How to Conduct a Year-in-Review at Your Business
Just because you are a business owner doesn’t mean you were born with all of the organizational skills required to manage a company. However, the very fact that you own a business is powerful evidence that you possess the tenacity, initiative, and passion to learn whatever you need to learn to succeed. One important skill to learn is how to conduct a year-end business review. Here’s how to do it in three simple steps.
Look at Key Metrics
As you look back on your year as a company, be sure to zoom in on the key metrics. These metrics provide the data you need to discuss both your successes and challenges. Some of the metrics to consider include your lead conversion rates, customer retention rates, and website performance. Of course, the most important metric is your overall revenue. However, how well you did in this regard is often determined by the lesser metrics mentioned above. How well you did in these metrics is often directly related to your revenue. As you focus on key metrics you can form a detailed picture of how the company performed in a given year.
Review Company Goals
Your key metrics are most informative when they are compared to the company goals. As you review your goals you can determine which goals were met and which need a little more work moving forward. You might even want to change your goal-setting approach for the next year. One popular approach is called Kaizen. This approach comes from the Japanese term meaning “continual improvement.” Kaizen is all about making small, continuous improvements over time rather than setting massive and lofty long-term goals. Kaizen can help define your goals and lead to measurable improvements in your workplace.
Get Feedback and Create New Goals
Year-in-Reviews shouldn’t be a lecture. Rather, these important meetings should be a discussion where everyone feels comfortable sharing. Most importantly, you should get people’s feedback about what did and didn’t work for the year. This feedback should then inform your decisions as you move forward into the next year. Have the strength to let go of goals or strategies that didn’t work and adopt a forward-thinking approach as you set new goals.
When conducted correctly, your year-end business review can be extremely impactful. It provides the opportunity to learn from the past and allow those lessons to influence how you move forward in the future. Don’t sell yourself short by skipping your annual year-in-reviews. They can expand your vision, offer valuable feedback, and illuminate your path for the next year.
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