With 2016 just round the corner this is the perfect time to plan how you want your business to develop in the New Year.
Whether you enjoyed spectacular success or experienced crushing defeats in 2015, you need to do something different. You cannot afford to rest on your achievements nor can you wallow in your setbacks. Either way, it’s time for change.
These 6 strategies are designed to help you to achieve a truly successful year:
1. Set Ambitious Goals
Goal setting is a valuable habit. It is the first step to achievement.
Any goal setting process will urge you to be realistic and to set goals that are achievable, because unrealistic dreams that are far out of reach only leads to frustration.
But realistic, doesn’t mean being unambitious, risk averse or overly cautious.
If you want to experience true success, you cannot limit yourself by lowering your expectations of what you think you can achieve.
You can set ambitious goals for your business but you also need to be motivated to accomplish them. You should aim as high as you can, and believe that you can achieve – as long as you take concerted, consistent actions that move you closer to your goals.
Take a look at the goals for your business and ask yourself whether you can aim higher. If aiming higher seems unreasonable or unattainable, you may have already set ambitious goals. But if there is scope to do more, then you can be just a little more ambitious.
2. Search for Growth Opportunities
The priority for most business is to identify profitable growth opportunities.
Begin with a review of the core business areas that generate revenue and profits – the products, services, customers, channels and geographic areas of operation.
This involves measuring and benchmarking profitability, rate of revenue growth and your reputation with your most important customers.
It does not have to take a great deal of time, but can provide insightful information on the growth potential of the core business. You will also identify changes that need to be made and can then create your strategy for strengthening, eliminating or adding new products and services.
3. Inculcate Innovation
Regardless of which growth strategy you select, your infrastructure and processes must support and encourage innovation. An on-going commitment to creating an innovation culture is a must.
You can begin to develop a culture of innovation by:
- Eliminating regional, departmental or team silos. Interdependency and complementary team working are essential for innovation
- Utilising leading-edge innovation processes. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, there are myriad of innovation tools and processes to draw on that align can with your strategy, mission and vision
- Growing innovation leaders at all levels. Innovation is not the preserve of the leadership team, real innovation can and must take place throughout the business. Identify and support your managerial and non-managerial innovation leaders
4. Leverage Partnerships
Partnerships and strategic alliances are a proven way for businesses to grow, develop and offer new products and services or reduce your operating cost. You must create the right foundations for a successful partnership to avoid the hurdles that many companies fall at when entering these arrangements.
To avoid wasted time, resources and potential brand damage you must clarify the role of partnering within your company’s strategy. You can then develop selection criteria for a potential partner (including values and cultural fit).
Having identified and prioritised potential partners, you can develop a partnership framework covering governance, strategy, legal, operational, financial and structural issues.
When you have established alignment between the potential partners you need to determine the partnership value proposition and negotiate commercial and financial agreements.
5. Develop Organisational Capabilities
It’s widely accepted that an organisation’s success is rooted in the expertise, commitment and capabilities of the people who are responsible for implementing its strategic plans.
When times are tough, one of the first areas that businesses seek to make savings is the training and development budget – it is an easy target. Don’t be fooled, this can be a huge mistake.
Many organisations are now adopting a counterintuitive approach, investing heavily in training while the economy is in decline. They opine that having the best-trained and equipped workforce will fast-track business growth once the upturn arrives.
Your success in 2016 will therefore be dependent on how you build organizational capabilities and manage talent.
Begin by clarifying and understanding which capabilities truly impact business performance and align your training and development programmes accordingly.
A focus on building leadership skills is considered to be the capability that contributes most to the performance of any business. So make sure that leadership excellence is a core feature of your learning and development programmes.
6. Get People Talking
Most companies boast about how they provide exceptional client service. But how do they define exceptional?
Exceptional service is about surprising, and delighting customers, turning them into enthusiastic fans, a referral sources and lifelong clients who stick with you not only because you do great work, but because the value you bring to them goes far beyond what they ask or expect.
According to Bob Burg, “if you provide enough value, not only will people want to come back, they will tell others about your business.”
One way that you can achieve this is to assist them with a service or product that you don’t provide.
Remember the film Miracle on 34th Street when Santa (who worked for Coles department store) advised people where to go to buy toys that his store didn’t stock or had run out of?
It might sound crazy, but it got people talking and is a great example of how exceptional service – even if it was a movie!
So make it your goal in 2016 to have your customers talking about the exceptional service you have provided.
Conclusion
If you want to achieve your goals in 2016 you need to do something different to build on your past success or to overcome the failures.
We wish you a spectacularly successful 2016 and to kick-start that success, we would like to give you one complimentary goal setting session so that you can begin the year with clarity, purpose and focus.
Contact us by 29th January 2016 to claim complimentary goal setting session.