The days are starting to get longer, the temperatures are getting warmer (at least in some places), and the daffodils are popping up all over the place. Which can only mean one thing – Spring is on the way!
Spring makes us feel refreshed and ready to take on the world again.
We usually also feel the need to do a bit of a spring clean in our homes and gardens. Something else to think about is a business spring clean, so you can be prepared for the coming months.
Ways that you can spring clean your business:
Clean your office or workspace
If you’re anything like me, your office can get a bit messy. With receipts all over the place and a million Post-It notes that have long since lost their stick and fallen from where they were once visible. Now is a fantastic time to clean or even entirely reorganise your workspace or office.
Some important things to consider when cleaning:
- Keeping your important documents
Make sure that you have a specific folder for your important documents, like receipts, plans, and strategic documentation. Just in case you think you’ve sorted them and can’t find them when you really need them. - Clean your keyboard and screens
If you’re a computer worker, your keyboard can get nasty! So get yourself some disinfectant wipes and clean it thoroughly. - Storage
Make sure that you have enough storage for everything that you need. While not everything needs its own place, it does need somewhere. - Furniture
Does your current set-up serve its purpose? Your workspace must be functional for both your work and your body. And if you’re looking at upgrading your furniture, try to get something that is ergonomically beneficial. A good computer chair with a desk at the right height will do wonders!
Having a clean and functional workspace can help you clear your mind and focus on the work at hand.
Tidy your desktop/computer
Once you’ve cleaned your physical workspace, it’s important to tidy your digital workspace too!
It’s easy to let things pile up on your computer. They’re not physical things; it’s not like they get in the way when there are too many of them. However, it is important that you clean them up every now and then.
Make sure that your documents are named and filed in a way that make sense to you and are easy to find when you need them. The last thing you want is to be looking for one specific document and taking 15 minutes to find it because you can’t remember what you called it or where you saved it.
Close your unused tabs! If you have heaps of tabs open because you ’might need it later’, trust me, you won’t need it later! And if it’s something you use often, consider saving it as a shortcut so you can close it when you’re not using it.
Delete your screenshots and downloads once you’ve used them, so the files aren’t just sitting on your computer, taking up memory space.
Delete your old emails that you’re never going to look at again. Your email hosting system can only store so many emails, so make sure to regularly cull old ones.
Having a clean desktop is good for you and your computer!
Check out your accounts
Go through your accounting software and make sure that you don’t have any outstanding invoices to receive payment for or bills that you need to pay. To be honest, you should be doing this more regularly than once a year, but you might as well do it now too!
Make sure that you pay all of your bills. And if you can’t pay them, talk to the person you owe money to. If you communicate openly with them, they’ll likely work with you to find a solution. And, if you do have overdue invoices, make sure to reach out to the client so that you can get some money. You might find that they need to pay it off over a period of time. But, if they’re not willing to pay, talk to your bookkeeper, accountant, or a debt collector.
Run a Profit and Loss and have a look at where your money leaks are. We’re almost halfway through the financial year, so it’s a good time to check on this anyway!
Compare your business to the beginning of the financial year and this time last year. Check how your business is growing and check what you can change to be more profitable. You can even make an appointment with your accountant to go over your numbers.
Just a note: do make sure to check with your bookkeepers and accountants to make sure that what you do is going to be ok for your accounts! The last thing you want to do is mess those up!
Clean up your systems
One of the hardest things to deal with is when your systems get messy. Now is a great time to clean them up!
If you have any specific systems that you use, like a Customer Relationship Management system or a Task Management system, it’s important to keep them tidy. The last thing that you want is someone getting an email or invoice that is incorrect, or tasks being missed because something went wrong.
While it’ll depend on what system you’re using will depend on what exactly you have to clean up, but just make sure that all the data is correct and as up to date as possible. You may encounter duplicate information, irrelevant or outdated content, and malfunctioning systems.
This will likely take a while to sort, so just go through it all step by step, and take your time!
Organise your marketing
Get into all of your marketing documents, images, and systems and make sure that they are as up-to-date as possible.
If you use Canva or another system for creating your marketing collateral, log in and have a look at everything that you’ve made over the past year (or more). Sometimes you’ll find really old images that you haven’t used in years, which you can either update or delete entirely, and other times you’ll find new (or old) inspiration for new posts.
While you’re in there, also make sure that your logos, colours, and fonts are the most accurate so all your posts represent your brand correctly.
Get some reports of how your marketing is working. This is both for your paid marketing, like Google or Facebook Ads, and your organic marketing.
With your organic marketing, it’s important to track what people are engaging with so that you can post more of that. How do you know if your organic marketing is doing well? Just look at your views, reach, interactions, and link clicks. That’ll give you a general overview of what content is working best for your business. The higher these results are, the better your organic posts are doing!
If you’ve been doing advertising, you need to ensure that the money that you’re spending is actually working. Figuring out how well your advertising has done really depends on what the purpose of your marketing campaigns was. Some general things to look at are:
- Impressions – How many times the ad was seen
- Reach – How many people saw the ad (this is different from impressions because some people will have seen the ad multiple times)
- Clicks – How many people clicked on the ad and/or link
- Cost per result – How much you paid for the purpose of your ad (e.g. how much you paid per click)
Now that you’ve cleaned up your business, you can look to the future. It’s a great time to strategise how to be more organised in the future. Look into strategies to streamline your documents, accounting, systems, and marketing for the future. You can even look into new office furniture or organisation systems to keep your space clean.
And if you need any help with your business spring cleaning, join one of our groups! We have lots of members who can help you with any and all of the above!
