Four Easy Ways To Spring Clean Your Business

As we step into a new year and return to work after the festive break, it’s a natural time to evaluate systems and processes that you have in place in your business. Just as you reflect on your personal progress over the previous year, and perhaps set some goals, so you should take a look with fresh eyes at the software and resources that you’re using at work. It’s a time for clean starts and making the most of your resources to start 2020 off on the right note. So how do you go about spring cleaning your business? 

Plan A Website Update

Your website is your shop window to the world and the main source of information for customers, financial backers, business collaborators, and suppliers, so it should be an ongoing priority to make sure it is up to date, with rich content and in line with Web accessibility standards. If you haven’t been maintaining your website and making incremental improvements, use the new year as a chance to reevaluate, kicking off with a comprehensive web audit and a round of user testing to determine what users really need. Combine this with insight from your web analytics to come up with a plan. Rewrite copy to be effective for search engine optimization and take time to fix the details, such as adding alt text to the images and ensuring that fonts are legible. 

Review Your Systems

Some people say that your business is only as  good as the systems you use, and it’s certainly true that you can improve processes, add productivity and even increase your bottom line with the right software at your disposal. Take the time to consider your business needs and how they could be better supported, whether it’s a payroll processing system provo ut or software which schedules your blog posts for you. Or perhaps it’s time to invest in the best CRM for your business, or an email marketing tool that really delivers. Use the fresh start as a chance to assess what you need. 

Revisit Your Business Plan

When you first started your business, you will have taken time and care to develop a business plan– but how often have you looked at it since? The truth is that many small business owners lose sight of their original vision and values in the rush of the daily grind. And the market and customer needs are constantly changing around us, altering the macroenvironment. So we need to respond to this by proactively revisiting our business plans and adapting what we do and how we do it. Refreshing your plan and revisiting your original will really help you with strategic development for the new year. 

Organize Your Inbox 

Finally, take the time to give your emails a little spring clean too. It’s amazing how much more calm and productive you will feel with a clean inbox. Shift your folder system to the timeline method – creating folders for today, tomorrow, this week and next week – and file emails there to create a to-do list. Unsubscribe from all those newsletters you never read and delete anything over six months old. Start afresh in 2020 and don’t let email rule your world. 

If you liked this post, you also want to read: End of the year round up: things to do before the new year starts and 20 Top things to do before new year with this end-of-the-year bucket list.