What are your goals for your Southeastern FL business this year? I’m going to assume filing your taxes on time is already on your list. For the financial well-being of your business, that needs to be one of your top priorities right now.
And the IRS has just announced: Tax season starts on January 27th. Which makes right now the most crucial time to strategically optimize your tax return. Schedule your appointment with us as soon as you can, so we can make sure you’re maximizing all potential tax savings opportunities.
My advice? Schedule your appointment now, while my calendar still has plenty of open slots: calendly.com/ralfheyer/30-minute-meeting
(Exception: If you’ve been affected by the recent devastating wildfires in California, you have until October 15th to file and pay your 2024 taxes. Sincerely, our thoughts and prayers are with you right now.)
Now, back to my original question: What are your goals for your business this year? (I promise I won’t meddle this time.)
The opportunity this first month of the year affords is special. I know it’s cliche, but please indulge me for a moment. This is a unique time to reflect, to dream, and to start again. And if you make the most of it, I think you’ll be surprised where you’re standing this time next year.
2025 is still fresh. So I want to challenge you: This year, go beyond your typical annual goal-setting. Really take advantage of this time to generate new vision for your business with strategic planning.
Strategic Business Planning to Level Up Your Miami Metropolitan Business
“The loftier the building, the deeper the foundation that must be laid.” – Thomas A. Kempis
You’ve (hopefully) set goals for your Southeastern FL business for the new year. But how do you know if those goals are the right ones? (And more importantly, that you’re not wasting precious time and resources chasing a goal that won’t turn out to be profitable?)
The way to avoid this is strategic business planning. On the barebones level, strategic business planning is defining your objectives and strategizing the most economical and efficient way to achieve them.
This might sound rudimentary to you, but 77 percent of businesses actually aren’t doing this – and they’re treading water (or slowly drowning) as a result.
Without a strategic plan, you’ll be busy – but you won’t be productive. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather stay on the productive side of that equation.
The SWOT method
There are lots of strategic business planning methods out there to choose from. I want to focus on the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis framework because it relies solely on actual data to plan your best path forward. What can I say, I’m a numbers person.
Successful strategic planning for your business has to start with clear objectives – and that’s what the SWOT method is all about.
Step 1: Ask questions.
Start by asking questions for each category. This is a great opportunity for a whiteboard session with your team, splitting the board into four labeled quadrants and writing the questions within them.
Some questions you might ask could be…
– Strengths: What are we succeeding at? What is our competitive advantage? What do we receive positive customer feedback about?
– Weaknesses: What products are performing the worst? What is slowing us down? (Be honest here – this is NOT the time for sugar-coating).
– Opportunities: What marketplace trends are currently rising? What demographics could we consider targeting?
– Threats: What are competitors doing? How many competitors do we face? What new or upcoming regulations could set us back?
Step 2: Gather data.
Now find the answers to all those questions. Turn to sources like employee/customer feedback, financial and sales reports, market trends and competitor research, and any other available data. (This is where it becomes really important that you’ve been keeping careful records all year.)
Step 3: Identify (and refine) objectives.
You now can identify your strategic objectives: Taking advantage of the opportunities that are aligned with your strengths, and mitigating threats by working on your weaker areas.
Say, for example, you own a small e-commerce store selling sustainable apparel. From your SWOT analysis, you identify that:
– Your greatest strength is your eco-friendly products.
– Your primary weakness is your high shipping costs (and high prices in general).
– Your most profitable untapped opportunity is using social media for organic marketing.
– Your biggest threat is that cheap, fast fashion is wooing over your price-sensitive customers.
Bingo – you’ve found your growth-driving objectives for 2025: Launching social media marketing and lowering shipping costs.
Keep in mind: The SWOT analysis is only the first piece of the puzzle. After you find your objectives, you need to break each of them down into actionable steps with measurable benchmarks (something I talked about recently with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), if you’ll recall. Consider this note the prologue to that one).
Random goals won’t help your business grow in 2025. They have to be backed by strategy – driven by detailed internal and external data (especially financial data). And if that financial data looks like Greek to you, not to worry. My team and I would be happy to help break it down in real-people speak.
calendly.com/ralfheyer/30-minute-meeting
To a productive 2025,
Ralf Heyer