Why Business Owners Need to Review The Current Year Before Planning for the Next Year

Want to know why business owners need to review the current year before planning for the next year? It’s easy to get excited about the upcoming year and want to dive straight into planning mode, but for your planning to be as effective as possible you need to stop and take a moment to review the current year. Keep on reading to find out why business owners need to review their current year before planning for the next year.

 

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WHY BUSINESS OWNERS NEED TO REVIEW THE CURRENT YEAR BEFORE PLANNING FOR THE NEXT YEAR

 

1. Identify wins and successes

Let’s start on a positive note. Reviewing your current year give you the opportunity to identify, and acknowledge, all your wins and successes. All too often I talk to business owners who are achieving great things, but as soon as they achieve something they set themselves a bigger goal and off they go. Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to continually improve and striving to be better. But you should take a moment to identify the wins and successes across the year.

 

Having a list of all your wins and successes will not only enable you to see cumulatively all the great things that have happened over the past year, but it will also help with planning for the next year. The key is to look at your wins and successes, and then determine what happened in order for the wins and successes to happen. Understanding what worked well, and why in this year, will help when planning what to do next year.

 

2. Identify mistakes and setbacks

We started on a positive note, but you also need to look at the negatives. You need to identify mistakes and setbacks. In business not everything goes to plan or well. Mistakes will be made and setbacks will happen. Some will be a result of internal things that you may have been able to control. Whilst others will be a result of external things that you couldn’t control (but could have perhaps responded to differently. Again similar to when looking at your wins and successes yes it is important to have the list of what went wrong. But it is more important to then dive into why those mistakes and setbacks happened. This will help you to realise things you should avoid doing in the future and also be aware of some external factors that might still impact your business in the next year.

 

WANT TO CREATE A PLAN FOR 2025 IN JUST ONE DAY?  That is exactly what can happen when you book a 2025 Strategy Day! I have a tried-and-tested process that I’ve used for years that ensures that in just one day I can help business owners to create a plan for the whole year ahead.  All you have to do is fill in a questionnaire beforehand and then turn up on the day. I’ll then lead you through the whole process and write everything down – making it super easy for you! For more information and to book a 2025 Strategy Day click here.

 

3. Take the key learnings into the next year

A big reason why business owners need to review the current year before planning for the next year is to take the key learnings into the next year. By looking at your wins and successes, and your mistakes and setbacks, you should have a good understanding of what has and hasn’t worked over the past year. That information is invaluable for a business as it moves into the next year. You want to continue to build on the wins and you want to avoid making the same mistakes again.

 

Reviewing your year will enable you to properly process what has happened in your business, why it has happened and then take those learnings into what you plan to do, and then do, in the next year.

 

4. Ensure you have a proper understanding of your business’ finances

One area of your business that you definitely want to be reviewing before planning ahead is your business’ finances. Too many business owners don’t have a proper understanding of their business finances and planning for a year ahead without knowing what actually happened this year is madness.

 

With your business’ finances there are a lot of things you could be looking at including:

• Revenue / Income
• Expenditure
• Gross profit
• Sales per offer
• Profitability per offer

 

Looking at these figures will mean you understand financially what happened in your business, but when planning for the year ahead it will help you to make decisions around what to continue to sell and what to stop selling, whether changes need to happen to increase profitability and when marketing should happen. It will also give you data to help you with your financial forecasting for the year ahead.

 

WANT TO PLAN FOR 2025 TO BE YOUR BEST YEAR YET IN BUSINESS?  That is exactly what we can do together when you book a 2025 Strategy Day! I have a tried-and-tested process that I’ve used for years that ensures that in just one day I can help business owners to create a plan for the whole year ahead.  All you have to do is fill in a questionnaire beforehand and then turn up on the day. I’ll then lead you through the whole process and write everything down – making it super easy for you! For more information and to book a 2025 Strategy Day click here.

 

5. Reflect on how you feel about where the business currently is 

Last, but not least, business owners need to review their current year before planning for the next year so they can reflect on the business current position and how you feel about that. A lot can happen in a year and it’s important to take a moment to really reflect on what your business currently looks like and how you feel about that. If you are running a lifestyle business then it isn’t purely about the numbers. Your revenue might be growing and that looks great on paper, but if that is because you are selling offers you don’t want to sell or working with people you don’t want to work with then it isn’t going to feel great.

Once you’ve got all of the data around your business’ performance then you’ll want to reflect on both how the year has gone and the current position of your business. Having a honest reflection on your business’ current position and how you feel about that will enable you, when planning for the year ahead, to either continue if that feels right or make necessary shifts.

 

That’s it. You now know business owners need to review the current year before planning for the next year.

 

Having a proper understanding of what has happened over the past year to get your business to the current point will enable you to be much more effective when planning for the year ahead. As shown it is important to review both the numbers, and how you are feeling in the business. By doing this you are going to put yourself in a well informed position to plan to make your business better (and possibly bigger) in the year ahead.

 

I hope you’ve found this blog post useful and now can see why it is important to review your current year before planning for the year ahead.

 

And that is exactly why the first section of a 2025 Strategy Day is dedicated to reviewing and reflecting. Together we’ll look at your business’ performance over the last year and then you’ll have the opportunity to reflect on how you feel about where the business is now. And then we’ll make a plan for where you want it to go. 

For all the information, and to book, a 2025 Strategy Day click here.