Year-End Business Review: Analyze Your Business Results to Double Your Profits In the New Year

Guest post from Sue Clement

How has business been this year? If you want to do better (or EVEN better) next year, it’s time to do that dreaded task: the year-end business check-up.

Like a physical, the year-end check-up goes over ever detail of your business to find out if everything is in order, and how well all parts are working. And like a physical, it helps diagnose any potential problems so they can be fixed before they turn into big problems.

So go ahead and schedule some time. You may well want to set aside a day or maybe at least a few hours and take a closer look at how your business has been doing. Here are some of the things you should do as part of your review:

1) Check your balance sheets

Did you turn a profit? How much did you make? Are you happy with the results? How much more do you hope to make in the new year.

2) Check the return on your investments

What did you invest in during the year, and what were the results. There are a number of things you may have invested in, so check each of them separately:

• Advertising
• Networking (money AND time spent on networking)
• Online Marketing
• Continuing Training and Education for yourself and/or your staff
• New equipment, software, hardware, and so on
• Other

Check each of them and find out what worked, and what didn’t. Decide where you want to invest more, and where you may want to invest less than you did this year.

3) Evaluate your marketing efforts and results

Take an even closer look at your marketing efforts and find out which types of marketing brought you the best results. Try to assign a dollar figure to everything even if you “just” spent time. How can do you that?

Decide how much your time is worth. Whether it’s $50/hour, $150/hour, or even just $20/hour, calculate the hours you spent on various activities including networking events and find out how much you spent.

4) Tally the numbers

Then take a look at your results. And not just at the net cash earnings, but at the lifetime value of the new clients and customers you got as a result of your marketing efforts. How much is each of them worth? You find out their lifetime value if you multiply their average purchases over a year by the number of years they typically remain your customer.

5) Figure out return on your investment – and take action accordingly

Once you have tallied the numbers, take a look at which of your activities brought the most results per dollar spent. Plan to do a lot more of those. And drop or minimize the activities that yielded lesser results.

And if you would like to boost your business results even more in the new year, join Sue Clement at her FREE teleseminar ^[1] with powerful strategies to get a headstart on the competition and take your business to the next level. To sign up, click here: http://www.sueclement.com/teleseminar-gs.htm