Spring Cleaning Your Business: 12 Tips for Setting Up Your Business for Year-Long Success

Becky Martin, writer

Published at 10/02/2020, Updated on 04/05/2022 , Reading time: 5 min

Spring Cleaning Your Business: 12 Tips for Setting Up Your Business for Year-Long Success — Photo © spring-clean.jpg

Before you know it, flowers will start blooming, temperatures will rise and days will get longer. With it coming up to spring, we thought we’d put a twist on the classic idea of a ‘spring clean’ and see how it can be applied to your business.

We believe that the transition in seasons provides just as much inspiration for your business as it does for your house; but what we’re taking about doesn’t involve lots of elbow grease. By ‘spring cleaning’ your business, what we really mean is optimising it for future success. So, why not use this spring as an opportunity to revamp your business? If you want to make your business sparkle and feel brand new, consider these 12 top tips for spring cleaning your business.

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Get your priorities straight

To be a successful business owner you need to use your time efficiently. If you haven’t already, determine exactly how you should spend your time. Declutter your schedule by deciding which processes or people are taking up a lot of your time that could be spent better.

Give your marketing strategies a refresh

You don’t need to wait until a change in seasons to examine your current marketing strategies, but use it as the perfect opportunity if you haven’t in a while. Consider which advertising mediums are proving the most successful and allow you to measure return on investment. Also, think about whether you are spreading your advertising budget too thin and if your campaign is still captivating audiences.

Update your website and social media

Have a look at your online presence and take note of any copy that could be rewritten to sound better or more accurately reflect your target market and the kind of services you’re currently offering. As with your social media, make sure every post that goes out is representing your brand as effectively as possible. This is a great part of spring cleaning your business because fixing these little details doesn’t take heaps of effort but can make a huge impact.

Strengthen your business goals

Ask yourself how specific your business goals are and whether you’re achieving them. The trouble with goals being unspecific is that you are less able to accurately track when and how they are achieved. Decide whether your goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, results-orientated and time-bound). SMART goals mean your business can have a proper focus and you can have a clear idea of your path to success.

Revisit your business plan

Often, when businesses change and adapt business owners think there isn’t any use for their original business plan. But it’s actually important to dust off your business plan once a year and keep it up to date. It’s always going to be beneficial re-exploring the basic foundation your business was built on.

Consider your long-term goals

When completing stage five, consider what your long-term goals are. It might be that your predictions, needs and aspirations aren’t the same as when you started out. It’s completely normal for your goals to change, but just make sure you’ve acknowledged this and the rest of your team are aware of it. If your goals haven’t changed since you last updated your business plan, use this as an opportunity to check how you’re achieving them.

Shuffle your staff around

Reflect on what needs your business has. Take the time to assess which roles are being filled well and which could be performed better. Think about how your business has changed and how this impacts the importance of certain roles. If your business has new needs, think about how you could redistribute staff responsibilities or role definitions and maybe even hire new people.

Examine your finances

Look at any areas where you might be spending too much money. If this is the case, re-evaluate your budget. You can spring clean your business by cutting back on expenses and review where money is going. Some of this you probably can’t do much about; for example, the rent. But it’s worth checking you’re getting the best deals on shipping, utilities, phones etc.

Organise your desk

You might not mind the ‘organised chaos’ of your cluttered desk, but studies have actually shown that it can have a significant impact on long-term productivity and behaviours. It’s been found that 90 percent of Americans think that messy desks are detrimental to someone’s work ethic and 57 percent would judge their colleges for how their workspaces are kept. So, in order to encourage healthy co-worker relationships and increase productivity levels this spring, why not dedicate a morning to de-cluttering your desk?

Organise your emails

You probably say you’re going to do this all the time but never get around to it. Doing so should help make your communications methods feel more manageable for a minor expense.

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Clean the office

Taking the idea of spring cleaning quite literally, if the office hasn’t had a good spruce in a while, why not do it now? Research has shown that workers in a clean office get more work done. Untidy workplaces can lose out on £1.9 million a year from lost productivity due to searching for documents.

Think about yourself

Make sure you’re considering your personal energy, motivation levels and happiness, as well as just thinking about the business. Think of ways to re-energise yourself and make sure you’re getting enough rest. Consider what you can do to reignite the passion that inspired you to start your business in the first place.

Spring clean your business today

We’ve suggested 12 ways you can spring clean your business, but there are loads more! By taking a few, if not all, of these on board, you’ll be well on your way to optimise your business for future success. Want some more inspiration? Have a look at another one of our articles in the ‘sector spotlight’ series: ‘The CEOs Creating New Trends in the Beauty Sector.’