10 New Year Resolutions for Entrepreneurs

  Entrepreneurs, just like every other person, want the New Year to yield better outcomes for them than the previous one. But success seldom comes to the unprepared. It is often the result of careful planning and diligent, consistent execution. That’s why New Year’s resolutions exist.

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If you are a founder or business executive, you can achieve much better results this year if you set the right goals and follow through with them. Here are ten New Year resolutions that you can adopt to hit your business growth targets over the coming months.

Become More Organized

It’s hard to overstate how important being organized is to improving productivity. Without order, you will fail to efficiently deal with tasks. But if you have a well-defined approach to handling work, you will get better at focusing on assignments and will tackle them the right way. You can get more organized by using to-do lists, de-cluttering and neatly arranging your workstation, setting reminders, and delegating tasks to capable hands where appropriate.

Pay Attention to Your Health

It takes a lot of hard work to build a business that thrives. However, devoting almost all of your time to extra-length work sessions may be counter-productive. It could adversely affect your physical and mental health. This year, commit to taking out time to rest and recharge. This will save you from burning out (and eventually having to spend days or weeks away from work due to poor health).

Expand Your Business

This doesn’t have to be about opening a branch of your business at a new location (although you could do this if the relevant resources are available to you). ‘Expanding your enterprise’ may mean adding a new product to your current offerings, or selling to new markets. Whatever approach you adopt, be sure that it’s something you can sustain over the medium to long term.

Improve Your Management Skills

Your business’s growth prospects partly depend on your ability to manage the human and material resources at your disposal. If you work with a team, you will need to lead them effectively in order to get the most out of them. You will also have to deploy your finances, equipment, and other technologies in ways that maximize your business’s production and profit-making potential. Taking a few courses in business management could help you acquire and sharpen skills in this area.

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Update Your Business Plan

It may be time to review and update your business plan. If it’s been a long while since you wrote it, a good number of its key assumptions and projections may have become obsolete. By adjusting these things, you’ll ensure that the plan stays true to reality, and remains a document that you can refer to for present purposes.

Carry Out a Security Audit

If your business utilizes contemporary technologies, it should periodically carry out a security audit of its IT infrastructure. Have your IT team (or an externally managed IT service provider) examine the whole setup, and check for vulnerabilities that cyber criminals may exploit. If or when they identify weaknesses, they should take steps to fix them. Doing this could save you the potentially immense cost of a cyberattack on your business.

Document Important Details and Transactions

Legal, finance, and business management experts often advise that businesses “document everything”. There are a lot of reasons you should do so. Document negotiations, deals, contracts, sales, purchases, job descriptions and processes—everything you will possibly need to refer to or reexamine in the future. They may prove crucial for any number of uses, from loan applications to court cases, and mundane fact-checks.

Insure Your Business

Now is a good time to insure your business if you haven’t already done so. Obtaining proper insurance for your enterprise, its premises and equipment (if you own these) will reduce the financial burden you have to bear if you lose them. Just make sure you sign up with a reputable insurer and understand their terms and conditions before committing to a policy.

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Complete Outstanding Projects

Perhaps you began a project last year but didn’t see it through to completion. Do what you can to finish it up this year. Dealing with these outstanding projects could be pivotal to kick-starting the growth engines of your business, and taking it further than you managed to in the past. With completed tasks out of the way, you’ll get to tackle newer challenges and make your business progress up the ladder of development.

Keep Learning

Entrepreneurs and business executives need to stay in touch with the evolving trends in their industries and markets. And they have to sharpen their skills, update their knowledge of laws and policies, and get better at engaging their teams, clients, and partners. If you are a business founder or executive, you can do these things by listening to podcasts, watching video tutorials, and reading books and articles about running a business. Featured Image Source: eLearning Industry

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This article was first published on 11th January 2023

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