Big Things In 2015

It’s the time to look forward to 2016. What’s going to be big in 2016, Vlad, what do I focus on going forward?

I’ll get to that in about two weeks because I know everyone loves those posts but right now you ought to be focused on everything that went right and wrong in 2015. If you own or run a business odds are you aren’t getting paid any more just for showing up, there are no attendance and participation trophies in business (unless you’re an employee and even that’s more of a question with outsourcing). It’s time to take a long, good (or ugly) look at the year you are wrapping up and look at what went well and what went poorly.

Simply put: Your biggest opportunity to succeed immediately is to correct the problems and bad habits you’ve developed in your business over the year, rather than finding a new product, service, agenda or task you could pursue. And no time for doing that like the last two weeks of the year.

Here are things to go over:

– Is everyone happy?
– Why isn’t everyone happy?
– Are you up/down on the year? Why?
– Where are you wasting time?
– Are you utilizing your talent efficiently?
– If not, do you need new talent or new tasks?
– Are your clients happy? Have they all heard from you?
– Anyone stagnant? Cut/remove/repurpose.

Those should get you started. Explain your results against your agenda and see where you came short. This should be an ongoing process anyhow but we all know things tend to slip off the plate from time to time – so no excuses.

Sometimes people get caught up in the positive vibe around the holiday season and refuse to look at the ugliness during the seemingly only calendar convenient time of the year with some breathing room. If you put that off, your problems continue to linger, you don’t make as much progress and this same time next year you’re wondering why you aren’t making more money. This is not about being the Grinch and ruining your Christmas, it’s about looking at things that didn’t play out in 2015 – finding out why – and correcting it so that next year is more prosperous.

You cannot have it all. And the competition has never been tougher while making $ has never been less certain or predictable. I always say on Facebook “times is tough” and with fewer and fewer things being given, easy and simple the more you have to step your game up to be successful in the long term. Everyone can get lucky briefly, long term success takes long term commitment.

You can’t look at 2016 until you’ve looked long and hard at 2015. Hope it was a great one – and to those of you that work with us at ExchangeDefender, I hope we were a big part of your success so far!