Happy October!
Well, that’s it. We are in the thick of it. The conferences, the campaigns, the new customers, the holidays, the changing of the seasons, the rush, rush, rush and the go, go GO.
There are very few weeks actually left in this year and for many businesses, those weeks are some of the busiest - both personally and professionally.
It can be easy during this time to push aside all that cool strategic planning you did over the spring and summer, when your mind was a bit more at ease. It can be easy to look at those things and think, “Yes, it’s important, but it’s not urgent - and so much is urgent right now.”
Six months from now, you may look up from the grindstone, aghast. Why is your business in the same place it was a year ago? There were so many changes you wanted to make - changes you knew would make all the difference. But you were so busy. It wasn’t urgent, and this, whatever is in front of you, this is urgent.
This month, we want you to do something really, really difficult:
Stop for a second, and prioritize.
Yes, that screaming customer with their hair on fire, they are stressing you out with their urgency. Yes, that sale needs to happen or you won’t meet your target, which might be the only thing between you and making payroll this month. Yes, that request that just came through has a deadline of tomorrow.
We know. We have them too. We are service-oriented folks, and we want to make everybody happy. It’s hard to avoid being purely reactionary when you’re built to support others, which of course is exactly what your business is built to do. You know as well as we do that being proactive will make all the difference, and we know as well as you do how truly difficult that is when you’re dealing with the day to day.
We want you to be incredibly successful, so we are asking you to build being thoughtful about your business into your every day. We want you to create a time block each week, set aside just to think about what’s most important, so you can rearrange your life and your business to achieve that success.
We want you, and your business, to be resilient (our theme for 2019). This month’s resiliency article is all about one of our favourite things: processes. You don’t have to love creating or maintaining processes to know great processes are the difference between crushing it and getting crushed. Get in there. We know you’ll love it.
We want you to have a plan. During those focused time blocks, we encourage you to think about what you’ll be doing in 2020 - perhaps creating a content calendar?
We also want you to meet the fabulous Leanne, our Analytical Slayer, who lives for bookkeeping, communication, and Disney. We know that you’ll get as big a kick out of her as we do.
Finally, if you happen to be in Toronto in November, our CEO Julia Chung will be talking all about finances at the CPA Ontario Women in Business Summit. Other featured speakers include Vicki Saunders from SheEO and bestselling author, Amanda Lindhout. You do not have to be a CPA to attend - join us!