Business New Year Resolutions to Boost Profits and Productivity

When we talk about New Year's resolutions for business owners, we usually don't mean dry January or reducing your chocolate consumption (unless those things are negatively impacting the performance of your business). Instead, we mean things like securing a feature in Times Magazine, reducing your tax liabilities, increasing profits, or overhauling your marketing strategy.

Whether you're a large, medium, or small business, regardless of your industry, this guide should give you a head start on setting and meeting your new year's goals.

Why New Year's business resolutions matter

Over the course of a typical year, it's very common for business owners not to be able to fully address existing problems or early warning signs of future ones. Unsustainable practices like allowing business debts to creep higher or adopting pricing strategies that drive sales, but damage profits often need time and mental availability to fix. Unlike the tax year, Christmas and the New Year give us a globally recognised opportunity to reset our clocks, with the endeavour of starting the new year as we mean to go on.

Visualise what success for your business looks like

Before putting pen to paper let’s start off in your imagination. Close your eyes and imagine the business you want to have in the next 2,5 or even 10 years, what does it look like, what does it do, what are its customers like. Once you've developed these thoughts and ideas it’s time to create a vision board that will guide your goal setting.

Focusing on what really matters

When considering what you should focus on for your new year’s resolution we like to think of our 4 Ps of business (not to be confused with the 4 Ps of marketing). People, product, process and profit, always try and make sure that your resolutions include a minimum of 2 Ps.

The output of this process doesn’t need to be 100% business orientated, one of the most pivotal parts of sustainable business growth is ensuring you and your team have as good a work-life balance as possible.

We've broken down examples for each P that could help you generate some ideas relevant to your business:

People - A new or updated incentive scheme, remote work infrastructure or moving to a hybrid work model.

Product - New products or services that better meet your target audience’s needs.

Process - Forecasting tools, accounting software.

Profit - New revenue streams, reducing or removing unprofitable services or products.

Invest in your team

Understanding the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of your team can be a priceless tool to improve employee wellness and to help you define exactly what needs to change in the new year to get your team functioning optimally.

Ask for feedback

Employee survey providers can be a great way to hear directly from employees whilst also ensuring that your team will actively and truthfully participate, as in many instances, fear of feedback not being anonymous can reduce engagement.

Team building events

Team building activities like virtual escape rooms or scavenger hunts are a great way to build collaborative spirit with your team, allowing them to connect in a more relaxed and fun environment. In turn fostering a better working environment. However, from the cost perspective this option may be more feasible for small businesses and teams.

Personal development

This can easily be forgotten at busy times or deprioritised by team members with lots of experience. However, ensuring that your team is growing both personally and professionally adds more intrinsic value than salary or work benefits can. It could even be the reason why a potential job seeker would choose to work for you over a competitor.

Performance management

Taking performance measurement seriously is fundamental to maintaining a healthy team. It’s important that you can recognise both top performers as well as employees not living up to their full potential. If not, you are at high risk of losing your star performers to competitors and letting unmotivated employees impact the rest of the team.

DEI still matters

Although multiple businesses are pulling away from diversity and inclusion efforts, if you speak to employees from a range of backgrounds. A company’s stance on DEI is still important for both employees and customers.

Reviewing and potentially changing service providers

Whether it’s outsourced accounting or new inventory management services, reviewing your service providers is an effective way to get your business running smoothly and cost efficiently.

Improving your marketing

Optimising your performance across your various marketing channels is typically a focus when businesses are trying to figure out how to scale up or maintain performance.

The first step we would recommend is that on a regular basis (not just yearly), you are reviewing the performance of existing channels against your marketing plan and desired marketing outcomes. Failure to evolve your marketing plan and business model to the changing landscape is a key reason powerful brands like Blockbuster Video disappeared into history. Below we've concentrated on what we believe to be the 2 most impactful marketing channels that could change your business in the new year.

Social Media

Regardless of your business type, it’s highly likely that if your business isn’t visible across paid or organic social media then you are not maximising all your growth opportunities. Yes, this even includes all you business owners that operate in small niches.

If you plan to explore the world of social media for the first time or want to expand your existing reach, then it’s often most cost effective for you to partner with an agency that can help you cost efficiently scale your campaigns. A specialist Facebook ads agency will be able to help you start a new campaign or takeover your small, medium or large self-managed campaign and scale it cost efficiently. All whilst ensuring that their years of experience is baked into your campaign from the beginning.

Content marketing

AI may have arrived, but content is still king. Content marketing in its different forms touches every part of your business so ensuring that you have a message that is clear, helpful and unique can really make you stand out from the crowd.

Achieving this is easier said than done so if you do not have the time or resources within the business then consider outsourcing it in the new year. We recommend starting at a level that’s suitable for your budget and focusing on pieces of content with the highest potential to impact conversion. Allowing you to gradually scale up, re-investing new revenues and profits into more content marketing.

Improving your connection to customers

Improving your connection to your target audience through customer loyalty, customer experience and audience engagement is a guaranteed way to ensure your business grows its retained customer base.

Customer service call centres

It may sound like an expensive option but these days, you don’t need to build your own call center or recruit staff personally, instead there are companies that can do this all for you. Allowing you to have fractional call center staff, with a service that scales with you, keeping your costs manageable as you grow.

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are a great way to reward customers whilst also demonstrating to new potential customers that there are additional benefits to becoming a customer.

Online reviews

Regardless of your opinion of online reviews, they can be key to helping you scale your business. However, our main piece of advice here would be to wait until you have ironed out any operational bugs within your business as once you have enabled reviews there is no turning back, a negative review early on in your journey could slow your growth.

Stepping out of your comfort zone

There are many additional options for improving your business in the new year, however they may require you to do a few things that you may not have experience with.

Networking events

Some people find this extremely cringeworthy, however you can ask any seriously successful business owner, and you will find that many will point to key relationships as a source of the success (and a dash of good luck and fortunate timing).

You don’t need to fake it or be somebody you’re not, just take one small step at a time. At your first networking event, simply turning up gets you a pass mark. In your second event, turn up and have one conversation with a stranger, build on this until you feel like a natural.

Publish a post

Whether it’s on your business blog, LinkedIn or Medium.com, as a business owner simply putting your opinion, insights and knowledge out into the world can be a powerful way to capture more attention, customer or sales.

Technological innovation

New technology could help you unlock your next phase of business growth; all it takes is an open mind and some research skills. This could take the shape of introducing new collaboration software tools, retail software solutions, innovative in-store technology or adding new more efficient machinery to the factory floor or production lines. Even a small but cost-effective improvement to your way of working when compounded with your other efforts can have a big impact on your bottom line. The upside being that you could find a new technology that either saves you lots of money or makes you much more.

Get inspiration from the productivity Gurus

If you’re stuck for inspiration still, then consider turning to the productivity legends. Our go to reading list for inspiration is Zen Habits by Leo Babauta, The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss or absolutely anything written by James Clear, best known for writing atomic habits.

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