Every new year, do you go through the motions of creating a “new year, new you,” trying to overhaul your business and your life to make this year your “best year yet”? Start the right financial footing.

Look no further than your social media feed and you’ll quickly find that you are far from alone. Everyone is encouraging us to be better than before by changing our diets, our exercise regimens, our reading habits, our relationship statuses, our home organization systems, our money management, you name it.

And so many of us buy into it. I’ve been guilty of this too!

Then when we can’t hold onto these new (unattainable) habits, we feel like failures.

What if we try a new way of making progress toward our best year yet? Instead of trying to change it all, try finding little things you can do to make consistent progress in your business. And let’s forget the major overhaul.

This applies to any resolutions and changes you want to make in your personal life, but let’s talk about how to do this in your business.

Do CPR on Your Business

We’re not trying to breathe life into your business, we’re doing what’s Consistent, Predictable, and Repeatable. CPR.

What are the little things you can do to make consistent growth in your business? It’s not about overhauling your finances so you can set yourself up to be profitable next year; it’s about consistently allocating to your Profit account—starting with just 1% a month, if that’s where you have to start.

Make it a habit: Twice a month, transfer 1% of your revenue to Profit. Once you’ve established this habit, increase that allocation to 2% or 3%—whatever works for where you are right now.

Not sure how much to allocate? Grab our free Profit First Overview and learn what your percentages should be based on your current revenue.

As you become more consistent in your allocations, they start to become predictable. You know that on the 10th and 25th of each month, you’ll have a financial date with yourself to make those allocations. And you’ll hopefully start to incorporate other pieces of the financial pie in those dates, like reviewing your balance sheet and profit and loss statements, checking in on your expenses to see if there’s anything you can let go of, and planning for future purchases.

Consistency and predictability will help you to create more systems so that everything you do is repeatable, without recreating the wheel each time.

Some ideas for systems around your financials include:

• Use our allocation calculator that allows you to plug in your numbers so you don’t have to do the calculations yourself each time. This is a robust tool that leaves all the guesswork out of making your regular distributions and has been a game-changer for so many of our clients.

• Create a task in your project management system (or use a Google Doc), listing out what you’ll do on your finance dates. Then there’s no question about what you need to do and your finances are always up-to-date.
• Even if your finance dates are only once or twice a month, make it a point to enter transactions more often so you’re not overwhelmed during your finance dates. Or, hire someone like us to do this for you!

You Can’t Do it All

One of the biggest challenges to setting new goals and intentions in the new year is that we want to do it all. We want to learn new things, launch new offers, set new revenue goals. But there’s only so much time in the day, especially if you have some personal goals and commitments you want to keep.

Joining mastermind groups and coaching programs and buying courses is fine, but know what you want to prioritize learning. Then do that and only that until you’ve mastered the concepts. Only then should you focus on doing something else that’s new.

If you want to lose weight, you know you need to focus on nutrition, fitness, and mindset. But if you’ve been off the wagon for a while, you really can only focus on one thing at a time. Determine what’s most important to start with and do only that for a month, then add in the next most important part of the process and so on.

Just like if you’re trying to overhaul your health, trying to do everything at once is a recipe for overwhelm. If you’re trying to “fix” all the things in your business at once, you’ll stress yourself out and not make progress on anything.

This really is an exciting time of year and it’s ripe with possibilities. What one thing will you choose to start with to become Consistent with, so it becomes Predictable, and then Repeatable? Where will you start your success in 2023?