It's Time to Winterize Your Business

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It's Time to Winterize Your Business

Written by Leanne Hoagland Smith

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Growing Sales in Tough Times

You cannot allow fear and anxiety about the economy to paralyze you. Instead, focus on what you can accomplish and take steps to do so. Today, more than ever, it is imperative to reach out to new prospects and to existing customers. Don’t be one of the many who are waiting with their fingers crossed for the economy to improve. Instead, keep taking proactive steps to build your sales pipeline and generate sales revenue.

With 2010 quickly coming to a close, now is the time to winterize your business so you are ready for 2011. For many businesses, the winter months slow down because their customers' budgets have been exhausted. Additionally with the forthcoming holidays, this is a time for some businesses especially manufacturers to furlough their workforce to allow time for internal maintenance and repair operations (MRO).

Common winterizing actions include the usual strategic plan review of goals achieved and not achieved in the areas of:

Marketing
Sales
Customer Loyalty
Leadership and Management
Growth and Innovation
Financials

Actions to Winterize Your Business
This is all fine and good. However there are other check up actions that are ignored until a crisis situation happens. These specific situations create a misalignment or gaps in the efficiency and effectiveness of any organization:

Assessment of existing workforce and future needs from projecting, budgeting, recruiting to hiring to on boarding to retaining new employees
Succession planning respective to not only potential sale or merger of the business, but to external customers and internal customers
Review of job descriptions and performance appraisals to ensure alignment to strategic plan, department's objectives and actual tasks performed
Compensation and incentives based upon performance appraisals, productivity and goals achieved
Processes and systems to ensure continuous improvement such as review of current vendors
Local, regional, national and international trends in marketplace including people, processes and strategies

To manage a high performance organization is very much alike to operating a high performance vehicle. There are specific times to perform routine maintenance. For example, airplanes must undergo a manufacturer-mandated complete rebuild of the engine or engines depending upon the actual hours of flight time. Automobiles that experience the northern cold winters also need to be winterized from having batteries to tires checked.

Imagine where your business could be if you adopted such a rigorous schedule to ensure that your organization continues to fly high or drive without those unexpected repairs because you failed to invest the time to work ON your business instead of always just IN your business.

The question for you is when will you schedule the time to winterize your business so that 2011 will be even better than 2010? And if you need help, do not be afraid to talk to your trusted advisers such as your lawyer, CPA, mentor or even another small business owner.

If you like this article, check out Leanne Hoagland-Smith's book, The Red Jacket in a Sea of Gray Suits.

Leanne Hoagland Smith
		About the author:
		Leanne Haogland-Smith has over 25 years in sales. Her true joy is selling and helping clients unlock the results that they want. She holds a core belief that the majority of answers are within each individual or organization and, sometimes, people just need an outside perspective to help them discover those answers. Leanne has written more than 1000 articles on sales and process improvement. Learn more about Leanne at www.processspecialist.com .