If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that things can alter quickly and sometimes those changes may be beyond your control.
But with light appearing at the end of what has been a long tunnel, now might be the time to reset your business to better position it for success.
So what’s involved in a business reset? It all comes down to knowing where you want to go, determining opportunity and casting off the things that might be holding you back, while embracing the available tools that can assist.
Why reset your business?
Hitting the reset button on your business allows you to consider it as a clean slate. It involves evaluating what’s working and what’s not, getting crystal clear on your goals for the future and determining the path to get you there.
In the interim, it also sees you identify the practices, people or processes that may be holding you back, giving you the space for new thinking and establishing business goals that will set you on the path to success.
A bit like a business audit, it allows you to see your business from a fresh perspective, identifying potential that you can actively work towards. Ultimately, it allows for more agile decision making in your business and more efficient key activities.
So, let’s walk through the process.
Create a winning business mindset
Resetting your business starts with a winning mindset. Remember that can-do attitude you had in the early days of business? Well now’s the time to dust it off and don it again.
A winning business mindset sees you view challenge as opportunity and mistakes as the chance to learn.
This mindset starts from the top of any enterprise and quickly trickles down through your team.
Importantly, a winning mindset ties into your business through things like your vision, mission and team goals.
What’s working and what’s not?
As mentioned before, resetting your business is akin to conducting an audit, which involves determining what’s working and what’s not.
Here, you draw on things like your business numbers, while also using tools like SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to really drill down into the areas where your business performs and those key activities where it can improve.
Shed the dead wood
Once you know what’s working and what’s not, it’s time to shed the dead wood and get back to business basics.
Dead wood might involve anything from products and services that fail to pique customer interest to processes and procedures that are holding you back.
Basically, it involves asking ‘does this work as it should?’ and, if not, either finding an alternative or simply casting it off.
This also applies to the people and thinking in your business. For example, is the culture in your business working, and do you have the right staff in the right place?
Where to from here?
After a touch of streamlining, and having identified your strengths, weaknesses, business opportunities and threats, it’s time to get crystal clear on where you want your business to go from here.
This is about goal setting and planning, including determining the key activities and KPIs required to meet your business objectives.
Get focused on your customer
Your customer should be at the core of any business reset. So now’s the time to re-examine exactly who they are and seek feedback on what they really want from your products and services.
Tap the talent of your team
Chances are you have a talented team of individuals around you, who are just as invested in your business as you are.
Where possible, bring them into the process of resetting your business. They’re likely to have great insight into things that work and those that don’t, along with processes and procedures that need a little refining.
Embrace the tools required
Many businesses can be streamlined to run far more efficiently using tools like software and automation.
This doesn’t mean embracing all the latest bright shiny tech objects, but instead look at areas that can be improved with digital technology, such as CRMs, accounting software, social media marketing automation etc.
Stay the course
Once you’ve embarked on a business reset, it’s important to stay the course, using KPIs and numbers to identify how your business is travelling.
Then it becomes a process of honing and refining your enterprise over time in the knowledge it’s now more efficient, more streamlined and more agile than it was.
If you’re looking to reset your business, I’m available to assist. You can book a discovery call with me here, or learn more here.
