Happy holidays! I hope you are all having a wonderful holiday season. The end of December is traditionally downtime for most businesses; a time for rest and relaxation, and for spending time with family. As you take
this time to rest and reset, it is also a great time to start looking forward to 2024, to make sure that the upcoming year goes as smoothly as possible.
The first thing that you should do is to set a budget for 2024. Review your 2023 actual income statement - the
income and the expenses, and try and figure out where you should go from there. Do you want to grow or to stay the same? You need a mathematical plan for how to achieve your goals - if you want to grow 50% next year, you only have 12 months to do so, and usually that kind of growth happens gradually. Plot out when you want that growth to happen. One thing that will
really help with this is looking at your 2023 actual results and see if there is any seasonality to your sales and expenses, so that you can strategically plan for 2024.
Once you plan out your sales for the year, then plan for expenses. What do you want to purchase, and when? If you are planning to increase your sales, are you also planning to increase your
workforce to match the demand? Are these new workers going to be employees or independent contractors? Figure out if expenses from 2023 are not serving you, such as various networking groups or computer subscriptions. You should consider cutting or not renewing those expenses, so that you can save that money or use the funds for something
else.