The start of the new year is ideal for pressing pause and setting resolutions for your business. Take time to think through which activities will enhance your entrepreneurial skills and foster a resilient, profitable, and growth-minded business.
From making goals that strike the balance between achievable and challenging to improving your personal experience as leader and owner, here are a few of the resolution essentials to drive growth.
Make Your Financial Projections
Effective financial management relies on projections (glorified guesstimates based on what’s reasonable yet optimistic), with cash flow projections serving as the vital piece of this puzzle. Use a spreadsheet or any of the many digital planning tools to estimate monthly cash inflows and outflows. Take into account any planned investments or financing that will ensure you have sufficient funds to reach your goals. Once your projections are noted, check back throughout the year to monitor your cash flow and make any necessary adjustments to maintain your organization’s ideal trajectory.
Expand Your Marketing Efforts
How do you boost your sales? It’s not rocket science: Connect with your ideal customers. Identify your niche audience – the exact demographic of consumers who want or need the products or services you offer. Remember that when it comes to marketing, targeting everyone equates to targeting no one. With your ideal audience in mind, come up with strategies to guide them to your business. Precision is paramount; be specific in your marketing efforts to zero in on your target audience. And once you get in front of them, make sure your message resonates.
Print marketing in niche publications is a focused approach. Use highly read hyperlocal publications (Stroll, Greet, BeLocal, and Real Producers, for examples) to consistently place your brand in front of your audience every month. Then embrace the powerful one-two punch of print + digital, with the help of our friends at Hyport Digital, to make your targeted marketing go even further. Digital provides comprehensive solutions to elevate your online visibility and take your business to the next level.
Embrace an Employee Performance System
A business is only as great as it makes its people feel. If you’ve done the work to create a brag-worthy culture in your organization, take it up a notch via an effective performance management system. This is a tool to boost employee engagement by aligning performance with company objectives. It’s a win-win for you and your team. Employee performance systems help leaders recognize emerging talent, define training objectives, and make more impartial decisions when it comes to compensation and staffing. It’s a resolution worth making for any business focused on growth in 2024.
Prioritize Work-Life Balance
There may not be a term more overused than “work-life balance,” and yet we all know what it is… and we want it. The pandemic gave many employees a taste of the work-from-home life, and it’s a lifestyle that simply works best for a lot of us. If at all possible, give the people what they want. In many ways, this means prioritizing people over profits, but that’s what you have to do in 2024 to recruit and retain the best talent.
Take a long look at the many out-of-the-box ways you can make the lives of your employees better. Maybe it is the chance to work from home (if not every day, at least a few days per week). Maybe it is allowing others to nominate star teammates for extra PTO. Organic profits follow when you have your role and your employees’ roles centered around what matters most: life outside of work.
Learn how N2 creates opportunities for peak work-life balance
As we make our way through January, it’s important to lay the groundwork for a prosperous and resilient business. There are many great and worthy resolutions out there, but we believe embracing the four detailed above will kickstart a strong and exciting 2024.
