Fourth Quarter Checklist for Small Business Owners

Welcome to A New Life podcast with Pamela Jean where it's all about empowering women to empower more women. Get ready friends, to create a new life. And here is your host, Pamela Jean.

Hello my friends. Welcome to A New Life podcast. I'm your host, Pamela Jean. Thank you so much for being here today. I am excited to talk about this topic. It's something I'm very passionate about and I hope you'll enjoy it. This is definitely geared towards our entrepreneurs, our business owners because we are talking about a fourth quarter checklist for small business owners. I really cannot believe that it is the end of September. We have October 1st knocking on our door very soon and honestly, we're getting to that time of the year where we blink and it's Christmas, New Year's and 2024 is here before you know it. You know, I think it's important to have a plan with your business and your checklist in every single quarter, but something special about that and maybe a little bit on the urgent side of the fourth quarter because there's a lot to wrap up at the end of the year. So I just want to share a little checklist of things that small business owners should consider look at do set as a goal. Make sure you have by the time 2023 leaves us forever and ever. So first of all, look at your profit and loss statement. It's important to know where you stand now, right now rather than after the first of the year. If you're fortunate enough to have more profit than you expected, you may want to consider a major purchase that can be depreciated and taken off of your taxes and go towards tax benefits and make sure that have the cash. And talk to your accountant about this. If you're not clear about depreciation rules and what all qualifies as write offs, make sure you talk to your accountant. You know, look at your P and L, see what your numbers are, see what amount of money you could be spending and what you should you spend it on to give you the most and most efficient and aggressive tax benefits. The tax laws and codes change all, all the time. Don't rely on yourself for that. Truly consult a professional, talk to your accountant and figure out what's your best plan of attack. Now honestly, you should be looking at your P and L every month. Just I hope you didn't wait until fourth quarter to look at your P and L. You should be doing that monthly. But take a really, really deep dive. Look into it before you call your accountant and say, you know, look how much money should I spend? What would be the best type of investment? Maybe investing or just buying equipment or something like that? Verify the second tip is verify your 1099 information just to make sure that everything is set up properly in your accounting system. If you don't have proper information from each vendor, ask for it now. Then you'll be able to create the new form to use every single year. You don't want to wait to the end of the year and when you have to submit all of your 1099s and not have proper information. So do that ahead of time. Don't wait till the last minute and have to scramble. I'm sure you've been been there. I know I have, but I'm not there anymore. Thank goodness. But make sure you have all of those details mapped out. Start planning for your clients holiday gifts and cards. You know it's already October. If you have a business where you're in sales, where you sell products, you should already have your your Black Friday sale type of marketing campaigns already done and ready to roll. Because before you know it, it's going to be that time. So make sure you have your hol, your Christmas gifts, your appreciation to your clients, whatever that looks like, and get them ready to order and have them in plenty of time again. So you're not scrambling if you're catching a theme here. I'm a planner and I think you know that if you're not a planner, your business will be so much more smooth if you become a little bit of a planner. Be in front of the eight ball instead of behind the next thing. Number four is to create budgets for the new year. Start budgeting now for the new year. It's better to be ahead of the game instead of trying to catch up after the new year to figure out what your budget is going to be for 2024. And I want you to take some time to write out all of your accomplishments for this year to share with your staff to share with your board members. They'll appreciate knowing all of the accomplishments that they were a part of for this year so far. Double check your 2023 goals. Are you close Are you close to those sales goals? Are you close to the productivity goals? Do you need to buckle down and meet and set some of your set some new goals or buckle down to be able to reach the 2023 goals? Now's the time to to assess so you can finish strong sharing this information with the people in your business that has helped you get to where you are to get those numbers to be is really, really important. It feels empowering to your employees, to your staff, to the people that you work with. It empowers them. It helps them feel like a part of something and that's really, really important for them to feel like they matter, that they're an important part of your business. Now is also a good time to clean up your email list. Are there people on your list who have never responded or opened an email all year long? Now might be the time to clean it up. Purge that list, get rid of the inactive use and start the next year with a clean, solid, strong, well detailed and scrubbed email list. I know if you've ever had someone unsubscribe to your email, it happens, friends. But don't look at it as a bad thing. Look at it as a favor honestly. Because if you're taking people out of your email list that simply are inactive, they probably aren't interested in what your products are, your services are. That is really okay. It's good to have I would rather you have a really, really solid smaller list than to have