Sometimes when we run online businesses, we don’t realize how much clutter it’s actually accumulating. Unlike an office desk or an area that you can see, it’s not as visible when it’s digital clutter or it’s mental clutter.
In sharing these six strategies for spring cleaning your business, you can do them all or you can just pick a few that resonate with you. You can take some time this week and to the next before we head into Q2 and clean out a little bit of your business, get to the heart of what’s working, clean out some stuff that’s not, and move forward with some super fresh energy for quarter two in 2018.
#1 – Spring Clean Your Office
But of course, because you can’t see it, my first strategy is for you to start with your actual office space. If you don’t have an office space, I would encourage you to make kind of a dedicated one. So, claim the dining room or kitchen table for yourself or claim the sofa but do have a dedicated area where you can start to store stuff, or else it’s just going to be all throughout the house and even harder to sort through.
If you do have a dedicated office space like me, I would highly recommend starting with clearing the clutter. In my case, I’ve got tons of these little notes all over the place and they accumulate very fast. For me, at the end of each week, I actually make a practice of taking all the notes I’ve written and putting them into a notebook or Asana for a to-do list. But if you have let some paper clutter, mail, notebooks, five different journals accumulate, take some time now, combine everything together, and choose one key strategy of how you’re going to take notes or how you’re going to track invoices and paper bills moving forward.
#2 – Spring Clean Your Digital Clutter
Strategy number two is to clean out your digital clutter and this one is jampacked. I mean, I threw a lot of ideas that where some digital clutter might be hiding. So, some of these might apply to you and some of them might not. But take a listen, see if any of these ideas even spark other programs that I’m not thinking about but here’s a couple of the main places where I’ve found that digital clutter hangs out.
Your downloads folder, right? You opt in to somebody’s something, you’re downloading PDFs and templates, you are on all these online courses and downloading all their materials. Your downloads folder is a jewel box that I’m guessing you are not tapping into enough. Take some time, go through it, sort, delete things that aren’t relevant anymore. When I do these sometimes, I find PDFs about social media from 2013. None of that’s really relevant anymore. It’s pretty safe to delete.
The other place we store a lot digital clutter is on our desktop. So, on your laptop or your desktop computer, you probably saved website links or you have a bunch of folders. Now’s a really great time to go through those, decide what to keep, put them in a folder that says, “Look at later,” or something like that and just have it so it takes up less digital space in your view.
Now talking about folders, you probably have a Dropbox or a Google Drive or Basecamp or all these other places where you are storing files. I would highly encourage you to go through, see if do need both. For me, I like both because I use Google Drive as active documents and I use Dropbox as my back-up storage for things that aren’t changing. Once I’ve got like a final PDF or I’m done working with a client, those folders get archived essentially in Dropbox. But figure out a system that works for you but do go through if you have cleaned out your downloads folder before and you put everything in resources and you haven’t looked at them, feel free to delete, obviously, there might be something juicy there but if your business is moving along just fine, don’t waste time listening to more, possibly, bad advice.
Another place that digital clutter is affecting you and you might not realize, is old tasks. I like Asana but if you use Trello or you use Basecamp or Teamwork or any other system, you probably have a bunch of admin or outdated tasks that are just sitting there but every time you login, you constantly feel behind. Take some time to either delete those tasks if they’re no longer relevant, assign them to someone else on your team to make sure that they get done or update the deadline for yourself and don’t let it get behind.
And then my final piece of digital clutter is Facebook groups. I joined a ton of these to network and use and share my advice and get clients, but when it comes down to it, I know that there’s a four-group radius where I really get the majority of my clients, and those other groups were just taking up digital clutter, putting notifications on my Facebook page, things like that and I wasn’t active in them and I wasn’t serving the others. One day, I went through and left 36 Facebook groups and I felt like I lost 36 pounds. If you keep logging into Facebook and have hundreds of notifications, either leave a group or turn off those notifications but find a way to eliminate that constant feeling of being behind.
#3 – Spring Clean Your Subscriptions
So, my third tip for decluttering this spring is to review your subscriptions. We all get in the habit of joining membership sites and joining software programs and paying for this thing and that thing online or joining 12-part payment plans. Go through your recurring subscriptions on your credit card or your business checking and clean out anything that you’re really no longer using or not using to the best of the abilities. A lot of times, I’ll come into a client’s business and they still have their old MailChimp that they’re paying $20 a month for something because they moved over to ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft but then forgot to close that out. Close it out. $20 isn’t a lot in a month but year after year, these things add up.
