BUSINESS COMMENT & NEWS
Coast River Business Journal
January 2021 • 15
Goal setting
Six goals your business can set in 2021
By Jessica Newhall
Clatsop Community College
Small Business Development Center
Small businesses are often the product of the
powerful combination of entrepreneurial vision
and passion. While these can be helpful to pen-
etrate markets and fuel the tenacity required to
overcome challenges, a business owner can sig-
nificantly improve their chances of success by
supporting vision and passion with a solid, well-
thought-out plan to actively guide decision mak-
ing. To say that the pandemic has disrupted most
small business owners’ ability to plan would be an
understatement.
Yet, as understanding of the virus grows, vac-
cinations commence and consumer habits sta-
bilize, the start of 2021 offers business owners a
new opportunity to dip their toes into the planning
waters once again.
Here are six suggestions of business goals you
can set this year:
Understand what drives your profitability.
If you have not looked at your financials lately, the
start of the year is an incredibly powerful time to do
so as it can help guide budgeting and decision mak-
ing for the coming year and help avoid emotional or
reactive decisions that can have a negative impact
on performance. One key indicator that business
owners can look for in year-end financials is profit-
ability (especially critical for Sole Props and LLCs
as this often dictates your take-home earnings). Do
you understand what key factors are positively or
negatively impacting profitability (revenue, cost of
goods, expenses)? How has profitability changed
from 2019 to 2020 and why? How does your profit-
ability compare to others in your industry? (Unsure
of your industry averages? The SBDC can help.)
Reduce ongoing business expenses. Given the
economic climate, you are likely operating pretty
lean already but something to consider: if a busi-
ness were able to just trim $27 per day from the
expense line, that would be the equivalent of almost
$10,000 per year. For a business with annual prof-
its of $50,000, an additional $10,000 to the bottom
line would result in a 20% increase! So, look at your
financials for 2020 and think about where you might
be able to trim without sacrificing product or service
quality or creating risk.
Increase revenue. There are several ways that
businesses can increase top-line revenue. This is a
wonderful time to rekindle that passion and think
about what existing customers might buy more of,
whether they could support a price increase for
existing offerings or what kind of fresh offering
might attract new customers. Schedule some time
for brainstorming — and if you have a team, this is
a great time to engage them as well!
Fix a broken customer-service process. All
businesses have those nagging little snags in their
Clatsop home supply ends
year at historic low
Jessica Newhall
customer experience that come up from time to time
(or even worse, all the time). Unfortunately, it is
easy to get so busy that these never get addressed
and small blunders in customer service can turn into
big problems. If there is something that has come
up consistently in customer comments or feedback
from your employees, this is a great time to com-
mit to fixing it.
Grow your digital presence. The pandemic has
opened new avenues of growth for companies who
have leveraged the power of digital to drive engage-
ment, reach new customers and increase sales. If
your business needs an enhanced online presence,
pick one channel (but just one to start), such as your
website or a specific social media platform, this is a
great time to set that goal and get moving {span}—
{/span} and the great part about digital marketing is
that progress is easily measured with analytics!
Improve your financial health. The bottom line
is, not monitoring how money is flowing through
your company in a timely and accurate manner can
be crippling to business success and often leads to
failure. If goals one through three above were unat-
tainable due to a lack of accurate financials, now is
the time to solve for that by enhancing your book-
keeping skills and processes internally or outsourc-
ing to a reputable professional bookkeeper.
Once you identify what you want to achieve in
2021, make sure you document your goal and that
it is S.M.A.R.T., which means it is: specific (not
vague), measurable (what metric will you use to
track success?), achievable (set yourself up for suc-
cess!), relevant (this goal should really matter to the
vitality of your business), and timely (has a dead-
line). Also, do not try to tackle too much, especially
right now, or you will likely burn out. Keep it sim-
ple and achievable.
If you need help analyzing your financial state-
ments, developing effective goals or need support
with planning, the business advisors at the SBDC
are here to help. Always free and confidential.
ASTORIA — Capping a year in which the “law
of supply and demand” nudged Clatsop County
home values to a historical new level, December was
marked by a leveling in the median price even while
the housing inventory became tighter.
There were only 68 houses listed for sale in the
county in December, according to data from the Clat-
sop Association of Realtors — less than half as many
as in August and fewer than a third of the 209 active
listings in March 2020 as pandemic restrictions were
beginning to be imposed. A year ago in December
2019, there were 244 listings, equaling a decline of
72%.
Only five active listings were priced under
$249,000 as December ended, with five more priced
between $250,000 and $299,999.
The average selling price was $507,668 in
December, 11% more than a year earlier, but a
decline from the $540,516 in November. December’s
median price — meaning half sold for more and half
for less — was $389,500, about level with December
2019 and down from $426,000 in November.
Houses are spending a median of 60 days on
the market between the listing and closing, down
from 101 days in December 2019 and 82 days in
November 2020. The absorption rate — a real estate
industry measurement of how fast sales are burning
through the available inventory — fell below one
month to 0.97, compared to 3.59 in December 2019.
This means that unless more houses were listed, it
would take less than a month to exhaust the avail-
able supply.
The average list price of the 39 houses listed in
December was $771,110, up 23% from 12 months
earlier. Eighteen of the new listings were for
$500,000 or more, compared to six listings at that
level a year before.