a big list with a lot of inactivity. So take some time to clean up your email list. It's also a good time of the year to start unsubscribing to emails that you receive that really are time suckers for you. You know, if you've ever, you know, ordered something from Etsy for instance, not knocking on Etsy by any means, but if you ever order something from them, sometimes you get stuck on an email list where you're constantly getting emails them. Remove those distractions from your email and honestly my preference for you would to have a personal email and a business email. Keep those things separate so you're really, really allotting your time properly and allows better focus. Perform a website audit. Let's be honest. How often do you look at your website and audit your website? Check all the links, all the autoresponders on website to make sure they're still working. Double check pages for expired offers or promos and delete any pages that are no longer relevant. Or simply update your website. I know as an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, a small business owner, it can be hard to keep all of the plates spinning. I get it. But your website is so very important and I know it's a time issue, but this has to be put on your schedule. Make an appointment with yourself to take care of that website. It's that important. Or if you're in a place where you have a marketing team, have someone from your marketing team do it for you or an outside marketing service. But make sure that website is really, really up to poor up to par. It's very, very important. The next thing you might want to consider doing is to record your year end mileage. If you use a vehicle for work, write down your year end mileage so you have it ready when it's time to meet with your accountant again. Be ahead of the eight ball and not behind. Make a copy of your current year calendar. Your 2023 year calendar should have a copy somewhere for you to keep. Your business calendar documents, your work, your life, travel, meetings and more. It's a valuable record. Save a PDF report of your entire year. You never know if you're going to need it. And you never know if you might lose information. Lose your 2023 calendar. And how are you going to go back and rebuild the history of your business year if you don't have that calendar? So make a backup of that calendar. Speaking of backups, back up your files. Hopefully you already do this on a regular basis, but if you're not doing it, do it today. Start today. Backing up all of your files. You do not want to risk losing a year's worth of client information, financial data, marketing content and other files. Assemble all of these files in a single folder dated the year. Nice and easy. Super simple. Send a copy of that file, that folder to the cloud for backup or Dropbox. Keep a copy on an external hard drive separate from your computer because if your computer dies tomorrow, everything you have on it dies with it. Sometimes it's very difficult to get your data off of a dead computer, so don't put yourself in that vulnerable position with your files of your company, your client data. It's very, very important that you take good care of it. Keep another copy on your computer's hard drive, but also burn it to disk, have it on a jump drive, put it in the cloud, put it on Dropbox. Have multiple Copies of your 2023 information and data and the last part of the checklist I want to share with you and this is probably my most the thing that I get the most excited about, that I absolutely love so much is to have strategic planning session for the new year. Get that on your calendar. Now is a great time to meet with your leadership team, your board of directors, council of advisors, consultants, the staff, anyone who has a hand in your business. Get everyone together and start planning for the future of your company. Get feedback from your trusted advisors, even customers would be a great source to help shape the future of your business? What do you want for 2024? Did you reach your sales goals? Did you reach your financial goals? What did you do in 2020 you want to repeat in 24? What happened in 23 that you don't want to repeat? Start planning all of those things. I know, I know. We have three more months of the year. We have October, November, December. I get it. I don't know about you, but I'm excited for what a new year brings. I'm excited for the possibilities. I get really excited to look back at the goals I had set January 1 and to look at the ones and see the ones that I completed, the ones that are still in progress, the ones that I even let go. So it's okay to let go of goals. Sometimes you start out the year thinking that a goal is really relevant, but as you get going in the year, it's like, you know, that's not a goal that I need to worry about today. That's not a goal for right now. You can adjust and change your goals. You don't have to live with them forever, but take a look at them and start planning for the new year. So my friends, that was just a quick little list of fourth quarter checklists for small business owners. Something I hope you can take to heart, bring to your office, bring to your space and start making that checklist and going through everything. If you would like a copy of this, send me an email and I will give you a link. My email address is Pamela Jean A New Life gmail.com Please email me and I'm happy to send you a PDF of this so you can read through it for yourself and go through your own little checklist you can add to mine. You can take things away, it'll be perfect for you. Now if you love this podcast and you got something out of it today, please rate and share it with your friends. Subscribe so you never ever miss an episode. My friends, thank you so much. Happy fourth quarter of 2023 as we step into that later this week and make today a great day. Thank you friends.

Thank you for joining us today on a New Life podcast. We will see you next.

Sam.