You should always be working to a goal with your label, what you determine the goal to be will be individual to you, however having a goal helps you stay focused and stop time wasting.
The last few months of the year is a perfect time for you to assess the year gone and plan for your year ahead. You have already done the legwork for your holiday releases and January and February generally quiet down which essentially gives you a month or two to regroup and get ready to smash the year ahead.
Here are a few of our top tips for planning your year:
Take A Step Back
Take a step back and see what worked for you in the last year. Did you have a specific release that did really well? If so, what did you do that affected this? Even if you didn't do anything directly, has the artist had some exposure that could have affected the success, if so, how can you take this and replicate it over your upcoming releases?
Similar to your successes, asses your failures, you can often learn more from your failures than you can form your successes. Have you explored marketing opportunities that didn't pay off. Are there artists on your roster that aren't of benefit to your label? You will know better than anyone what you have done this past year and know what questions to ask, but be brutally honest with yourself and learn from your mistakes.
Set Realistic End Of Year Goals
Now you have assessed where you are at now, envisage where you want to be this time next year. Make sure this is realistic, whilst you want to push yourself with your goals, you don't want to make them so great they are unachievable.
There is no definite path for a label to take, however, if you are stuck for realistic ideas, you could review similar labels which you aspire to and research what they have done over the years to be where they are at now. Would some of these milestones help you on your path?
Work Backwards From Your End of Year Goals
You will not reach these goals overnight and if you have set your EOY goals correctly there will be a long path you need to take to reach them. Break out each EOY goal into key milestones, this may only be a few milestones over the year, but these milestones are metrics by which you can measure your ongoing success throughout the year.
Take these milestones and break then out into tasks which you need to complete to hit these milestones. Depending on the complexity of what is involved, you can then break these out further and make them as granular as they need to be depending on the complexity of your milestones.
Once you have these tasks set them out week by week, this will really help you focus your weeks and not lose track.
You may also want to consider outsourcing certain aspects of these milestones depending on your skill set and time constraints.
Don't Be Afraid To Walk Away From A Bad Idea
Whilst you may set your goals and start working towards them, there is nothing to say you can't change these goals once you start. Opportunities may present themselves that you need to take advantage of, or market conditions may chance which means you need to adjust your plan, or your initial plan may just not be working.
If you have a good reason to change a goal or leave a project, do it. Don't continue to waste your time and resources on a bad idea.