Scout Your Competition, Upgrade Your Lighting, and More Must-Do Items to Start the New Year

Jan. 8-14

STRATEGY Look at what your competitors are doing and learn from them, both the good and the bad. Visit their websites and subscribe to their newsletters. This will keep you up to date on trends, where your market is moving, and, at a glance, what everyone else is advertising, discounting, and featuring.

Jan. 15-21

TRAINING The early part of the year is a great time to do cross training as staff are usually more receptive to new concepts and the idea of change. Draw up a schedule. Once trained, all your staff, from sales to production, will be able to discuss installation, artwork maintenance, or anything else that comes during an interaction with a customer.

Jan. 22-28

MANAGEMENT Take an inventory of your tech use and evaluate each item for its usefulness, working on the assumption that if something can’t justify itself, it’s out. Exit the social networks you barely use and get rid of the apps that have no benefit. Yep, that means Candy Crush may have to go.

Jan. 29-Feb 4

SHOWROOM Nothing has the immediate impact on your showroom that a lighting upgrade will. Bring in a consultant for a day. With their help, you may be able to upgrade to the latest LEDs and make other changes to bring sparkle to your showroom again.

Feb. 5-11

STRATEGY A lot has changed in the last few years. Ask staff to answer this one question: Why should people in your local community still buy from you? After you’ve been in business for a while, it’s easy to get complacent and ignore new competitors and changes in the industry, society, and marketplace. It’s time to try and get in your customers’ heads.

Feb. 12-18

HIRING Be prepared. You never know when you might come across your next superstar employee. It could be the server at a restaurant or someone you meet at a party. Business coach Bob Negen recommends keeping business cards on hand and committing to memory the phrase “I hope you’re happy here, but if you ever want to make a change, here’s my business card.” It makes the “ask” simple and effective.

Feb 19-25

OPERATIONS Dump Your Bacn. This is the term for those dozens of email newsletters you’ve subscribed to. A study by MessageGate estimates up to 30 percent of emails are bacn. A huge inbox slows searches and makes your head hurt.

CUSTOMER SERVICE Add a monthly tip to your website.

MONTHLY PROJECT

Hiring an Influencer? Keep It Real! 
Influencer marketing can be very effective. But does your influencer speak to your audience? Analyze their followers with these tools.

HypeAuditor shows you audience stats for any Instagram account: location, age, gender. This lets you know if your influencer will reach a target audience (like “female business owners 35+”) located in your community. 
hypeauditor.com  

SocialBlade displays follower/following patterns for the last 30 days. Why?
Because unusual spikes in following can indicate if an influencer bought fake followers, which won’t help you at all. 
socialblade.com 

FakeCheck detects true engagement by comparing your influencer’s number of likes and comments with those of similar-sized accounts. Low relative engagement indicates low true social reach. 
fakecheck.co