by Stacy Zemon
The end of the year is a good time to reflect on your business’s progress over the past year and plan how you want it to develop in 2011.
Sometimes the hardest thing about New Year’s resolutions is simply keeping them, so begin by simply committing to do your best. It might seem like there is a lot to aim for, but there are twelve months in which you can continue to make improvements.
Here are some New Year’s resolutions to consider. They are designed to help you grow both professionally and personally. Here’s to your success in 2011!
Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions
- Learn how to delegate and do more of it. There are so many things to do when you’re running a DJ business, it’s easy to delude ourselves that we need to do all of them. Then we wonder why we’re so tired and frazzled and have no time to do anything else! Determine Your Personal Return on Investment, and decide to let someone else do some of the tasks for a change. Delegation is the key to a healthy work-life balance.
- Promote your business regularly and consistently. Too often the task of promoting your services slips to the bottom of the to-do list in the press of urgent tasks. If you want to attract new clients, you have to make promotion a priority. Make a New Year’s resolution to hire a marketing expert, or take the time to create a marketing plan on your own and follow through. Try some of these Low-Cost Ways to Promote Your Business to get started.
- Make business planning a weekly event. Planning is vital if you want a healthy, growing mobile entertainment company. Business planning lets you take stock of what worked and what didn’t work, and helps you set new directions or adjust old goals. So why do it just once a year or once a quarter? Set aside time each week to review, adjust, and look forward - or even better, make business planning a part of each day. Not only will this help you avoid costly mistakes and stay on track, but you’ll feel more focused and relaxed.
- Learn something new. What you choose to learn may be directly related to your business or completely unrelated. Learning something new will add to your skills and add a new dimension of interest to your life. To be more innovative, you need more diverse sources of information and inspiration. Resolve to read magazines you’ve never considered, watch movies you think you’d hate, and attend lectures of topics apparently unrelated to what you do. Also, there are a plethora of DJ conventions, publications, web and chat sites and of course – this blog from which you can learn. How will you find the time? By delegating, remember?
- Join a new business organization or networking group. There’s nothing like talking to other business people for sparking new ideas, refining old ones, and making contacts. Whether it’s a group specifically designed for networking or a national, regional or local DJ association, making the effort to be a part of a group will revitalize you and your company.
- Give something back to your community. There are all kinds of worthy organizations that make a difference in your community. Make a New Year’s resolution to find a cause that matters to you, and give what you can. Make this the year that you serve on a committee, be a mentor, volunteer, or make regular donations to the groups in your community that try to make the place you live a better place. And those that give get. Nothing will seed and grow goodwill for you and your business better.
- Put time for you on your calendar. It’s extremely important it is to take the time to recharge and refresh yourself. All work and no play is a recipe for mental and physical disaster. So if you have trouble freeing up time to do the things you enjoy, write time regularly into your schedule to “meet with yourself” and stick to that commitment. If you won’t invest in yourself, who will?
- Set realistic goals. Goal setting is a valuable habit – if the goals lead to success rather than distress. Make a New Year’s resolution that the goals you set will be goals that are achievable, rather than unrealistic pipe dreams that are so far out of reach they only lead to frustration.
- Don’t make do; buy something new. Is there a piece of equipment you’ve had your eye on to better your performance? Buy it. Whether it’s a new mixer, a pair of active speakers, or even an old fax machine that’s a pain to use, make a New Year’s resolution to stop putting off getting what you need. The irritation of making do just isn’t worth it.
- Drop what’s not working for you and move on. All products and services aren’t going to be super sellers, all sales methods aren’t going to work for everyone, and all suppliers or contractors aren’t going to be ideally suited to your business. If a technique or a product or a business relationship isn’t working for you, stop using it. Don’t invest a lot of energy into trying to make the unworkable workable. Move on. Put up your antenna and look for something or someone better.
Achieving a Healthy Work-Life Balance
This is like maintaining a good relationship; you have to keep working on it. But if you apply these New Year’s resolutions throughout the year, your success is guaranteed! When this time comes around again next year, you can sit back and reflect again. Rejoice in your successes. Learn from your misses. And then set tougher goals for 2012.
What special New Year’s resolutions have you made for your business?
Stacy Zemon, Publisher and Chief Scribe
Stacy Zemon is widely considered an authority on the disc jockey business. She has become a distinguished industry leader over the course of her illustrious 30+ year career as a DJ Entertainer. To her credit, Stacy has spawned more professional disc jockey business owners than anyone else in the DJ industry! She is author of the world’s best-selling DJ books: The Mobile DJ Handbook, The DJ Sales & Marketing Handbook and The Mobile DJ MBA, and is a longtime writer for DJ Times magazine. Stacy’s mission is to provide educational resources for DJs that support their professional growth and financial prosperity. Write to her c/o [email protected] or call 877-442-7170. For the longer version of Stacy’s story, click here. To learn about Stacy’s business consulting services, click here.
