"Round 'Em Up": Getting Your Business Ready For An Awesome 2022

With 2021 crawling its way towards its last days, everyone is in a frenzy to achieve last-minute goals and hit targets so they can end the year in grand style. Businesses are no exception.

From the closing of accounts to filing taxes and declaring profits (or losses) made and even going on a much-needed company retreat, every business owner, entrepreneur, or top executive is looking to round up the affairs of their business and ensure they are more than ready to enter the new year with a fresh, clean start.

The holiday season is notorious for being the most difficult time of the year to complete tasks and it can be overwhelming when the long list of things to do seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. It’s like that full-blown storm before nice calm weather and getting through it can be exhausting, especially if you’re a new business owner or entrepreneur.

Closing off your business year is a good way to sit back and evaluate how well or badly your business did over the year, not just in terms of finances, but in every other aspect.

Here are a few things to have on your checklist if you are a new business owner, or if you’re having a hard time figuring out what you need to look out for before the year ends.

Analyze Your Goals For The Year

You probably set some goals and targets at the beginning of the year, and just like everyone else, you had high hopes of achieving these goals by the end of the year.

As the year closes, you need to go back to these goals and targets (especially if you weren’t checking and updating them regularly during the year) and determine which ones have been achieved or left hanging. Doing this helps you to determine how much progress you have made and gives you a clearer idea of what to prioritize in the coming year.

Conduct an overall audit of your business

With the year coming to a close, it is important to evaluate your existing business processes, systems, strategies, and plans. This includes financial, human resource, marketing, sales, and even technological areas.

Most companies focus more on evaluating their finances at the end of the year and neglect the other aspects of their business which in reality affect revenue more than we think.

It is important to conduct a detailed audit of things like:

• your social media (strategy, profile updates, content strategy, etc)
• website (updates, re-designs, SEO, etc), and
• human resources (employee growth analysis, employee-company alignments, employee-customer relations, etc)

to help you determine areas that need restructuring.

You might be surprised to find out just how many loopholes are lurking behind these simple, yet larger overlooked systems.

If running through all of these audits feels a bit overwhelming, you can outsource it to companies like Bloop Global who offer detailed business process audits for free.

Review Your Pricing Strategy

Pricing is one aspect of every business that is important, yet least understood. Most businesses price their products or services based on what other competitors are pricing without paying much attention to how much value they are giving.

As the year comes to a close, review what your pricing strategy looks like and determine if you need to make some changes in the upcoming year. Try your best to thoroughly understand what exactly is going into each price you are offering for your products or services.

A good book to help you understand what a good pricing strategy looks like is Winning Pricing Strategy by Edison Gbenga Ade, which breaks down the fundamentals of pricing and helps you in adopting the right pricing strategy for your business.

Run Special Holiday Offers and Promos

This is a great time to start running holiday promos and offers for your good and services if you haven’t started already. Doing this gives you a great revenue boost for the year and gives you the opportunity to get other relevant information and feedback from customers. You can use your promotions as a way to get reviews about your products or services and use that as a way to boost your business for the upcoming year.

Check Your Financials and Close Your Accounting Records

This is a very common practice for businesses that cannot and should not be overlooked. It is important to know how well your business did financially over the year in order to determine if it is still worth running the business.

Making significant revenues and profits as a business is important unless your organization is not for profit.

You need to make sure your bookkeeping records are up-to-date and review your financial statements which include income, cash flow, profit and loss, and balance sheets.

If this is something you can’t do by yourself, you can get the help of an accounting expert or use accounting software like Quickbooks to do all the brainwork for you.

File all taxes

This is very important if your business is registered in the country of operation as it saves your business from the legal sanctions that follow if you fail to. If this is something you’re not confident doing on your own, you can hire a tax expert to come in so they can help you through it before tax time is due.

Once you have gone through all of these steps, you can move on to planning for your new year, using insights from your end-of-year review.

I have prepared a step-by-step checklist template that you can follow through if you’re still not sure what you need to do to close the year for your business. Access it here.