5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Happy New Year! The countdown has rung out, the Party is over, and it’s time to go back to work. It can be tempting to want to stay back and enjoy some extra time off. But the thought of not being able to pay for the excess indulgences over the course of the past week should be enough to jolt you back to work.

If you have been bitten by the New Year bug and the desire for a different outcome for your life and business in the next 12 months, know that you are not alone. A lot of people start the New Year hoping it would be their best year yet, the year all their dreams would come true, and their lives would change for the better. Hoping for a better outcome is one thing, getting your hands dirty to bring your dream to life is another, and it all starts with a plan.

The New Year is a time for opportunities and possibilities, and you must position yourself to take advantage of it. You have to be prepared for what is to come, and you can position yourself to be able to do that by creating a Plan. A Plan is a proposal, what a person intends to do. A plan could be a list of steps used to achieve a desired goal. If you would like to make your plan more detailed and have weight, you can add a timeline and also the resources needed to complete the project.

Sitting down to write a plan for your business can be a boring and tiresome activity, and you may be enticed to copy-paste from the past, especially the ones you didn’t accomplish. After all, everyone is doing it and it’s easy, but that may not be a good idea, remember the New Year is a new opportunity filled with possibilities. When you just go through the motions, you reduce your chance of success. Also, you don’t want to make some success because you got lucky, you want the gratification that you have accomplished something.

To create a goal for the New Year so you can make it your best year yet, you need to be aware of your desires for your business. You have to put the interest of the business at the forefront of every decision you make. Next, gather ideas, you can use answers from the Reflection exercise, and even borrow ideas from your previous goals.

Goals are better is they are written down and placed where you or key people can refer to on an as-needed basis. Goals should be written in statement form. For example, one of your goals could be:

In 2018, we would explore better relationships with our vendors so we can negotiate deeper discounts.

You can create a plan for the entire business and also for different aspects of the business. You could create a plan for events, social media marketing, and email marketing. You can also create a plan for stuff that needs to be fixed, for example, if you identify an event in the past year that failed, you can create a Plan to succeed. For example,

The last event failed because I did not promote it online, for this year’s event, we would post the event every day on all our Social Media platforms.

Creating a plan is not a one-day activity, you should give yourself sufficient time to get this done. Since this should be completed before the New Year, it is best to start in December, I would suggest you start early in the month but in case you haven’t started, it better late than never. Now you know, you would be better prepared this time next year. Work at your peak thinking time in a space you enjoy and at a time where you would not be easily distracted. I prefer doing it in the morning, as the first business of the day.

Using these ideas and the learnings and insights from the questions you answered in the Reflection Series, I am confident you can create a solid plan for 2018.

What ideas has this sparked, What has helped you? Please share your ideas and thoughts in the comments.