The Big Mañana: Why February is Truly the Beginning of the Calendar Year for Business Owners
As we put the celebrations and holiday cheer of the season behind us, it can be difficult for many business owners to jumpstart the energy and action envisioned for the new year. The lingering effects of the holiday season, often referred to as the "holiday hangover," can slow down productivity and delay the planning process. However, February presents itself as an excellent opportunity to hit the refresh icon and begin the calendar year in earnest on a strong note.
January often arrives with high hopes and ambitious resolutions. However, the transition from the relaxed holiday mode to a full-throttle work mode can be challenging.
February, often overlooked as just a home for Valentine’s Day, and its unique leap year expansion every 4 years, holds the potential to be the actual starting point for your business year. The fog tends to clear by February and the holiday hangover has ebbed, and owners and employees engage their muscle memories and begin to return to their regular routines—but wait a minute, that is not what we all promised ourselves in January, this year was going to be different.
A couple of items to get onto your checklist to bring big ideas out of the holiday fog into the planning calendar starting in February:
Answer the ‘why’ questions. Why are you in this business? Why does it matter to you and your customers?
Get goals written down. Ask yourself, where would you like your company to be at this time next February, what conversations will you be having with yourself in 2026?
Lift up your people. Check the temperature of your team. Are they happy, inspired, motivated to do more? What kind of benefit package do you provide? Is there a retirement savings plan?
Get out the calendar. Start with activities and accomplishments you envision by month and then month by month, and activity by activity, add detail and dates to the calendar. Share with the team. (Don’t forget Valentine’s Day—huge mistake).
Identify health-focused tactics. Find ways to enhance your self-care and wellbeing for employees, get something on the calendar that addresses this goal each month.
You don’t have to overindulge in alcohol to suffer the holiday “hangover.” The fourth quarter holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Eve—can all be spectacular personal opportunities to share with loved ones and families, and to create core memories and experiences that bring great joy. With all that manufactured joy, there can also be intense pressure on people to meet personal goals with family celebrations and obligations. Festivity can be exhausting—cleaning, hosting, cooking, shopping, wrapping, and caring so deeply about pleasing everyone. And to be honest, there will almost always be at least one minor catastrophe that will occur in your home to add a little special spice to the season, e.g. a flooded basement where your guests were supposed to stay, a power outage pausing cooking operations and a whole host of wonderful surprises in the bathroom arena. It’s the most wonderful time of the year.
Now it is all done, it is mañana. February is the “morning after,” it is the time when we can all put those good memories in our brain bank’s happy account and the rest behind the subconscious curtain. We can start to re-focus ourselves on the professional joys we will pursue in 2026 and that just might make this upcoming holiday season less stressful all-around. If we aren’t working to advance and improve, then on February 2nd Groundhog Day may have new meaning for your business and your holiday season, and you’ll be making your own movie resigned to living the same year over and over again.