Fresh Canvas

Well, it is well into the New Year and I hope you are as excited as we are to what 2013 will bring. It is nice to start with a new slate and either ride the positive wave of 2012 or leave our woes in the 2012 wake. Either way, 2013 is a fresh new start...so what shall we do? The best approach we have found this year is to do your Spring cleaning now. It is a great way to get the inventory in check - adding order to what might have been chaos from a bunch of end of year jobs. Also, a great plus to getting your office and shop in check is to help your employees and co-workers feel that they have a new slate too; a fresh new canvas. Ah, now what to do with that canvas? Well Paul Cezanne once said,"It's so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas."  Funny how a French painter from the late 1800's could still apply his quote to January of twenty-thirteen. 
I hope you think of your fresh, new, blank canvas as an opportunity. An opportunity to take your highlights of the past year and enhance them as well as build up your lows points. Take some time to sit back and reflect your top five accomplishments and your top five failures. Make a plan to make them all better and execute. Take your brush out and start attacking that canvas with better lighting, better paint jobs, better quoting, better customer service and so on. Before you know, it will be 2014 and you are going to have to do this process all over again. I hope when you step back and look at 2013 you see  a beautiful VanGogh or a Rembrandt!