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New Year’s Resolution Planning For Businesses

It’s Time…

Happy New Year.

It’s a phrase that evokes the ball dropping in Times Square, but it should be both a priority for your business for the next four quarters – and a reminder that your company needs to make sure it doesn’t drop the ball with it’s own resolutions for the next year. After all, the wishes of happiness need to be backed up with an actionable, solid operational plan – one managed by the right people in the right roles – in order to have a truly fulfilling business year.

Businesses need resolutions for the New Year ahead. Businesses need attainable, realistic goals in order to focus resources, operational priorities, customer service goals, employee relations, and of course, deliver the desired year end financial results.

The old Einstein saying applies here, about insanity being doing the same things and expecting different results. In order to improve operations in the year ahead, and have December 31, 2017 be a much better finish than the one delivered on December 31, 2016, your organization needs to do things differently.

Perhaps getting some “objective perspective” from the outside is a great way to map out the journey from poor results to improved profitability, better customer satisfaction and relationships, happier employees, and other concise, deliverable goals.

• Has your company forgotten how to make money?
• Have you established and do you track, KPI’s?
• What did you state you would achieve on January 1 of 2016, 15, 14? ‘

Here’s something to strive for, what we call the REAL list of 5 business KPI’s:

1. Happy Customers
2. Net Income
3. Engaged, loyal Employees
4. Quiet and contented vendors
5. Consistent, controlled growth

Those are deliverable, important resolutions for every business; and should be similar to one’s own typical, and personal, New Year’s resolutions: being more productive, slimming down, achieving goals, growth and development, vitality, contentment.

Auld Lang Syne was a poem before it was a New Year’s Anthem. And some of the lines remind us that perhaps last year we set out with a firm strategy and operational plan, but perhaps that “old acquaintance” was soon forgotten, and the business went off track, “We have run about the slopes, and picked the daisies fine; But we’ve wandered many a weary foot, since good old times.”

Businesses run through natural cycles, but the ability of the organization to be sustainable over the long term is a function of sticking to a flexible, realistic, candid plan and realizing that there can’t be a mismatch between fixed overheads and fluid revenues and profits. In short, companies now need to be more pliable than ever before.

And this just might be the year your business would benefit from a conversation with the professionals from QORVAL.

Happy New Year.
Auld Lang Syne, Robert Burns

Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should old acquaintance be forgot,
and good old times?
[Chorus:]
For old times since, my dear,
for good old times,
we’ll drink a cup of kindness yet,
for good old times.
And surely you’ll have your pint cup!
and surely I’ll have mine!
And we’ll drink a cup o’ kindness yet,
for good old times.
(Chorus)
We two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine;
But we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since good old times.
(Chorus)
We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since good old times.
(Chorus)
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give us a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for good old times.