Each year I think the same, where has time gone and how are we now nearly at the end of another year. What have I accomplished and am I on track or off track? There is no better time to set your goals either as we wind down for the year or at the beginning of 2023. Whether your looking to grow your revenue and bottom line through sales of your services and helping your clients, or improve your retention and client loyalty.
When planning your goals, make them specific and remember the acronym S.M.A.R.T. The ‘S’ stands for Specific, the ‘M’ stands for Measurable, ‘A’ stands for Achievable, ‘R’ is for Realistic and ‘T’ is for Timely. Ultimately, you want to start small so you can achieve the goal, gain confidence and then build on your foundation until you’ve reached your long-term objective.
Naturally, there are some great tech solutions you can implement to help your professional services firm or business accomplish its goals for 2023.
Improve Your Client Experience
Does your firm or business have a website? Obviously, most firms or businesses these days do, but is your website able to help you turn people from a someday might be interested to a lead and then ultimately to a client? Do your clients and prospective clients enjoy the experience of using your website? If you ask yourselves these and answer No to any of them, then you need to re-evaluate your website and digital client experience.
For most of you, you don’t sell online directly. So utilise the space of your website and write helpful content that helps educate your client and prospective client on what good is and how you benefit them, in simple language they understand, with writing and posting blog articles. If you sell ‘products’ online with an online store, you want to make sure it is easy to navigate, and the checkout process is smooth.
In every case, as a mentor of mine likes to say, look to remove the irritants in the system.
You may also want to consider how new technology like AI chatbots may be able to help. Alternatively there are human driven chat plugins for your website that could help turn more web traffic into leads and ultimately paying clients.
Invest In Ongoing Cyber Security Services And Solutions
Cyber threats and attacks occur hourly. While the ones you tend to hear about are the larger businesses, such as Optus and Medibank recently.
Unfortunately, small businesses as well as small to medium law, accounting and financial services firms are also hit, they just don’t make the news. This puts your reputation and your family’s livelihood at risk, when you suffer an attack. Naturally, you want to do everything you can to protect that. Your clients, obviously, want you to be protecting their highly sensitive information.
Possibly, the most crucial component of your cyber security is ongoing, continual employee education. Your entire team needs to know and fully understand your cyber security practices and why you have them in place. If you are not running this at least quarterly, ideally monthly, 2023 is the time to implement it.
Get Help With Your IT Needs By Hiring A Managed IT Services Provider Heavily Experienced With Cyber Security
Managed IT services providers are able to provide an excellent solution for small businesses and small to medium law, accounting and financial services firm IT needs. They take over the behind the scenes work that needs to be done, allowing you and your team to focus on serving your clients and keeping them happy. MSP’s can take care of your data backup and disaster recovery, improve you and your team’s productivity by ensuring you’re running the most efficient technology to meet your goals.
The good ones will identify issues and fix problems before they become much more serious, saving you money.
Hiring an MSP who is heavily experienced with cyber security is one of the few sure-fire ways to protect your reputation and family’s livelihood, which is being generated by your firm or business. Given that statistics indicate sixty percent of small to medium businesses close down after a cyber attack, that is not something you want to risk. Who you choose to protect your assets, should not be a decision taken lightly.
If you’ve been interested in hiring an MSP, or you are thinking about changing providers, there is no better time than the present. You’ll be fulfilling a New Year’s resolution while significantly improving and protecting your reputation, family’s livelihood, your legacy and ultimately your firm or business.
The new year provides us with an opportunity to reset and refocus our attention back on improving ourselves and our firm or business. You must make plans and then implement them if you want to improve, though. Give some of these resolutions a try, and you’ll quickly notice the benefits they bring to your firm or business.
Want additional resources to help you prevent or mitigate reputation damage, protect your family’s livelihood and ensuring you don’t fall victim to scams, phishing emails or cyber-attack? Click here now and sign up for FREE actionable, byte sized (sorry, bad IT pun) tips delivered straight to your email inbox that you can use to protect your reputation and family’s livelihood.