Are Your Business Goals SMART?

Set achievable business goals with my SMART PATH system.

Running a business can be tough. People like to be challenged, but not overwhelmed. How do you make sure your business goals are engaging and realistic?

Tackling too much

Having big dreams for your business is great! But just like making a New Year’s resolution to never eat a carbohydrate again, or to go from never jogging to a marathon winner by February, if the bar is set too high, the chance of burnout or failure increases.

So, how do you make progress without burnout?

In my experience, it’s difficult to make progress until you pay attention to the process rather than the end goal. Instead of making major changes immediately, I advise business owners to break their goals down into the SMART PATH system. You’ve likely heard of SMART goals, and adding the PATH to achieving them increases productivity without sacrificing morale.

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How to Declutter Your Closet

Let’s declutter your closet!

Does your closet feel a little claustrophobic? The best way to make space is to declutter your closet!

When I work with clients, I use the acronym TRACKS to sort and pare it down to the essentials, and you can use it on your own, too.

TRACKS stands for Trash, Recycle, Action, Charity, Keep, and Sell. When I’m decluttering with someone, we go through each item and ask which of these categories it belongs in. Sorting everything into these categories is a big step towards a neat closet!

Trash

It’s the first letter of the acronym, but it’s really the last resort. Only send a piece of clothing to the landfill if it doesn’t fit in any other category.

Recycle

Recycling clothes usually takes the form of donation, but you CAN reuse material in other ways if the garment is no longer wearable. Here’s a neat video about how to make t-shirt yarn! You can also cut garments into rags and use them to clean up around the house.

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Streamline Office Efficiency – Review Your KPIs! 

Streamline Office Efficiency – Review Your KPIs! 

It’s always helpful to look at your business with an eagle-eye view, and the new year is a particularly good time to do it! Reviewing your business as a whole shows you where you’re on track, and where you need to spend some time improving. But what do you look at? What metrics do you use to compare this year to last year? 

Assess Your Business

Key Performance Indices (or KPIs) are the quantifiable data that tell you how you’re performing in each area of your business. The numbers will be unique to your business, and the goal of using KPIs is to look for patterns through consistent measuring. So, what are the basic KPIs? 

  • Financial: How much money are you making? How much are you spending? 
  • Marketing: How many people know about your products or services?
  • Sales: How many people are buying from you? How many of the people you’re marketing to are actually making purchases? 
  • HR: Do you have the right number of employees? Do you have the right people in each position? 
  • Inventory: Do you have enough inventory to fill orders? Do you have an excess of inventory?
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What’s Your Closet Style?

What's your closet style?

When you know what your closet style is, then you can work toward it!

Clothing is an everyday part of life, which means your closet is a central part of your morning. Does it take forever to find what you want to wear each day? Do you roam the house, looking through piles of laundry for what you want? Getting dressed can be simple and stress-free, but not if your closet threatens an avalanche when you open it. A simple-to-use, calm and orderly closet? You can make it happen! Over the next four weeks I’ll take you through the steps you can take to make your closet work for YOU. The first step: find your closet style.

Why Organize My Closet?

An organized closet brings many benefits! An organized closet…

  • contains ALL of your clothes, so you only have one place to go to find what you need. 
  • contains clothes you like and wear. You can go into your closet and be guaranteed to pick out something that fits you and matches your personal style. 
  • keeps your clothes in better condition. When they’re wadded up on the floor, or languishing in the dryer, clothes develop wrinkles. The less you have to iron, the longer your clothes will last. And who wants to iron, anyway? 
  • makes it clear which clothes are clean. When your clothes are strewn all about the house, it can be difficult to tell the dirty stuff from the clean stuff. Clothes might go through the wash two or three times! When all your clothes have a home, it’s simple to tell what’s clean.
  • is decluttered, meaning you have fewer clothes to deal with overall. Things might get worn more often, which gives you a chance to update your wardrobe with current styles without having barely-worn items hanging around for ages. 
  • is eco- and budget-friendly! When you store clothes properly, they last longer and you won’t have to buy new ones. Donating items that you don’t wear gives them a chance to be loved by someone else, too. The longer a piece of clothing stays in circulation, the less new clothing has to be made. Don’t buy into the throwaway mentality of fast fashion! 

Speaking of Fast Fashion…

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Practical Tips for Living Your Best Life: The Smallest Achievable Step

Blog Header. The Smallest Achievable Step

Stuck? Start with the smallest achievable step!

If thinking about organizing your entire home makes your palms sweat, you’re not alone! Decluttering and organizing every space in your house is a big commitment, involving a lot of effort and time. Having an organized home is a completely reasonable goal, but where do you start?

Start Small

The short answer is: start small! When a project seems too big and too daunting, start with the smallest achievable step. To find your smallest achievable step, ask yourself: What sounds so easy that it makes you laugh?

If you want to declutter your garage but the thought makes you nervous, scale it back. How about decluttering one category of item, like gardening tools? Maybe your smallest achievable step is sorting your toolbox. Maybe it’s the top half of your toolbox, or even one compartment!

When you’ve found a part of the project that is laughably doable, do it! Sort that single compartment in your toolbox, then congratulate yourself on a job well done. That one small task gets you closer to your goal and starts you off with a win. Little accomplishments are as addictive as big ones, and you’ll soon find yourself taking the next step, and the next. You’ll get the hang of organizing and start modifying what you do to achieve your goal even faster.

Success fuels success, and if you keep the momentum up, organizing will become part of your routine.

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