5 useful tips for getting your business ready for a great 2022

For many businesses, the last few months of 2021 were a rollercoaster. While some have seen growth, others have struggled with disruptions due to Brexit and the Delta and Omicron coronavirus variants.

However, after this difficult year, many business owners are hopeful that 2022 will bring strong growth. According to a recent study, published by Business Live, more than two-thirds of them feel confident about the year ahead.

If you’re one of them, it’s important to ensure that you’re running your business as effectively as possible. Read on for five useful tips for getting your business ready for a great 2022.

1. Look back over what lessons you can learn from 2021

One of the first things you may want to do as you enter 2022 is to look back and think about what the previous year has taught you. For most businesses, 2021 presented some unique challenges, so reflecting on how you handled them can help you to adapt to what the future may hold.

For example, if you struggled with supply chain issues or perhaps even staff shortages, you may want to take a good look at what you could have done to avoid these problems. You can then use this as an opportunity to make your business more resilient to future issues.

Conversely, you can also look at the things that your employees handled well and try to encourage the skills and teamwork that helped them to overcome the obstacle.

While you may be understandably proud of the work culture, it’s important to remember that there are always improvements that you can make.

2. Set clearly defined goals

This may seem like an obvious step but, if you want to grow your company in 2022, it’s important to outline your objectives so you can plan how you’re going to reach them.

Setting meaningful and achievable goals can help you to improve your company more effectively. This is because, without a clear strategy in mind, it’s hard to know how to quantify your success.

One of the benefits of setting these smaller milestones is that you can use them to reflect on how effective your strategy is and whether or not you’re on the right track. If you fail to meet a smaller goal, you may need to rethink your plans so you can meet your targets for the end of the year.

3. Get your finances in order

As well as improving your business’s efficiency and productivity by learning from your mistakes and setting goals, you may want to give some thought to your finances.

The start of the year is the perfect time to give your business finances a thorough inspection. You could consider exploring your current expenditure and seeing whether you could save money.

Or perhaps you could consider ways to give your cash flow a boost by tracking your inflows and outflows even more carefully.

Your finances are integral to the overall health of your business. So, you may even want to make this the year that you work with a financial expert who can take an objective look at your company and tell you where you’re going right and, more importantly, where you’re going wrong.

4. Ensure you have the right protection in place

One of the most important lessons that the pandemic has taught us is that the unexpected can happen at any time. That’s why, if you want to be confident that you can overcome whatever the future may hold, it’s important to have the right protection in place.

There are a variety of different types of cover that can help your business, from cyber to key person insurance. If you aren’t sure which types you may benefit from the most, you may want to seek professional advice.

Knowing that you have adequate protection can give you a greater sense of confidence that your business won’t be disrupted, whatever the future may hold.

5. Make your business even more tax-efficient

Tax can be one of the most frustrating ways to lose hard-earned money in your business, especially as it’s possible to reduce your tax bill through good planning.

January is always the end of the tax year for self-assessment tax returns, which is most likely how you file yours as a business owner. That means you now have a concrete figure for how much tax you paid this year, and a clear target to try and reduce for next year.

There are a whole host of different tax-saving options available to business owners, including:

• Making the most of deductible expenses
• Offsetting losses against your profits to claim Corporation Tax relief
• Drawing your earnings in the most tax-efficient way
• Make the most of tax reliefs or allowances, such as the Dividend Allowance.

Tax is notoriously complicated, so it can be sensible to work with a financial professional who can help you with the more complex aspects of tax planning.

Get in touch

If you want to be able to make properly informed decisions when growing your business in 2022, get in touch. Email enquiries@rosebridgeltd.com or call 01204 300010 to find out more about how we could help you.

Please note

This article is for information only. Please do not act based on anything you might read in this article. All contents are based on our understanding of HMRC legislation, which is subject to change.

The Financial Conduct Authority does not regulate tax advice.