A Checklist For Small Business Owners In The Process Of Making Business Changes!

Are you considering rebranding or offering a new service? While poking around on the internet, you will find year-end checklists everywhere! Especially from accounting and tax firms. However, THIS CHECKLIST IS NOT ONE OF THOSE! This list is for small business owners who are in the process of rebranding or considering adding new services.

Being the owner of The Roving Accountant, I prepared this checklist, and it has worked well for my business, so I want to share it with you. Through this checklist, I hope I can help ease some of the anxiety you might be feeling.

If you are like me and tend to go after that next shiny object, this checklist might be just what you need. Keep reading to know more!

1. Revise your mission statement to define what a win-win looks like for you, your customer, and your team. This should be easy, but it took me two weeks as I never had one, to begin with!

2. Export your entire customer list to a spreadsheet, and add four columns of information, total sales year to date, total lifetime sales, services they pay for, and how happy you would be if you had hundred more clients JUST LIKE THEM! (smiley rating of one to five). As a business owner, I have sorted my spreadsheet two ways, first by smiles, then by year-to-date sales.

3. Review the top 10%, first on smiles later on sales. For me, I had to circle back through a couple of times because my two lists did not match very closely, and I asked myself WHY I ranked my smiles the way I did. Most of my answers were about how they respected my boundaries, their sense of humor, and how open they were to change.

4. Time to crunch some numbers! Ask yourself:

a. If I increased my most popular service offerings by 6% to my five smile customers, do the lists start to look more similar? If not, how much of an increase would I need, and would that increase be a reasonable ask?

b. If I add the new service, am I considering how many of my five smile customers really need or want that service? If not many, then it might be best to table it for now.

c. Is my competition offering this new service I am considering? For me, I wanted to be different, so I was looking for something more unique than what most bookkeepers do!

d. Is this new service something my team can do, or can I automate it so I don’t add more things to my plate? This was SUPER important to me as my team is small.

e. What added costs are involved with this new service? Is there something that can be edited out of your expenses to cover it easily? (For me, I did not even review my expenses before pulling the trigger! My bad!)

f. What is the ROI? (I never thought of services like this. Software or subscription is definitely required. Knowing how many customers I needed on this new service BEFORE enrolling would have been nice!)

g. Does this new service match with my revised mission statement? This must be a resounding YES! What is the point of rebranding if you are not being congruent with your new vision for your company?

(Make sure to discuss the new service idea with your team and get their feedback. I wanted team buy-in, so I was glad I did this part!)

h. How are others that offer this service marketing it? (I did not ask this question, but now I wish I had! Learning a new CRM and sales automation online software has taken time and money I was not planning on spending, but it is worth the extra effort now!)

i. Will this new service help me enjoy owning and running my company more and get me fired up about offering it? (This was really one of the few questions I DID ask myself over and over and answered with a resounding YES!)

j. And finally, is there training, coaching, and mentoring that can go along with this new service, or am I out there learning and figuring it out on my own? (Having someone to help teach and guide me is ALWAYS the ultimate game changer and shortest path to success!)

Now that you know what to do, good luck to you on your journey!

If you need help preparing for the coming year or looking for an accountant to help simplify the process, reach out to the tax expert at The Roving Accountant serving in Firestone, Colorado. I provide access to clients who don’t have the resources to hire full-time accounting staff. Apart from offering bookkeeping and accounting services, I also provide management as well as Profit First. I serve clients across Firestone, Weld County, Boulder County, Henderson, Greeley, Loveland, Longmont, and the surrounding areas.

To learn more about my services, please click here. If you have any questions, I’d love to hear from you. Please contact me here.