New Year Business Checklist

Happy 2021!!! Wow, we made it. While not that much has actually changed, just having a new year on the calendar feels so much better. Congratulations for all of us for getting through 2020, I'm excited for bigger and better things. 

I thought it would be helpful to share a checklist of the things that we do at the end/beginning of each year to get organized and all set up for the coming year. These are things that you'll want to keep an eye on throughout the year, but it's especially helpful to take some time once a year to go through them. Let's get started!

Set Goals
If you've been following us for any amount of time, you know we love goals. Like LOVE love. We've been setting goals since day one of our business - actually since before we were even technically a business. We really believe that having long term goals and then setting short term goals based off of those has helped us grow our business so much. While you can set goals at any time of the year, the new year is a great time to take a look back at the last year of your business and then think about where you want to be at the end of this year. If you need help with this, we have a guide that walks you through our whole process that you can download here. 

Review Your Values and Business Plan
This goes along with setting goals, but it's a little more broad and high-level. This is also somewhat covered in our goal setting guide, but your values and business plan will help you to figure out what your goals should be. It's ok for your values to change as your business grows, for example you might realize you really want to focus on only women-owned brands, or only clean skincare, or something along those lines. That's why it's important to review them every year and see if anything has changed. 

Go Through All Your Finances and Make a Budget
This isn't always super fun, but it's super SUPER important. As creatives we often aren't great at things like managing money (if you are, congrats, you've overcome the stereotype), but now is the time to learn. We use the Profit First system to organize our money and we highly recommend it - read about it here. We check in on our financial goals every month and make sure to stay on top of our books, but we also take a look at our overall profit and loss statements at the end of each year. We take some time to project our income for the new year and then set goals and a budget based on our projected income and our known expenses. 

Get an Accountant or Check in With Yours
If you don't have an accountant and you are bringing in any significant income, make it a top priority to find one ASAP. You will want one who is familiar with freelancing and who is in your own state/country. Even if you just have one to help you with taxes, do it. It's worth the money, trust me, you can't afford to NOT have an accountant. The last thing you want is to be audited and a good way to make that happen is to try to figure out your own taxes. A good accountant will be blunt, do things by the book, save you money by utilizing deductions and point out areas that you can improve in your financial decisions. Ours helps us with our quarterly and yearly taxes and also reconciles our books at the end of each month. It's a good idea to check in with them when you review your end of the year finances to get their advice on how things could improve in the new year. 

Renew Licenses and Permits
Make sure you are up to date on all your licenses and any permits that you need to run your business. These will vary depending on the state and country you're in, but it can be helpful to put expiration dates into your calendar with recurring events so you can make sure that nothing lapses. 

Review Your Insurance
Another super fun topic! If you're running a business and working with clients you will want to have insurance. Not only do you often need insurance to rent a studio or get permits to shoot, you need it in case anything in your business goes wrong. I recommend getting general liability insurance with coverage for your property as well as an errors and omissions policy. 

The exact coverage will depend on your plan, but general liability will cover you if anyone is injured because of your business. We have a business owners policy through Hiscox that is general liability but also covers our equipment if it's stolen or damaged. Errors and omissions according to the Hiscox site "is useful whenever you or your employees provide a service that a client could claim is inadequate or tied to negligence". Read more about it here. 

You'll want to research your state and country to see what kind of insurance is required for you because some states require you to have specific insurance. I also recommend reaching out to get some quotes from some insurance companies. If you plan on covering your equipment (which I recommend) you will want to create a folder in your google drive with receipts and photos of everything you want covered in case you ever have to make a claim. At the end of each year check to make sure that all of your equipment is in the folder and review your policy to make sure it still works for your business. 

Review Your Contract
Go through your contract and make any changes you've been meaning to make. I like to make a template for myself that has spots I can just fill in for each client so that drafting contracts for each job is easy. Think back on any client issues you had over the year and then think about how those could be avoided through adding to your contract. If it's been a little while and you've made a lot of changes plan to have a lawyer look through it and make sure that everything looks good.

Raise Your Prices
This is the perfect time to raise your rates with clients that you've had for a while. You have new financial goals and it's the new year so a lot of clients will be expecting it. We have a whole blog post on this with a lot of tips including an email template that you can check out here. Remember that if clients drop you when you raise your rates that just leaves you open to take on clients who will pay what you are worth!

Update Your Intake Form
While you're reviewing your contract and thinking about any issues you've had with clients, make changes to your intake form to try to eliminate problem clients from the get go. The more information you can get upfront, the better. It'll help you create a more precise estimate and help you to see red flags early on. 

Client Gifts
Enough about bad clients - let's talk about good ones! For all of the clients that you enjoyed working with and that you will (or want to) continue working with it's nice to send a holiday gift with a thank you note. This often happens at Christmas, but you can also do a New Year gift too - we were swamped with moving in December so we will be sending ours out this week. We like to purchase something from one of our clients to send to others because it's a way to support our clients and it makes it unique. We budget for this every year because it's important for showing our clients that we appreciate them and continuing to build our relationship.

Clean and Organize
It's also helpful at the end of the year to clean out your files both paper and digital, and clean out your studio space. Get rid of any props or equipment you are no longer using and think about any purchases you want to budget for in the new year. This way you can start the year fresh with a clean space and clear mind. It helps so much!

There's my list of things to do to set your business up for success in the new year! Let me know if there is anything you would add!

Is it the weekend yet?
Elle