Post Image
  It’s a new year. So it’s time to give your entrepreneurial goals another go. If you’re aiming to grow your business at a significant rate over the next twelve months, you’ll need to have a plan for making that happen. A great plan will contain the steps you should take, as well as the indicators of growth that you should be keeping tabs on.
Read more about Business
Do you want to begin your business year on a positive note? This article explains how you can get that done. Here are the steps you must take to hit the ground running this period.

Lay Out a Plan for the New Year

Ideally, you should already have strategies for success all prepared before the New Year comes. But even if you don’t, you can devote the first week of 2023 to plotting a winning path for your enterprise. Review your business’s performance over the previous year, identify its high and low points, and identify the reasons for (or sources of) your victories and losses. Then determine to plug leakages, fix operational faults, and deploy more resources to products and services that deliver good sales and profits.

Aim to Increase Efficiency

Typically, you’ll want to increase the quality and quantity of your offerings. Depending on the nature and volume of the resources at your disposal, you may decide to get more work done on one of these fronts than on the other. Whatever you do, aim to improve your business’s efficiency. It should be able to give you more per unit of money you invest in it than it managed last year. You can do better if you’ve noted its strong and weak points as we advised in step one.
Sign up for the Connect Nigeria daily newsletter

Document Success Metrics

Your planning and strategizing won’t be worth your while unless you lay out the metrics by which you’ll measure your business’s progress. Have a list of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the exact figures (or range of figures) you’re looking to attain weekly, monthly, quarterly, and by the end of the year. For example, you may want to a specific number of your product every week, or gain a particular minimum number of clients each month. Of course, you should detail the steps you’ll take in order to score those wins within the deadlines you set for them.

Define and Assign Roles

If you work with a team, make sure that everyone is on board with your plans. Tell them why you’ve set your business goals, and let them know how they can help to achieve those goals. Ideally, they will have also contributed their views and knowledge to the creation of the plans you’ll be working with. Assign roles to each person and/or department, and make them responsible for meeting particular aims.

Listen to Your Customers

Your business exists to serve its present and future customers. And it can only do this well if it’s meeting their needs in the manner that they prefer. So, it’s important that you know what they want from you. Constantly seek feedback from them, evaluate their suggestions, and implement ideas that may improve the quality of your products or services. This is one sure way to boost patronage and sales early on in the New Year.
Register to attend the CN Business Mixer

Learn on the Go

Pick up on the trends in your industry and market, and incorporate ideas and processes that work into your own operations. Be open to the necessity of change when and where it’s needed. Be agile and flexible, and encourage your team to adopt these traits too. Learn lessons on the go, and be willing to quickly test out new strategies, even if on a small scale. If they work, you can scale them for the business as a whole. If they don’t, you could either tweak them for a retest or drop them entirely.

Final Words

It’s hard to overemphasize the need to start the new business year on a good note. Doing so could set you up for continual wins. We believe that the ideas we’ve shared here will enable you to start out with a roar and score great wins for your enterprise this period.
Got a suggestion? Contact us: editor@connectnigeria.com    
You might also like:
This article was first published on 7th January 2023

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

Comments (42)

42 thoughts on “Business Growth Tips: How to Start Your Business Year on a Positive Note”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *