Congratulations! Your small business has made it through 2021. However, if you are a successful business owner, your mind is already on what lies ahead in 2022. You may be considering all the possibilities and challenges you will face over the 12 months. Regardless of the good, the bad, and the ugly, you have some planning to do.
A little preparation can go a long way in helping you develop a strategy that lays the foundations for your business and your team. Below we look at five things you should consider when building your strategy.
1. Improve Your Online Presence
If you do not have a strong online presence, your business will not survive. Your competitors are already everywhere online. Therefore, you need to create a strong online presence to gain traction in your market. There are several things you can do to improve your online presence.
- Create or update your website with a focus on SEO.
- Build an email list.
- Produce content that engages your audience.
- Get on social media.
- Stay active with fresh content.
- Use paid advertising.
- Use digital tools to analyze and adjust your marketing strategies.
If you do not have the time or interest to market your company online, the best you can do is to outsource your digital marketing to an agency that can handle your marketing strategy for you.
2. Perform a Vendor Review
During a vendor review, you analyze the potential risks of utilizing a vendor’s product or service and an ongoing process to ensure that quality security practices are being maintained in an ongoing fashion. A vendor review process will assess a vendor’s capacity to maintain effective and appropriate security practices and other performance elements critical to an organization’s business. Vendor review is particularly critical when vendors have access to sensitive internal or customer data.
You may develop different vendor review processes for different vendor types. Vendor reviews will address a range of areas of risk that working with the vendor could pose to an organization, including reviewing a vendor’s physical environment security, organizational security, human resource security, data handling processes, asset management, etc and more.
3. Analyze and Update Your Equipment As Needed
To operate reliably, you depend on machinery, supplies, and other equipment (from vehicles to assembly devices). However, in the day-to-day activities that go with running the business, you may be that you forget to do periodic equipment checks and make sure you have what they need to grow your business.
The following are questions that you should ask regarding equipment needs:
- Does the business have the equipment necessary to succeed and profit over the long haul?
- If not, can the equipment last another year, and can the business sustain itself using the existing equipment?
- What will the new equipment cost and where can you obtain quotes for the equipment?
- Do you have the cash on hand or the ability to finance such purchases, or will the money need to come from future operational cash flow?
- Are there any expenses you could cut to offset and help justify such expenditures?
4. Growing Your Team
If you plan to hire in 2022, you’re not the only one. The job market will explode in various industries over the next 12 months. Therefore, you need to have a strategy for your next hires. Here are some tips for expanding your team in 2022.
- Build out your budget and anticipate your headcount beginning with the open positions you will need to fill in the first quarter of the year.
- Meet with your recruitment partners — internal and external — to discuss hiring needs, niche roles, and candidate qualifications.
- Before you launch your recruitment plan, take an audit of your company — the good and the bad.
- Think about what employees seek from companies and what your firm is doing to find and retain the best people.
- Keep potential candidates engaged and move the hiring process along thoughtfully but timely.
- Constantly evaluate what’s working and not, and alter your approach as needed.
5. Review and Analyze Your Group Health Insurance
Health insurance coverage is a business necessity. At the beginning of the year, new rates for health insurance, business liability insurance, automobile insurance, umbrella policies, and other types of insurance tend to come into effect, so it’s a great time to go quote shopping.
Consider the following questions about insurance:
- Is your company adequately covered in liability, and does it have adequate fire and health insurance?
- Are insurance companies running multi-policy deals at the beginning of the year to garner your business?
- Are there any new insurance carriers that might be able to provide a competitive quote?
- Has your company taken on new assets or business interests that haven’t been accounted for and protected by existing policies?
Contact Insurance Enterprise for Premier Health Insurance
If you have questions about group or individual health insurance and need health insurance quotes, contact Insurance Enterprise at 888-350-6605. Speak to a licensed agent and find out more about how you can get an affordable health insurance plan.