Spring Cleaning

It’s spring! Growing up in Iowa, the coming of warmer weather also meant the dreaded spring house cleaning – curtains, windows, floors, carpets; the list seemed endless.  I never understood why those long-awaited-for warm days had to be spent inside with the dust, when all I wanted to do was run barefoot outdoors.  As a result, I now rebel from this old routine and tend to just keep things tidy year round.  This practice could hold true for your business as well.

Each spring, articles start popping up like daisies about giving your business an annual scrub, but some of the tasks you might see listed should really be done more often. Here’s a few chores you might want to routinely tackle:

• Take a pulse check on your customer’s satisfaction level and let them know how much you appreciate them.
• Take a pulse check on your satisfaction level with your customers.  Not all customers are good customers, so weed out those who cost more in time and effort than they pay.
• Review and track your expenses.  Can you get better pricing?  Do you have expenses set on an automatic payment plan that you don’t really need?  Are you purchasing products for resale that no longer provide an effective return?
• Do an inventory of your website to make sure your content is accurate, your links are all active, and to identify new potential pages or information you can add to keep your site fresh.
• Visit competitor’s websites to keep up-to-date on their product and service offerings and maybe even glean an idea or two.
• Take a look at your accounts receivable balance, and if it contains transactions past your industry norm for collections, create an accounts receivable aging table to get a better grasp of your customer’s paying habits and potentially revise your payment policies.
• Clean up your e-mail.  Really.  I dare you.
• Just clean.  Your keyboard, mouse, and cell phone are all germinating, well, germs.  Save yourself from yourself.

Some of these items you may do less often than others, but definitely more than once a year.  This is just a short list, so do a quick check of your own business and figure out what chores you’ve been putting off that should be completed more frequently.  Then go outside and run barefoot.  After all, it IS spring.