Happy New Year!!! Everyone at the Strictly Business office is excited to kick off 2014 and get our New Year’s resolutions started.  In fact, along with what we are the most thankful for you can check some of our goals and resolutions out in this month’s issue!  For those of you who were swept away by all of the holiday action and haven’t had time to consider what you want to improve in the coming year, I encourage you to check out some of the great ideas we have included in our feature story this month.  Along the same lines, the beginning of the year is often a time we get serious about mapping out our plans for the coming year.  Especially in the business world, it is a time where we reflect on our successes and shortcomings of the previous year.  We then look into moving forward and outline the necessary improvements and adjustments that need to be made to get to the next level.  Often times this requires some outside perspective and expertise, so we have highlighted some excellent resources in our Business Planning feature.

We are currently participating in the Sandler Sales Training Program, and their exercise for goal setting is outlined on p. 15 in the magazine and also here.   The next step after that is to create a dream board, which we are doing as a staff at our year-end planning meeting.  This is a visual representation of your goals using photos, magazine clippings, or if you want to get creative you can use whatever materials you like to showcase your goals.  These dream boards are a wonderful way to nail down exactly what you want in the coming year and provide a constant visual reminder of what you are working towards.  Place them in a prominent place at your workplace, in your home, or on your website or social media!  We will have our dream boards on our Facebook page after the first of the year, and we encourage everyone to create a dream board for themselves and share them with us by posting on our Facebook page too!  This is also a wonderful activity for your kids.  Nicki recently made a dream board with her 5 year old daughter Addie, and found out that one of her goals is to live in Paris!

We hope you all had a wonderful and blessed holiday season, and we wish you much success in 2014!