Every new season brings with it an element of change, and hopefully a few seasonal specialties you can look forward to. For the fall season, your mind might fill with sweaters, changing leaves, trips to pick apples, pumpkin spice everywhere, and of course, the winter holidays coming on fast. Quite a bit happens in the year’s closing months, so it often seems like only the blink of an eye separates Labor Day from New Year’s Eve.
Fall is an optimal time to take more charge over your business, where you focus on everything that you have accomplished, as well as what still has room for improvement, all before calendars get flipped into a new year.
Before you’re able to any sort of fruitful planning for the future, you need to take the previous year into perspective and go back over everything that you’ve done in those 12 months. Do you remember what you first set out to accomplish? Do your actual accomplishments stack up very well to the original expectations?
The last four months of the year fly right by, especially when you consider how many events and holidays are mixed up in it all. Start considering holiday promotions now. Considering how many specials and sales are going to happen, you need to think ahead in order to stand out among your competitors.
You need to do other things that aren’t nearly as fun as getting ready for year-end promotions, which includes handling tax items and payroll tasks. You might want to send out reminders to your employers that they need to verify their W-4 information right away so you can process their W-2s promptly with the right information. The final quarter of the year is also an ideal time to start gathering up all the information, receipts, and documents you might need to file taxes in the new year. If all of this overwhelms you, or you just need professional advice on handling taxes, this might be a great time to partner up with UpToDate Bookkeeping in order to have help before things get too busy.
It’s really never too early to begin looking at your new year goals and where you want to make your business better. When you reflect on the accomplishments of the previous year, you have an analysis you can use to jumpstart the next year. Maybe you’d like to grow your customer base by 300, or perhaps you want 110% of your current ROI. Regardless of your goal, it’s good to plot them out in advance so you have time to start mapping out your strategies to get them done.
Fall is as fresh a start of a season as any other, so use it to bring some breathe some fresh air into your business. Even if the back-to-school frenzy is still hanging in the air around you, it’s a great time to do your own homework, study, and testing so you can teach the new year who is boss in your business.
