Are you ready to spring clean your business? It’s time to start looking forward to warmer weather and fresh spring air. It’s also time to make sure everything still works before getting ready to grow your business this year. Review whether you’re getting the ideal return on your time an effort. Double check that your existing clients are still excited about your brand and you’re still bringing in new clients. Take the opportunity this spring to shake out your business and let in some fresh ideas. Once you’ve finished spring cleaning, you’ll be ready to check out 7 Ways to Grow Your Business This Year.

Here are six steps to give your business new life and color this spring:

Out With the Old…

What has begun to build up? It’s time to question whether your business has grown out of some of your older service or product offerings, or even clients. When you spring clean your business it’s a great time to analyze your product list and review whether your clients (and you) get enough value out of each product. Does every product provide enough value for the time and effort it costs you to provide? Value your time appropriately and be careful what you’re saying yes to this year. Ensure that you are only putting your time where you will gain the most value out of it – be it emotional or financial value. A stressful client who never pays on time and requires ten times the communication as other clients may not be worth the effort. An old finance software that has so many bugs it can’t open in the time it takes to make tea should also go.

How else can you declutter? Necessary but tedious tasks that don’t require your immediate oversight should be delegated to a virtual assistant. A VA can save you both time and energy (see why you should hire a VA for blog management for example). You need to handle the clients, but someone else can handle the paperwork.

Do People Wonder What You Actually Do?

Whether your business is young or overgrown, you may have issues with inconsistent brand presentation. Perhaps you came into your business overwhelmed by all of the possibilities and avoided putting all of your eggs in one basket by spreading them all around a broad category of service. It’s time to gather those eggs and narrow your niche. Figure out where your clients gain the most value – which you can do through market research and client feedback – and start narrowing your service offerings.

Spring clean your business by defining your niche. Once you have a clear idea of who your market is, make sure your marketing materials and website echo that focus. If you’ve had trouble targeting your marketing campaigns or locating your audience in social media, this narrowing of your focus will help. The better you know yourself, the better you can know your ideal clients.

Start Recycling

The effort you put into each email or blog post should bring you value for months, not hours. You can increase this lifespan through templates and automation. Create templates from your best client emails to save you time when a similar situation arises. Set up automated social media and email marketing campaigns. These can repeat after a certain period, or can simply be updated with new sets of blog posts. This way you can continue gaining value from the time and effort you put in at first over several months or years. Utilize autoresponders to retain clients and hook new clients, as well as to get the most out of web and email content.

All of these templates and your growing cache of reusable content will help you to save time while retaining and increasing your client base. Don’t forget you can recycle blog posts too! If you had a blog post a few months (or even years) ago, it might be in need of an update. If you take the few minutes to fact check it and bring it into 2018, you’ll have put in far less effort for the same value as a brand new post!

How Long Since You’ve Redecorated?

Perhaps your brand image is perfect – pristine, modern, and a perfect reflection of your business values and services. Nevertheless, even the most successful companies regularly review and update their brand image. Reviewing your website, color scheme, logo, business documents and services for uniformity and focus can be a great way to spring clean your business. Make sure that every aspect of your business targets your newly focused niche.  You should also ensure it fits the aesthetic that your particular target market will be drawn to.

If you have an office (or a home office), this would also be a great opportunity to revitalize the space and make it welcoming to you and your clients. Bring in a plant, new shelves or drawers, and an even more efficient organization scheme. Make sure that your software and hardware are up to date, and get the best tools to improve your service.

You Missed a Spot…

Your office is clean, your brand image is up to date, your online presence is focused and automated, and you know exactly who you are and what your target market wants. Now it’s time to acknowledge that there might be more to dig out for a deeper spring clean of your business. Perhaps you still have old client paper files that you’ve been meaning to scan and shred but haven’t gotten around to. Perhaps you haven’t updated your letterhead because it’s ‘good enough’, or you couldn’t bring yourself to go back past a few months ago to clear out or update old blog archives that are no longer relevant to your business. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and take out the trash.

However, if you can’t bring yourself to audit your archive or reconsider your marketing plan you can still:

Hire a Professional

Not sure where to start? Have your archives grown impenetrable through years of neglect? Are you at a loss when you consider brand redesign or marketing campaigns? Delegate, delegate, delegate.

You’re the expert in your business – but you can’t be an expert in everything. You love your business, and you know it deserves only the best. Give yourself more time to take care of the big picture by hiring specialists for everything else.

Virtual assistants are a great resource for administration, especially those at Virtual A Team who provide you a supportive network of project managers and virtual assistants so that you never have a task or project fall through. Have something too big to handle? Bring in an expert. Need a website redesign? Don’t just rely on YouTube and hope. Bring in a website designer or consultant. Need a new logo or letterhead? Trust a graphic designer who specializes in businesses like yours. Focus on what you do best, we’ll do the rest.