Setting New Year’s Resolutions: Is Your Business Ready for 2023?

As we kick off a new calendar year, now is the time that people tend to evaluate the past year, scrutinize where they are now and set goals for the upcoming year in their personal lives. The most common goals that we think about are to eat better, exercise more, connect with people, etc., but what about your business? Should you take the same approach in your business life that you take for your personal life to help achieve new growth and prosperity?

In this post-pandemic era, businesses are facing disruption on multiple fronts. Company leaders must contend with the challenges of managing a remote workforce, as well as supply chain disruptions, demand shifts, resource constraints, a possible recession, and more, all while devising critical plans for the road ahead. Combined with uncertainty about how long the pandemic will continue to disrupt daily life and the economy, companies need to prioritize their needs and adapt to the constantly shifting environment.

As you evaluate the past year and set goals for 2023, here are a few items to consider:

Determine your business’ priorities for the upcoming year

Look at your goals from a global perspective and then narrow your list down to items that can be accomplished in smaller bites. Figure out what you need to focus on in more detail and develop a plan for getting it done.

• Identify priority projects for the upcoming year, starting with the first quarter.
• Ensure projects align with your organization’s strategic plans.
• Sort those projects into individual workstreams with dedicated teams.
• Make actionable checklists for each project.
• Create project benchmarks and define KPIs.
• Establish a monthly/quarterly review cadence for the initiatives with the executive team. Review all major initiatives, progress to date, and the current business environment. Reprioritize where appropriate.

Assign the right people

Identify your dedicated team—with the appropriate combination of skillsets and personalities—to ensure the project gets the attention it needs to be accomplished successfully, on time and on budget.

• Designate a specific person or team to be responsible for a project.
• Identify a senior-level champion for the project/initiative to help ensure firm-wide buy-in.
• Ensure the project team has productive group chemistry and the right combination of skillsets. At a minimum, you will need a big-picture visionary, a strategist to turn that vision into an action plan, and a tactical executor.
• When building the team, look for high performers outside of your regular circles to spread the opportunity to more professionals and provide them the opportunity to expand their skill sets.
• Be judicious about who is on the team. Keep only those who believe in the project and want it to succeed.
• Be realistic about team members’ workloads. Try to offload less important work that project members may be doing so they can dedicate more time to their assignments on the project.

Build a bird’s eye view

You will need a method of communicating all the projects happening throughout the business to company leadership and other parts of the organization. Getting a big-picture view also allows you to assess how your people’s time is being used, whether you are relying too heavily on a few professionals and if the organization is taking on more than it can handle.

• Track all the various projects in your organization in a centralized location, using common metrics for monitoring success, with the help of dashboards to provide the big picture. Ensure all dashboards are easy to use and are populated with accurate, real-time data. But, don’t rely solely on dashboards, however. Remain in regular communication with the project team who can provide more context to the data and share qualitative updates that aren’t as easily tracked.

Develop the next generation

As you are building your teams to complete initiatives or priorities, you may want to consider including younger staff to assist in your endeavors. Incorporating employees from all levels of the company can help ensure continuity in the way your organization approaches these tasks day in and day out. Additionally, bringing in newer staff who have different backgrounds and experiences may introduce fresh ideas or new ways of handling a situation that can help your team grow in unexpected ways.

Conclusion

While all of these items make sense any time of the year, January typically seems to be a good time to take a step back and look at where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re heading. Here at BMSS, we employ the Entreprenurial Operating System® (EOS) that incorporates many of these ideas. If you would like to learn more about EOS implementation, please reach out to your BMSS professional who can put you in touch with the implementation team. In addition to BMSS Advisors and CPAs and our EOS system, we have an IT group (Abacus Technologies), a payroll and PEO group (Payroll & Benefit Solutions), and a wealth management team (BMSS Wesson Wealth Solutions). Any one of these companies would love to sit down and discuss your needs with you as you prepare for 2023.