What about outdated software that you’re no longer using? Also, look for membership subscriptions you’re not taking full advantage of. Maybe go in, download a few things you really need and then ask to leave.
The other piece would be to look at some of those core subscriptions where you agreed to 12 payments. Reach out and say, “Hey, could I pay this rest of this in a chunk.” Most of the time, they’ll work with you and send you an invoice via PayPal or something else, but find a way to save yourself some money this spring and your subscriptions is the best place to do that.
#4 – Spring Clean Your Email List
My fourth strategy for spring cleaning your business is to clean out your email list. We all pay per subscriber, so whether you have MailChimp or you have Infusionsoft, you’re limited in your monthly plan to a certain number of people. If you are carrying dead weight month over month, you’re paying for people who aren’t reading your emails, who therefore, aren’t clicking to your sales page, who therefore aren’t buying from you, so why are you paying to have them? Set-up a quarterly or monthly list re-engagement or cleaning campaign. That could look like, “Hey, are you still interested in reading my newsletters? If not, unsubscribe. If you are, confirm that you still want to hear from me.” Reach out to people who have never gone through, go through delete, bounce subscribers or people who have unsubscribed, so that you aren’t paying for these, essentially dead weight emails.
One thing I do want to say though is before you delete them, download them so that you have them in a CSV file, because you can upload them to Facebook as a custom audience and maybe try to get them back on your list at some point. But, do go ahead and get rid of them for now, because they aren’t serving you.
#5 – Spring Clean Your Offers and Products
All right, my fifth strategy for spring cleaning is that you should look at your offers and products. This one’s kind of a two-parter.
The first thing I want you to do is look at your Q4 of 2017 or your Q1 numbers and find out where the majority of your sales are coming from. Is it coming from your one-to-one services but you want to do more digital products? Is it coming from one particular digital product but you actually have a storefront? First, look at where these numbers are coming from and make sure that where the majority of your sales is coming from is actually where you want them to be.
And then the second thing I want you to look at is, do any of the products and services you offer no longer resonate with you or you’ve grown past them or you don’t believe them anymore. As businesses, sometimes we create something a couple of years ago and then technology changes or the things we believe have changed and so, we might have something on our website or in our store that we’re technically offering but we don’t really feel good about.
If that’s the case, definitely run a close down sale and say it’s the last time people can get it, you’re going to put it away or you could just delete it altogether but do make sure that you’re still aligned with everything that you’re putting out there for sale.
#6 – Spring Clean Your Goals
Strategy number six is to clean up your goals and your 2018 plan. December is so long ago now, do the goals you’ve set still make sense? Are you still aligned with working on the projects that you planned? Things change and so don’t feel guilty if you’ve outgrown a plan, overlooked a plan, no longer want to do the plan and you’re happy, plan small for a little bit. Give yourself a break and don’t feel like you have to have this regimented plan. One think I do with all of my clients with their launch strategy or their general business strategy is make sure it’s customizable. Life changes, things happen. Don’t hold yourself accountable to something you’ve set four or five, six months ago if it’s no longer resonating with you.
All right, so I went over a lot of ideas. I hope that you will take some of this with you. So just to recap for spring cleaning your business, we’ve got cleaning up the real clutter in your office or a dedicated office space, cleaning up your digital clutter, cleaning up your email subscribers, cleaning up your subscriptions, cleaning up your offers and products to make sure they’re still aligned and cleaning up your goals.
Your Turn
I hope that you enjoyed learning these business cleaning strategies and that you’ll harness this fresh energy of spring to do a couple of these things to make sure you’re saving money, make sure you’re still growing in the direction that you want to and not holding yourself accountable to unreasonable strategies or standards.
If you found this video helpful, I would love to hear in comments below what you thought, which of these spring cleaning things you’re going to tackle. If you have any other questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. Otherwise, I will be back here with another strategy tip next week.
Your tips were great. This was a very helpful video, definitely tackling, my desk and my email folders….I am guessing I don’t need anything older than 2014!
Thanks, Mom (P.S. office and plant looks wonderful)