Are you set up for your biggest and best year ever?! If you’re thinking anything less than HECK YES – keep reading! I’m sharing my most powerful and simple tips for taking your business to the next level so you can invite more ease, more income, and more excitement into your business this year. Let’s jump in!

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Evaluate and Refine

A new year doesn’t have to mean a ‘new you’ or a new business in this case. The concept of reinvention seems to be a theme at the beginning of the year – but you have plenty of things in your current business that can be evaluated, tweaked, and refined. Though you may have many ideas (you genius, you!), it’s important to solidify what’s working and toss out what’s not before creating new things.

To tell what’s working and what’s not, you could take many different paths. I recommend first considering what the ROI is on each service or product you offer. You’ll have some top-performing offers, which is great! Do you think they are priced appropriately for the time and energy they require? You have full license to up your rates for your most desirable deliverables! For the underperformers, are you hanging on to them because you just enjoy doing them? Or would your energy be better spent elsewhere?

Remember: your underperforming elements might not be your actual offers – they may be certain clients! Sometimes, we think someone may be a great fit at the beginning of a partnership, and then they turn out to suck your time and energy dry while paying the same amount as the clients who trust you 100% and don’t need to breathe down your neck. Do yourself and your bottom line a favor and let them go to make room for bigger and better clients.

After you’ve justified your offers and price points, let’s think about our marketing and sales processes. As entrepreneurs, and especially solo entrepreneurs, we have to dedicate a ton of time here in order to bring in the sales, so leaning into your highest-producing efforts is key so that you have more time to spend on revenue-generating activities, like doing the actual client work!

It’s imperative that if you haven’t already been tracking where your leads are coming from and the dollar amounts attached to each of those clients/projects – this is your signal to start! You’ll begin to see patterns of what is working best and then you can build out your marketing strategy to do more of that and spend less time where your efforts aren’t converting as well.

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Commit to Consistency

The #1 thing that is going to make or break your brand is CONSISTENCY. There are two areas that I focus on with my work – marketing and operations.

The marketing portion covers everything that is outward-facing, meaning that people should be able to discover you online and know what you’re about. They should immediately recognize that you take your business seriously and that this isn’t just a little project or side-hustle. It needs to look and feel like you have invested in providing value to your prospects and that you are the expert they need to turn to for what you are offering.

Now, the thing about staying consistent with your marketing efforts is that there needs to be a system in place to support it. Posting on the fly isn’t going to give you that bird’s eye view you need to create a mix of value, promotions, and experiential content that new eye’s need to see you as the expert. When you commit to a system for implementing your marketing activities, you are committing to consistency.

If you are looking to implement a rinse-and-repeat system like this to automate consistency, solidify your strategy, and set yourself up to eventually outsource your marketing – look no further than my mini-course, Conquer Your Content Marketing! Click Here to sign up and get your system up and running in just a few days.

The second area I focus on is your operations and client experience. I love to use an analogy here: Have you ever had a fabulous meal at a restaurant, recommended it to your friends, and they end up having a completely different experience? Or worse, have you ever recommended a service provider that you loved, and a friend or colleague of yours ended up hiring… only to be dissatisfied with what they got or how they were treated? It’s not only a super bummer for them, they probably won’t trust your advice again, and everybody gets burned.

We’ve all had chaotic periods in our lives where we skip some of the nice-to-have but not essential parts of our process – which means that we have a past client who got treated like royalty while another was treated well, but not as well. If you could give the same amount of ‘surprise and delight’ to each and every client, even on your busiest day or in the midst of a chaotic season, they WILL come back and be extremely confident when referring you to their friends.

Automating the parts of your client experience that remain consistent and integrating surprise-and-delight moments within your workflow will allow you to know for a fact that you are strengthening your brand throughout the partnership and that your high-touch elements will be experienced by every lead and client that comes your way.

It’s time to live up to the hype! If you know it’s time to streamline your systems and automate a consistent experience for every lead and client that knocks on your virtual door, book a virtual coffee with me so I can point you in the right direction! We’ll chat through some of your processes and pick a software that’s perfect for you.

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Get Help Where You Need It

You know what your zone-of-genius is – now stay in it. When there is something you know you need to improve, whether it be your marketing efforts, your systems and processes, or your virtual dwellings (i.e.. your website and social profiles) – it’s time to either implement a software to move it forward or outsource to an expert who knows that realm better than you.

As far as implementing new software to save you time, money, and sanity (staying on top of all the things ain’t easy!) there are so many programs out there to make your life easier, but make sure to weigh your options before investing your time and money in signing up and setting up.

Here’s a list of my favorites, but again, feel free to book a virtual coffee if you need help deciding what is right for your business – I’ve used EVERYTHING.

When it comes to bringing in an expert, you should seek a provider who has a proven track record for what you are looking to integrate or implement. They need to be available to commit to spending the time and giving the attention required to create customized solutions for your unique business.

A cookie-cutter solution – whether it be a software or template that isn’t super customizable or a service provider that seems to take a one-size-fits-all approach – is going to leave you with a final product/process/strategy that has holes in it that could potentially be filled with brand- and experience-strengthening elements and potentially leave you with more work than less – which is the opposite of the goal!

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So – there you have it! Those are the three things I like to evaluate at the beginning of every year. Reinvention is not always necessary – maybe you just need a little extra pixie dust sprinkled on the magic that is already happening!

Cheers to a productive and prosperous new year!