We might begin by looking to see if something really makes sense for us to do – for the advancement or success of our business, to add credentials or credibility to our business, to enhance or bolster our own professional or skill development, or something that might be for the betterment of our clients.
We might ask how general strategies or solutions that we want to employ promotes the general safety of our clients or enhances their quality of life. Can we do something that makes our routines easier or the lives and daily activities of our clients less difficult or more simple to do?
Are we aware of the best solution to employ for what we are observing or what we know to be typical situations that we might encounter in the lives and living environments of our clients?
We might set education goals for ourselves to learn more about particular techniques or processes, products, solutions, or other approaches that we can use in our business to enhance the lives of our clients.
In terms of our business, we might have performance goals that we want to reach – the number of people we anticipate serving, the average size or scope of a remodeling engagement, the dollar volume we want, the satisfaction rate we want to achieve with our clients, the amount of referral business we obtain, the size of the margins we are able to carve out for ourselves through efficiency and pricing, and other such elements of growing and sustaining our business.
We likely will want to begin partnering – or expanding this relationship if this is something we already have been doing – with professionals from other disciplines to help us perform better evaluations and deliver more complete services for our clients.
There are even additional areas of our business, our delivery systems, our pricing, our menu of services, the geographic and demographic parameters of our clientele, and the average amount of time it takes to start and complete a job – and even volunteer or community work that we would like to do – that we could establish goals for as we move forward with this year.
Clearly we can’t do all of theses activities at once. We may be able to focus on just a handful of them – as important as all of them might be for us and our clients. Therefore, we have to set priorities. Which item is the most important to accomplish first? Maybe it it is the easiest one to do or the one that we think we can accomplish the quickest – for an early “win” and a little momentum boost. It might be just the opposite, tackling the most extensive or most complicated one first.
Regardless of which activity we select as our top priority, and what we might list as the next few priorities behind that one, nothing will matter if we don’t actually get to work on accomplishing them. Otherwise we just will have created a giant wish list that won’t end up serving us or our clients that well. We must put out intentions into action, and setting priories will help us begin with the most most important (as selected by us) items first.
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