8 min read
January 9th, 2024
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The end of every year brings the opportunity to reflect and evaluate everything that has transpired: successes, failures, opportunities, and challenges.
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Key Takeaways
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Through this reflection, we have the ability to determine what we can do better in the upcoming year and make resolutions to improve ourselves and our businesses.
To help you set your business resolutions for 2025, we've compiled five of the top New Year goals for businesses and business leadership tips.
5 Actionable Business Resolutions to Drive Growth in 2025
1. Create Direction and Alignment With a Better Operating Framework
At the beginning of the year, your goals and direction are fresh and at the top of your mind. Staying focused and keeping your entire business aimed at achieving your goals is essential to success. However, when you're months deep into 2025 and mired in whatever the year brings, it can be easy to lose sight of your purpose and direction. Plus, individual departments and employees can become distracted, working toward their own, departmentally or personally siloed goals, and these individual benchmarks could be working in a different direction than the business as a whole.
Read More: Financial Reports vs. Management Reports: What’s the Difference?
Businesses that use a well-organized and well-documented operating framework are more likely to stick to their strategies, continue working toward their short-term benchmarks, and eventually achieve their goals. An operating framework provides a system for:
- Defining SMART goals
- Developing strategies to achieve them
- Creating organization-wide alignment around those goals
- A means for measuring progress
- A schedule for routinely evaluating your progress
- A process for tweaking your strategy when performance is falling short
This year, commit to a resolution to adopt an official operating framework. This will help you set better goals and benchmarks, devise sound business strategies, and align your entire organization around moving the business in the same direction.
2. Strengthen Your Workplace Culture and Core Values
Along the lines of aligning your business around common goals, you should also focus on defining the core values upon which your goals should be based. With a strong set of core values, you can then also attract employees who are personally aligned with your business's values while developing a more positive, fulfilling workplace culture. In addition to core values, your business's traditions, interactions, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs impact workplace culture, so your core value system should be infused with every decision you make and every policy you implement.
A strong, positive workplace culture can strengthen your business, accelerate progress and growth, increase employee engagement and satisfaction, and maximize productivity. Businesses with a strong identity and culture simply perform better.
3. Focus on Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Employee turnover is one of the biggest (and most unnecessary) costs your business can incur. The cost of employee turnover includes both direct and indirect impacts on the bottom line. Some of the direct expenses of turnover include the actual costs associated with paying out employee severance, advertising a job opening, and carrying out the hiring process. Indirectly, turnover impacts your bottom line through the loss of knowledge, experience, and expertise that leaves along with every employee who quits your business. Additionally, there will be productivity lags that occur when you lose an employee and customers who might be less satisfied because their primary point person is no longer available.
The positive workplace culture mentioned above will help to improve employee retention through better employee engagement and satisfaction. However, culture alone is usually not enough. Businesses should resolve to design and implement human capital resource management strategies for employee retention. These strategies should include standards for optimized compensation models, bonuses, rewards, recognition, and benefits in addition to creating a more flexible, balanced workplace that meets the modern demands of today's workforce.
4. Listen to Customers and Refine Your Brand
The market is constantly shifting, and your business needs to actively work to remain relevant and competitive - no matter your industry. In 2025, you should devise a strategy and system for seeking customer feedback. Send out surveys and create a standard form and central network location where employees can record customer feedback.
Listen to your customers and use their feedback (both positive and negative) to improve your business, products, services, and brand to more specifically and completely meet their needs.
Improving customer satisfaction not only keeps your business competitive, but it also helps to reduce customer acquisition costs, making your business overall more profitable.
5. Build Your Business Outwards by Embracing Technology
Modern technology like cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence have revolutionized business operations. It's now easier than ever to build out your business, using outsourced providers and advanced tools to handle your non-core business functions like bookkeeping and accounting, information technology, legal, and marketing. By embracing technology, even the smallest businesses can afford to operate with fully functioning back offices.
In addition to leveraging the expertise and benefits of outsourced providers, businesses should also use technology to expand their online presence. If your business doesn't have an active website, Google review presence, or social media identity, then for many consumers, it doesn't exist. If you're not using social media, managing your storefront on Google, or updating your website regularly, commit to improving your online presence in 2025.
+5 New Year's Resolutions for Business Leadership Success
1. Continue Cultivating a Growth Mindset
One of the best ways for business leaders to improve is by adopting and cultivating a growth mindset. This leadership mindset is based on learning and continuously evolving. It celebrates both failure and success as equal learning opportunities, is open to feedback, and is always looking for ways to improve.
Read More: 5 Steps to Establishing Effective Leadership Teams
2. Attend More Networking Events
Some of us love it, and some of us hate it, but no one can deny that networking is an essential business leadership activity. Networking provides opportunities to learn, expand, partner, and strengthen both your business and yourself through the development of symbiotic relationships with other professionals. Start researching network opportunities now to create a full schedule of regular networking events throughout the year.
3. Make Time for Personal Development
You may have made it to the top of your business, but CEOs and busienss owners still need to work on improving themselves. With a demanding schedule, it can be easy to scratch out your own personal development time in favor of more meetings or what you perceive as higher-value tasks. However, continuously honing your own business acumen and improving your leadership style is a high-value task. Schedule time for reading, taking classes, listening to business leadership podcasts, learning advanced technologies, and keeping an eye on the industry and economy.
4. Commit to a Better Work-Life Balance
As a business leader, it can be difficult to maintain a healthy balance between the time you spend working and the time you spend simply living your life. Remember, though, that no one is immune to burnout, and taking breaks actually improves your productivity and focus. This year, make a resolution to spend a little more time on yourself. Go to the gym. Get home in time for dinner with your family. Take an art class. Start a meditation practice. Dedicate time to a hobby (not related to work) that you've always wanted to try.
5. Curate Your Personal Brand
As a business leader, you are not only the face of your company but you are also the face of you! Developing your personal brand identity can help shape the way the public perceives you and better direct the way your image impacts your business. Thanks to the internet and social media, people in business are more visible than ever before, so it's important to keep an eye on your online image and tailor a reputation of which you can be proud.
You can begin curating your personal brand by investing time in relevant social media platforms, creating and sharing meaningful content, and providing valuable information to your customers and peers.
Evaluate Your Business Resolutions and Business Success Strategies With a Better Back Office
One of the most important (yet overlooked) steps in New Year's resolutions is keeping track of your progress and measuring your success. It's easy to set goals, but following through with them requires dedication.
By outsourcing your back office to an experienced business bookkeeping and accounting team, you will have a partner in setting goals, measuring outcomes, and tracking results. However you resolve to improve your business and yourself in 2025, be sure to make the most of the goals you set by recording your results.
