Take a deep breath — you survived the holidays. Now comes January, a notoriously slow month for many businesses. Rather than lamenting this post-holiday slump, why not seize the chance to regroup, recharge and refine your plans for the year ahead?
Make some New Year’s resolutions.
Now’s the time to nail down those action plans. Talk to your business partners about goals for 2017 and get to work writing your resolutions for a happy and healthy business. Need a prompt? Try these business goal-setting resources to jumpstart your ideas.
Get analytical.
Once you have your goals in mind, assess how close you are to reaching them. Spend some time with your Square Dashboard to find out your busiest months, weeks, days and hours of the day. You can also get a better understanding of your top performing items, and — if you have more than one location — you can find out which one is bringing in the most business. Crunch the numbers before you make crucial decisions about things like staffing and planning inventory.
Streamline for success.
Time is precious and you can make saving it a priority. Use Square Inventory’s tracking tools to help you get organized, and automate your invoicing with Square Invoices. Keep things simple so you can focus on other areas of your action plan for 2017.
Listen to your customers.
Read reviews of your business online, talk to your team or send out a survey (with an incentive such as a discount on future purchases or a loyalty card). Listen to customer feedback, good and bad, and make changes for the new year.
Try new things.
January is the ideal time to mix things up and try a new approach to marketing, so experiment and try a new way of reaching and engaging with existing or potential customers. You could run a Facebook contest, use Instagram to promote daily deals or try offering customized gift cards. Anything that sends a ‘new year, new you’ message will likely resonate with customers who have made their own healthy resolutions.
Most importantly, enjoy the breather this month so you can hit the ground running when things get busy again and keep all those New Year’s resolutions.