Are You Making The Most Of EOFY?

2. Audit Your Services And Reevaluate Your Pricing Strategy

The process of weighing up the value – both in a monetary and more esoteric sense – of your products and services on a regular basis is key to the ongoing profitability of your business. And what better time to review (and likely increase) your prices and take another look at your pricing strategy than EOFY?

The reality is that the cost of business has gone up over the last two years and with significant inflation in Australia, most of us have no choice but to pass those costs on to consumers or clients.

Many a business owner has torn their hair out over pricing, so if this is you – you are certainly not alone. Use EOFY to work through each of these questions one by one, and if you need a little help – reach out to us or do a little research to benchmark or compare your rates across the industry.

3. Get A Shovel And Go Goal-Digging

If you didn’t set any goals for your business this financial year, then it’s going to be bloody hard to measure how successful you were. After all, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. 

So, before we go any further – if you don’t have any clearly articulated and specific business goals, then set some for the upcoming year covering everything from a brand awareness, revenue, profit margin, marketing, and even happiness and wellbeing perspective.

If, however, you did happen to set some goals for the year (either financial or calendar), then it’s time to check in and see how you’re tracking. That’s right – pick up those shovels, it’s time to go goal-digging…

• What were my three main business goals this year?

• Do I know exactly what success looks like for these goals?

• How did I go? Smash them? Almost get there? Nowhere close?

• What did I learn about how realistic and useful these goals were?

• Do I need to shift or revise them for the year or months ahead?

• Have I set a mix of standard goals and stretch goals?

• How will I feel when I have achieved these goals? How will I celebrate?

And if you need a little extra accountability or ‘zhuzhing’ for your goals, write them down and share them with us: [email protected] – we love nothing more than to cheer women in business on! And you definitely get bonus points for specific and measurable financial goals 😉.

4. Gather Feedback That Takes You Forward

We can change the future but we can’t change the past. That’s why we love the concept of ‘feedforward’ coined by business educator and coach Marshall Goldsmith. 

As opposed to the judgy, generalised and often unhelpful feedback we often get that focuses on the past, ‘feedforward’ focuses on soliciting specific and solution-focused insights that give us the momentum to move forward.

“Feedback: it focuses on a past, on what has already occurred—not on the infinite variety of opportunities that can happen in the future. As such, feedback can be limited and static, as opposed to expansive and dynamic.”
– Marshall Goldsmith

EOFY can be the perfect time to request feedforward from your colleagues, customers, business mentors or anyone you feel can help you and your business truly improve and get better.

Soliciting feedforward involves picking a specific behaviour or practice that you want to improve, say: ‘be a better listener’ or ‘get better at time management.’ Then, usually in a one-on-one setting, articulate to your colleague or customer what you would like to get better at and ask them:

What are two things I can do in the future to be a better listener / time manager / boss lady / project manager?

The best part about feedforward is that it is supposed to focus on the performance, not the person. Feedforward is not meant to involve a personal critique because it is discussing something that has not yet happened!

According to Carole Bozkurt, when we are designing our business non-negotiables, it helps to be crystal clear on the difference between the ‘nice to haves’ and the absolute deal breakers. She suggests writing down a list and asking yourself whether you could ever see yourself breaking your own rules. 

• How would you feel if you had to break them? 
• What would be the consequences? 
• Is someone depending on you and if you let them down what would it mean for them (and for you)?

Next, your non-negotiables need to be communicated out loud so that others know what is expected of them and they know where the boundaries are. Only then can you see if or when one of your non-negotiables has tried to be negotiated.

And finally, you must keep your list of non-negotiables current and review often. That’s where EOFY comes in! 

The end of the financial year is the perfect time to reaffirm your business (and life!) non-negotiables, interrogate whether or not they still apply, how you’ll enforce them, and whether or not you need to reiterate or communicate them more broadly. 

We’ve even had clients who create ‘this is how to work with me’ manuals, which is a pretty next level brilliant way of sharing your non-negotiables with others and keeping yourself accountable.

What are your business non-negotiables? We’d love to know. Share in the Kick Arse Women Doing Business Facebook Group!