5 Ways to Kickstart Your Business in the New Year
The new year is here, which means entrepreneurs everywhere are looking to hit the ground running and crush their goals this year. Whether you have a head start on planning for the new year or you’re feeling a little behind, these 5 ways to kickstart your business will help you feel confident in the new year.
#1: Reflect
One of the most important steps to kickstart your business in the new year is to take some time to reflect on the previous year. Ask yourself these questions:
What went well?
What didn’t go well?
What marketing channels were a hit this year?
What marketing channels need some improvement?
What could I have done differently in my business?
Did I take care of myself and my health?
Did I enjoy the work I did and feel fulfilled?
Did I need more support from others or team members?
Once you reflect on the previous year, you can celebrate how far you’ve come, assess where you currently are, and release any past feelings or frustrations. Think of this as a mini-therapy session that will help you move forward in the new year even stronger!
#2: Revisit Your ICA
The next action step to help you kickstart business in the new year is to revisit your ICA (Ideal Client Avatar).
As your business grows and changes over the year, so will your ICA. Their problems may have changed, the solutions they need in this fast-growing world may look different now than they did a year ago. They may be hanging out in new or different spaces online.
It is such a good practice to get in to revisit your ICA each new year so you can stay up-to-date on WHO you’re speaking to. Because no matter how amazing your offers or plans are for the year, if your offers and messaging don’t align with your ICA, none of
it’s going to matter.
Your messaging, marketing, packaging, and pricing ALL come down to your ICA.
Need some help getting clarity on your ICA? Check out this ICA blog post for more tips, and be sure to grab your FREE copy of our ICA Workbook by filling out the form below!
#3: Set Goals
After you’ve reflected on the past year and gotten clear on who your ICA is, that is when you are really ready to sit down and set goals for the upcoming year.
This is where so many entrepreneurs have it backward. They start setting goals first before knowing where they even are or who they’re speaking to.
It’s important to let your reflections and ICA findings guide your goal-setting. This will help you set SMART, realistic goals. Plus, it will help ensure that your goals are aligned to the offers that will reach your ICA and their needs.
For example, in your reflections from the previous year, you may have found that your audience needs support setting up their custom membership site. After doing some research on your ICA, you determined that your ICA is a female entrepreneur looking to make an impact on others through a custom-designed, fully immersive membership experience that allows them to deliver their personalized life coaching content and value directly to their members.
What your ICA needs from you is not a course on creating a membership.
What they need from you is the support to actually create and set up the custom membership platform, the tech, systems, integrations, etc. That way, they can focus on what they do best, coaching and serving.
From there, you may set a goal to help 5 impact-driven female entrepreneurs create and launch a custom membership site this year.
For more tips on setting goals in your business, check out this blog post.
#4: Create an Action Plan
The next way to kickstart business in the new year is to get down and dirty with your goals and create an action plan to help you hit them in the upcoming year.
This is one of the most exciting parts of the business. It’s where you get to brainstorm, plan backward, get out all of your pretty pens and markers and create the road map for how you’re going to help more people and achieve success.
If you’re anything like us, we love a good brainstorming session. It gives us all the warm fuzzies inside!
As you create your action plan, we recommend looking at your goal and working backward. From the example above, the goal is to help 5 female entrepreneurs create and launch custom membership sites. That is 1.25 sites per quarter of the year.
Work backward from there and plan to work on 2 projects per quarter. If you know the summer months are busier for you, plan to launch one site in Q1, two in Q2, one in Q3, and one in Q4. Boom, you’ve hit your goal!
Then, map out the timeline and steps to create those membership sites so you have an idea of what you (and your team) will need to do each month and week. Then it’s just a matter of plugging those dates into the calendar and getting to work!
#5: Conduct A Site Audit
Creating an action plan seems like a pretty straightforward step, right? However, you might be thinking, “but where am I going to find these clients?” That’s where this step comes in!
Just like it’s a good practice to revisit your ICA each new year, it’s a good idea to conduct a site audit every new year. This helps you determine what you need to change and what improvements need to be made on your website.
If your website is slow, clunky, has outdated plugins, or has images and messaging that doesn’t represent you as well as it possibly could, your website is NOT doing you justice.
A site audit helps you find these issues so you can fix them.
That way, you can ensure your website is functioning optimally, is user-friendly, secure, on-brand, speaks to your ICA, showcases your current services, and is totally and uniquely you!
If you want to learn more about kickstarting your business with a site audit, click here to learn more!
We hope these 5 ways to kickstart your business in the new year are helpful. We’d love to stay in touch with you and cheer you on all year long. Be sure to come follow us on Instagram to stay connected.
Cheers to the new year!
