With 2017 rapidly coming to a close, and the New Year soon upon us, businesses will be taking stock of the Christmas sales and reflecting on the past year. However, there is little time to think, because the new year will soon be bringing its own challenges. As a business, it is important to be ready for what the future holds for you and your company. Here are a few ideas that you can try to get your company ready for 2018.
Set Your Company Goals
It is a good idea to set your business goals to achieve each year, and most successful companies have clear goals for individuals, teams, departments, and the company as a whole. It could be to increase sales by a certain amount or to reduce your financial waste. Having clear targets at the beginning of the year, helps you to visualize how you are doing month by month and make any adjustments along the way. You can include many factors such as employee incentive plans, website analytics, and staffing levels to give you an accurate picture.
Evaluate Your Staff
You have seen how your workers have coped over the past year, and that includes periods when demand has been high. It is important that you take a look at how your employees have managed and identified any gaps that you need to fill. It could be that some of your staff need additional training, or that you need to recruit more staff to help make your company run smoothly. It is also a good idea to ask your workers what they thought and if they can identify any issues.
Marketing
Over the past 12-months, you have probably released one if not more marketing campaigns. It is now a good time to review those marketing campaigns and see how effective they were. With the help of analytical tools, you can see what ads were effective and who was interested in your products. It can also be a good time to consider a change to your logo or livery to try and boost visitors to your website and engage with more customers.
Business Processes
You may have noticed some areas of your company that needed to be changed or adapted to make them more efficient. It could mean installing new machinery or software to make your staff more productive and reduce downtime. Security is a critical consideration for any company that has an online presence. Now is a good time to review your strategy and see if improvements can be made. If you do a lot of work in the cloud, then you may need to think about additional security to keep your data safe. Adding a cloud security control point such as a CASB can improve the level of security between your office-based systems and your data in the cloud.
CASBs are quickly becoming a required security technology for companies that store sensitive corporate data in the cloud. With a CASB, organizations can understand how much sensitive data is being uploaded/downloaded to cloud services, who is accessing the data, and how much security risk corporate data is exposed to.
By utilizing all of this data and analyzing your performance over the last year, you can quickly develop a new strategy that will move your company forward into the new year.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect those of EconMatters.
© EconMatters.com All Rights Reserved | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Email Digest | Kindle
