Business Gifts to Give Yourself | Entrepreneur’s Checklist

UPDATE: 2015

I’ve been going through the posts on my website to see if any of them needed updating. I think I’d add updating blog posts to this list of gifts to give yourself. Additionally, I’ve added one more important gift. Develop a library of graphics you can employ throughout your marketing and social media posts. This will save you time, money and a great deal of frustration. Develop a template for your graphics and use it to illustrate your ideas on platforms that require a very visual component.

Many entrepreneurs and business owners are busy closing out the books on 2011 and allocating human and financial resources for 2012, or at least for Q1 2012.  At the same time, they are giving gifts to employees and clients.  This is NOT the time to forget about yourself. Giving one or more of the gifts below, to yourself and your business, can pay higher dividends in 2012 than the initial gift investment.  So, hop to it and play Santa to your business today.

This is the ideal time for entrepreneurs to give themselves a few gifts to start the new fiscal year off right.

Change Your Passwords

Make a new end of year ritual.  Change your passwords.  As a small business or entrepreneur, you’ve no doubt shared your password with designers, virtual assistants, and others during 2011.  Changing your passwords sets up an automatic review of everyone who has access to your accounts.  This can momentarily disrupt the flow of work as you review and reassign passwords and access to trusted contacts, but this is an essential end of year security practice.  Adopt industry best practices for secure passwords by using a combination of capital and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.  Make sure your new password is at least 10 characters long.  Afraid you won’t remember your new passwords.  Store all your online passwords in a safe, secure site that only you can access, from wherever you are. Roboform is a terrific online resource for securing storing your passwords for easy access (by you only).  This is safer than writing them down and carrying them around with you or entering them into your mobile device.  Theft or loss could be a nightmare for your online security.

Training

Entrepreneurs and business owners need to honestly assess where the weaknesses in their knowledge base exist, seek training programs to resolve those weaknesses and then look for challenge or stretch goals for themselves and their teams.  Training in new technologies, general knowledge base upgrades and software training do not need to be expensive or time consuming.  Many trainings are served up via webinars you can view and absorb on your own schedule.

Concept Inventory

Businesses and entrepreneurs need to be thinking about new products or services to add to their offerings, as well as deleting any products or services suffering from fatigue or obsolescence. Now is the time to take an inventory of your intellectual property offerings such as coaching programs, how-to books or trainings, speeches, proprietary software, apps and other products to make sure they’re up to date. For example, if you teach people how to use Facebook and haven’t including training about the new Facebook Timeline, pull that product off the shelf and update it so future customers aren’t disappointed.