Retreat, reflect and refresh to profit in your small business in 2010

This post is coming to you from beautiful Port Stephens, about a two-hour drive north of Sydney, Australia and I take a week’s break here towards the end of every calendar year.
My time here has three main purposes:

1. To retreat -  to rest and recharge my batteries
2. To reflect on and review the previous year – both my successes and my failures
3. To refresh my plans for the coming year. This year my forward planning is especially important because I plan to launch two new businesses early in the year  - www.AgeWellZone.com and www.HubSiteBuilder.com

Why you want to retreat from your small business to boost your profits

The biggest challenge that most small business owners have is to stop the go go go and do do do routines that can become habitual ways of keeping us locked in to working in our business rather than on our business. That’s why it’s essential to retreat from your business from 3 to 7 days at least once a year to allow you to step back from the inside workings of your business and examine what has happened and what you want to happen from a more global perspective.

12 tips to set the right course for your small business profits for 2010

1. Retreat from your business for a few days to relax your mind, body and spirit
2. Review your values. Your values are your lifestyle priorities and preferences. How have your priorities changed from when you established your small business or when you set your last vision for your business? Remember that your values are your unique motivation code.
3. Review your vision for your small business. Are you close to fulfilling that vision? If yes, then it’s time to set yourself a new, expanded vision. If no, is your vision truly aligned to your values, do you have the right strategies in place to take you as directly as possible toward your vision, do you have the right people on board and in the right roles to support your strategies with optimum effectiveness and efficiency. Or have changes in market conditions caused your existing vision to be no longer viable?
4. Review your mission for your small business. Are you still as passionate to help your customers or clients in your unique way with your unique products or services as you were the day you started your business? If yes, do the people you have working in your business share your passion and do they have the right knowledge, attitude, skills and systems to support them in the day to day implementation of the mission of your business? If no, then it’s time to review your values, because what you value, in other words what’s important to you, is what will provide the fuel to drive your ongoing efforts in your business.
5. Review what worked well, especially in terms of sales and marketing, which provide your cash flow, the lifeblood of your business. Remember that your web marketing strategy needs to be a subset of your overall marketing strategy.
6. Analyze why those strategies worked so well and identify how you can replicate and expand on them in the coming year.
7. Review what did not work so well. Is your website optimized for high search engine ranking to make it easier for potential customers to find you?
8. Analyze why those strategies did not add to your small business profits and what you need to do in order to tweak or delete any unsuccessful strategies or tactics.
9. Take a good hard, realistic look at your customer service. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes – what’s your customer experience REALLY like, both when things go well and when they need to come back to because something went wrong with your product or service?
10. Review your own knowledge, skills attitudes and systems. Do you need to update your knowledge to stay current or even ahead of the pack in your field? Are you working as much as possible in your strengths? In other words doing what you do best, and outsourcing the rest? Are your relationship skills bringing out the best in the people who work with and for you – employees, customers, suppliers and others? Have you systematized your business wherever possible to make it easier to run independently of your time and attention and to make it easier to sell when it’s time to move on to the next phase of your life?
11. Identify, intensify and integrate the Commitment Nexus of your business to turn employees and customers alike into raving fans. Contact me for details of our next Commitment Nexus Workshop
12. Take a mini-retreat, perhaps one or two days, every quarter and conduct a mini review of where you’re at in relation to where you want your business to be. Again, use this time to step outside of your business, to analyze what is and what is not working, to recharge your batteries, and to refocus with renewed energy.

Here’s to Your Peak Performance and Profits in 2010,
Karyn Clarke

New Series: Maximize Your Small Business Profits

The single most significant action you can take on a daily basis to maximize your performance and profits is to stay in your strengths zone. Your business strengths zone is the equivalent of what some people call flow. When you are in a flow state (your peak performance zone) your focus, performance and productivity levels are all at their peak. In addition, at the end of your activity or work day you feel a healthy sense of satisfaction, rather than a sense of debilitating exhaustion.

How Your Strengths Strengthen Your Small Business Profits

Your strengths are what you do best – most easily, most enjoyably and most efficiently, and therefore will lead to the most profit for your small business. Your strengths come from your natural talents. Your natural talents become strengths only when you have invested time and energy into increasing your knowledge, skills and experience to grow your natural talents into strengths. If you’re not yet 100% sure of what your natural talents are, you can identify your personal talent code here.

Once you have identified what your natural talents are, you owe it to yourself and your business profits to develop those talents into strengths, and to avoid working in your areas of weakness, where you are by definition less productive, less efficient and therefore less profitable. This is the secret to working on your business rather than working in your business.

So how do you avoid your weaknesses and stay in your strengths zone, your peak performance zone?

Outsource Your Weaknesses To Maximize Your Small Business Profits

If you’re anything like I am you will have a million and one business ideas in any given day, and cannot possibly implement them all. My solution to that dilemma is to outsource the tasks and systems that are time and energy draining for me.

When I first realized that I needed to delegate or outsource in order to become more profitable, I procrastinated for some time, putting the process into the too hard basket. I knew that I didn’t want any in-house employees, as I wanted the freedom to work from anywhere in the world, be it my local coffee shop or while visiting relatives in Japan.

The obvious solution was to engage virtual employees to do the work that was outside my strengths zone, but I really felt that it seemed very complicated and inefficient to engage people on a contract or project basis from sites like guru.com or elance.com. The challenge I have with that method is that every time you engage someone for a new project you also begin a new relationship, waste valuable time and energy educating your new contractor about your standards, expectations and professional requirements.

Then along came Tyrone Shum, almost in my own backyard in Sydney. Tyrone introduced me to his Mass Outsource System, and suddenly the cloud of confusion and uncertainty was lifted, replaced by clarity and confidence. Not only is Tyrone’s system amazingly effective and efficient in helping you to grow your small business profits, he actually gives away 10 FREE videos that outline his system in incredible detail.

Since linking up with Tyrone I am so much more motivated, focused and energized, simply because I now have the time and energy that I previously only dreamed about. Time and energy not only to expand my businesses and increase their profitability, but also time and freedom to actually have a life outside of my work. For the first time I feel that I truly am able to win at work.

Small Business Profits Resources Mentioned In This Post:

1. MyTalentCode.com
2. OutsourceTools.com