The beginning of the new year can really be a bummer.  The hustle and bustle and glitter of the holidays is all packed up and put away and for most wedding professionals the months of January and February can be pretty bleak and boring while we wait for the weather to warm back up.  Add to that the fact that the weather here in Northern Virginia has been down right depressing lately and it can be easy to wrap ourselves up in a cocoon and do nothing but read books in front of the fireplace with some tea (what I wish I spent the last week doing) or on the other end of the spetrum, ignoring impending burnout by working frantically without any real direction (what I actually have been doing).

Yesterday I finally had enough and decided that I was going to spend the day without an agenda.  There would be no todo list, no tasks that must be accomplished.  Instead I sat on my couch, caught up on some DVR, and starting leisurly perusing my RSS feed.  Low and behold, I stumbled upon the 2013 Action Plan from Sage Wedding Pros.

The 2013 Action Plan is a series of blog posts (click the photo to link to the beginning of the series) That walks you through quickly and easily updating your business plan for 2013.  That may sound intimidating, or totally boring to you, but it made me realize very quickly that there were a few things that I had been completely neglecting with the stress of the move to Virginia (hello, profit and loss statements) that had really affected my last quarter of 2012 and my bottom line.  In the 2-3 hours that I spent going through the blog posts (in conjunction with the Benchmark study from PPA – Click HERE to find out more about PPA and the benchmark study which is a super helpful guide for making sure your expenses are in check to keep you profitable) allowed me to identify several key weaknesses in my business over the past year as well as lay out a plan for how to minimize those in 2013.

This isn’t a scary thing, I promise.

I ended up with a few Quickbooks reports printed out and around 6 pages of notes in my notebook, half of which were setting my priotities for 2013 and breaking those down into miestones and action items and the other half was a revised operating budget.  This blog series was easy to read, very informative, and broke the subject matter down into easy to digest chunks that helped me pinpoint what products and services were most profitable, how to best market them, and gave me that little push that I needed to set goals for 2013.

If you think that sounds like something that could help you to…Head on over and check it out.