Check Back – Evaluate Now – Plan Forward

While you are celebrating the incoming year it is important that you look back at what you have done, evaluate what you have accomplished, and make plans for the future. It is important if growing your business over the next year is part of your vision.

Check Back

Look at your accomplishments over the year. Look at your accounts, your sales, your clients’ results, your product turnover, and include your personal and business achievement. Use your calendar if you have to, to remember what you have been doing over the year, where you have been, who you have been networking or doing business with. If this feels like a lot of work, then try keeping track during the year. Create an accomplishment list, a list you add to every time you achieve something, so you can simply review it at the end of the year.

Evaluate Now

What were you expecting to have accomplished this past year? If you wrote out your goals at the end of last year then go back and review them. Do any of your accomplishments meet or exceed your goals for the year? Create some metrics around your results.

• Percent of your goals met.
• Percent of each goal achieved.
• Areas where you did not achieve expected results.

Plan Forward

Now, start looking forward. Look at where you need to get help (check the “areas where you did not achieve expected results”). Create goals based on last year’s results and try to match or exceed them again. Look at new areas of growth. Create your Goals for the next year in terms that you can understand and measure at the end of the year. Add the phrase “All this or better” to the end of your goal list and then make sure you review them during the year.

Don’t let the year go by while you hope to achieve this great list you created; evaluate, make adjustments, put in new effort, bring on more help, do what needs to get done to meet or exceed your goals and next year you will be singing your outstanding achievements to your inner circle and receive the accolades you deserve because you did the work you committed to do.