With many people focused lately on holiday celebrations and new year resolutions, small businesses need to prioritise business planning. This includes both taking stock of the past year and making preparations for the year ahead.
If the past 20 months have taught us anything, it’s that businesses need to be agile, adaptable and innovative. If your start-up wants the best chance to not only survive but thrive, planning for the year is crucial.
Review your business plan
A good business plan acts as a roadmap for how to structure, run and grow your start-up. It’s important to pick a business plan that works for you, so look at what’s available and create a plan that’s right for you and your business.
At its core, a business plan should include goals and objectives, budgets and funding, marketing and sales plans, hiring strategies, and financial predictions and results. Once you’ve got it all outlined, this will be the foundation for all of your business strategies for the year ahead. You can then use this plan as a structure to build out more detailed tactics on how to achieve your new year’s business goals.
Set business goals and objectives
Research suggests businesses that set goals and track progress are more successful than those that don’t. Setting goals in the early stages of a business venture, through to established businesses is imperative to stay on track, grow your business, improve customer satisfaction, and have a thriving and healthy business.
Instead of tackling your biggest goal, such as raising a whopping amount in a funding round or meeting your annual sales targets in the first month, choose something smaller to start with like reducing business costs on things that the company no longers uses, or put up a new hire advertisement. This will keep your positive vibes in check and will help you to create an action plan that leads to success.
More funding, more opportunities
The past year has been massive for investment opportunities in Australia. In September, Australia recorded its first AU$1 billion week in the eight days between 13 September and 20 September 2021. This reflects the increasing capital opportunities available for start-ups that might be looking to get more funding in the new year.
Beyond venture capital (VC), there are alternative ways that you can tap into to accelerate your start-up’s growth and success. One increasingly popular way to do this is through venture studios. Venture studios, unlike traditional VCs, invest both capital and dedicated team support to help founders grow their business. The advantage of working with a venture studio is the team is so ingrained in the day-to-day operations of the business and the product or solution itself, that they’re able to help the business make better decisions while having a team of experts focusing on your startup without having to fork out on hiring your internal team, both through money and effort.
Depending on your investment goals for the future, there are many options available for non-technical founders, startups and small businesses today. It’s just about doing your research and finding the right fit for you and your business.
Look to the future
So, whether you’re finalising your business plan, setting OKRs for the first quarter of 2022, or exploring viable avenues of funding to grow your business, it’s important to stay focused on your overarching mission and vision. As 2022 is looming, and will undoubtedly have its own set of challenges, it will perhaps be more imperative than ever that you do everything in your power to set your company up for success.
