Top New Year’s Resolutions for Your Small Business

What’s at the top of your New Year’s resolution list? New Year’s resolutions aren’t just for individuals. Resolutions may be even more important for small business owners. Building clear and measurable goals into your business plan for the coming year will help you get on track and stay on track in 2019. Further, when your resolutions are part of your business plan, you’re far more likely to hold yourself accountable for meeting them.

Most New Year’s resolutions relate to an organization – a pain point for most businesses. What company hasn’t squandered precious time hunting down vital assets? Even small businesses are subject to losing items. Employees can spend hours on the phone and still come up empty-handed. The most obvious contributor to these frustrating circumstances is the lack of a formal asset tracking and management system.

If you’ve never drafted New Year’s resolutions for your business before, where do you start? The following list provides a few suggestions for your consideration. These resolutions jumpstart and organize your new year, give you a sense of direction and purpose, and are useful for small as well as large businesses of nearly any industry.

Keep Up With Change
It’s vital for business owners to keep up with change, both within the company and within the industry. That includes updating your equipment and software when necessary, examining your use policies around company-issued devices and/or BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and your security measures. To keep your company running at peak efficiency, you need to keep a close eye on what IT assets you have and where they are.

Also crucial is effective change management – creating a culture in which employees welcome and adapt to change because they’ve been adequately prepared for it by senior management. If you haven’t studied up on some of the core principles of change management, now is the time to make it one of your business New Year’s resolutions.

Organize Your Desk
The telltale sign of a hard worker is a messy desk, right? Nope. Keeping your desk organized can save you all sorts of time, not to mention the potential for disagreements among colleagues when items go missing. Make desk organization one of your New Year’s resolutions by establishing a culture at your company in which every item has a designated home, with the proper labels, folders, bins and trays to avoid any confusion. Encourage your employees not to put things aside to be organized later. Putting those items away in their designated place will help you curb the clutter that comes from stacks that pile up, and eliminate a lot of frustration in the process.

Organize Your Assets

Companies need to know what they own and where those items are located. They also need to know the condition of each of those items. An inventory/asset tracking system greatly reduces and often eliminates the mistakes associated with manual recordkeeping and centralizes all of your data in one convenient location.

Keeping track of your assets also means keeping track of their condition. Maintenance tracking software  helps you stay on top of maintenance schedules, set up notifications and alerts, create work orders and check an item’s complete maintenance history at any time.

Plan Ahead to Stay Ahead
Start planning now for your end of year review next year. Commit to maintaining your budget, self-auditing and keeping everyone in the loop as you go. Equipment refresh schedules are something to keep in mind, as is planned obsolescence, or the business strategy of producing consumer goods that become obsolete on a schedule, therefore requiring replacement. Remember that what got you here won’t keep you here, and that applies to your business plan as well as your resources. Just as some tools and technology are designed to break down eventually, your business is only as resilient as your ability to adapt to change.

Give Up
Don’t quit on yourself, your organization or your goals. Instead, give up on what’s not working, or distractions that keep you from focusing on your goals. Similarly, what can you trim from your employees’ plates? What can you trim from your plate? Are you delegating enough? Do your employees feel empowered or micromanaged? The New Year is the perfect opportunity to reassess. As you make your way into 2019, keep in mind that failures will occur. It’s how you react to those failures that counts.

Give Back
Why not build some corporate social responsibility, or CSR, into your 2019 plans? The holidays present numerous opportunities to get involved in philanthropic activities, of course, but your community’s needs aren’t just limited to December and January. Check out the nonprofit organizations in your area, and create a year-round calendar of CSR projects. Those activities are also a great way to get your employees out of the office and offer opportunities for them to get to know each other better in a relaxed environment.

Effective office managers can play a key role in helping your business stick to its New Year’s resolutions all year long. And one of the most effective tools you can provide your office manager is access to an asset tracking platform that serves up real-time comprehensive data. Using that platform, your office manager can effectively bring every asset stakeholder into the conversation, therefore promoting accountability throughout your organization. A powerful, yet streamlined and easy to use asset tracking and management system eliminates the guesswork and frustration typically associated with manual asset tracking and puts your data at your fingertips 24 hours a day.

Let Asset Panda show you how easy it can be to stay organized in 2019. This intuitive, powerful mobile platform syncs with the cloud and is sure to be one of the best New Year’s resolutions you can make.