities for support or improvement:
Nutrition: Is there easy access to healthy food and snacks or a facility that allows bringing these things to work?
Exercise: Is there access (facility) or incentive (reimbursement or friendly competition) that can lend additional support to individual goals?
Sleep and Sitting Posture: With over half our lives spent in bed or an office chair, the quality of these items can have a huge impact on our physiology. And countless studies, including this classic from Ted Talk Speaker Amy Cuddy and Harvard University, have linked positive, powerful posture and physiology to performance.
Maybe 2022 is the right time for those upgraded office chairs after all!?