With the New Year right around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about how to make your business easier to run, more productive, and more profitable in 2016. Here are three ways you can make 2016 your best year yet:

ONE – Write It All Down

The number of small businesses that don’t write down their procedures is astounding, as is the number of businesses that fail in their first few years.

If you really want to succeed, it’s not enough for everyone involved to simply know what needs to be done – procedures need to be documented in detail, and put somewhere that’s easy to access later.

This does two things: it makes it easier to train new people, and more importantly it makes doing even the toughest job seem easier to get through. You’ll always have a sense of how far along you are, how far you have to go, and the motivation to get there faster.

TWO – Hand Off Busy Work

Once you have it all written down, some jobs will stand out as things you either hate doing, or would be better done by someone else. Hiring someone to take over those tasks, or outsourcing to a third party, has widely been acknowledged as an absolute necessity for running an efficient business.

Once these items are crossed off your list, you can run through what’s left several times faster and more efficiently, and profits will multiply quicker than you can say Happy New Year.

THREE – Get Perspective

Having someone look everything over can save you years of trial and error. They should be looking for things you missed in the first two steps, and find simple ways to make things faster, cheaper, and more bullet-proof against errors.

You’ll know you’ve found the right person if they not only help sort out your procedures, but also help you find tools to organize everyone’s to-do lists.

For example, one of the things we often do for people is to build a system where they can assign procedures, track jobs as they’re completed, and get reminders on upcoming tasks. This can solve a lot of headaches and prevent many more in the future.

If you’d like to know more about using these three steps to create an incredible 2016 for your business, get in touch with us at [email protected].