February may be the shortest month of the year, but with some planning and forethought, we can still make  it a successful time. 
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The start of a new year always brings with it some pressure to plan out your perfect year! Social media is awash with mini-courses to help you organise your life and plan for
                                                                                                                              success.
​Resolutions abound – new year, new you and all that! 

But, research shows that by mid-February 80% of these resolutions will have failed. 

January may also just not be ‘your’ time so don’t feel like you have missed the boat completely if you didn’t work out a 12-month plan, perfectly colour coded. The start of the year can be a challenge after the holiday period, and it can take work life some weeks to get fully back to normal. 

Many businesses also have seasons and January just may not be a good time. 

People have seasons too. And for many, January is a time of ‘hibernating’ and boosting batteries.

If you are thinking of using the second month of the year to kickstart some planning then, here are some ideas we have gathered from around the team which may inspire you: 

• Start of by getting all your ideas down onto a white board, white wall or a big piece of paper. 

• Then see if you can group the various ideas and tasks together. 
• There will also be regular jobs throughout the year which you have to do so make sure these go into the mix. 
• Now start to prioritise. Look at those jobs which you can see need to be done quickly. 
• There will always be some things which you will put off – we all have them! But, getting those done as a priority will get them out of the way and you’ll feel better immediately. (For more on this kind of approach try 'Eat that Frog!'.
• Split the rest of the jobs into batches and you will start to see a plan coming together. 

• If you like nice pens and notebooks as we do, now is the time to indulge yourself! 
• When you have done your first draft, give yourself a pat on the back and have a break. Your plan will evolve and grow but getting this first draft down on paper is a good step to making this a successful month. 

If you do decide to do some planning this month, we wish the best of luck.  

​Enterprise Exchange regularly shares business support and advice via social media too so please do follow us on Twitter and connect on LinkedIn

Over the next few months, we're going to be interview all our team members so that our clients and colleagues get to know us better.

First up is one of our Directors, Benna McCartney.

​Could you give us a quick overview of your role at Enterprise Exchange?

Director - overseeing the back end of the business, managing freelance staff, business development and participant one to one support.

What experience do you have which led you to set up/work with Enterprise Exchange?

I am a qualified life and business coach and met my business partner Phil through different work we were doing with the same client group. We were both invited into Lewes Prison and asked to support the guys to set up their own businesses, since this is very often the only option for offenders and ex-offenders. We were not able to help at the time as we had such high workloads, but were randomly made redundant at the same time, so I had the idea of setting up the business together to initially support the men in prison. We managed to gain funding through Serco and the rest, as they say, is history!

Which aspect of your work do you enjoy most?

All of it! Sometimes I struggle with the admin side when there is too much to do and I feel my time would be much better spent supporting staff, participants and having more time to grow the business effectively, but I have lots of tools in place through my training, that enables me to organise myself effectively.
What do you do when you're not supporting EE?

I don’t seem to have time for much else at the moment, but when I do, I love spending time with family and friends, travelling, exercising, watching films and singing.

Tea or coffee and how do you take it?

Both but I prefer a good coffee – non dairy cappuccino (with one shot) is my ‘signature’ drink and tea with non dairy milk. I am also really into non dairy matcha lattes at the moment, which I am very happy to say seem to be more widely available in the last few weeks.

Thanks so much. How can people best contact you?

You are so welcome and please feel free to email me at benna@enterpriseexchange.org.uk.