5 Ways to Prepare Your Small Business for 2022

As 2021 wraps up, business owners faced another year of uncertainty as we navigated year 2 of the COVID-19 pandemic. While we may not know what 2022 will bring, that doesn't mean we can't do our best to plan ahead for a successful year. Here are my 5 tips to help small business owners and entrepreneurs prepare their business for the year ahead.

1. Know Your Numbers: Review your profit loss statements. Whether you work with a bookkeeper or use an online software like quickbooks, it's important to know exactly how much money your business brought in and how much money you spent. Make sure all of your expenses are categorized as well. This will help you not only identify your most and least profitable revenue sources, but it will also prepare you to file your taxes early next year.
2. Meet With Your Team: Conduct annual employee performance reviews. One of the keys to scaling as a small business is having strong staff. Conducting yearly employee performance reviews allows you to assess an employee's work in a given time period. During these reviews, you should schedule a time to evaluate your staff's overall performance, identify their strengths and weaknesses, offer feedback, and help them set goals. This will give you the opportunity to communicate expectations, correct issues before they escalate, and increase engagement and motivation.
3. Map Our Your Vision: Set your company goals for 2022. After you take a look at your numbers and meet with your team, map out your goals for 2022. Your company should start with identifying goals in the following areas: revenue, marketing, customer service, operations, and culture goals. After you have mapped out these goals, create a strategic plan and break down action steps take and milestones you to achieve during each quarter of 2022. Meet with your team to talk them through these goals so that everyone starts the new year on the same page and is aware of what the end game is. These goals should be revisited at least every quarter.
4. Identify Areas for Growth: Pinpoint professional development opportunities. In order to bring your company's 2022 vision to life, you and your staff will likely need professional development support. Take some time to reflect on what it is that you all are missing, do you need to hire consultants or a business strategist? Are there any conferences or trainings your staff can attend to make your team stronger? Start to identify your company's needs and do some research on how those needs can be met. Growing your team's skillset can be pivotal to the success of your business.
5. Schedule Vacations: Start planning to take time off now. Planning your vacations now, allows you and your team to plan ahead and keep the business running smoothly even if staff are on vacation. Identify in advance the moments when your business might need all hands on deck so that employees can avoid planning vacations around those times. This can also help boost worker morale by giving you and your team members breaks to look forward to throughout the year. Create a time off calendar that everyone on the team has access to so that everyone is aware when staff members won't be in the office.

Wishing your business much success in the new year! If you found this article helpful, feel free to add me to your network and learn more about my work, here.

Jessicah Pierre

The People's Publicist and Business Strategist