Set Your Business Up for Success in 2024 With These 3 Action Items
The transition from one year to the next requires more than just turning the page of your calendar — it's an invitation for retrospection, recalibration, and envisioning the future.
Forward-looking business owners see not just another year, but a wealth of opportunities, challenges, and potential victories. But harnessing these opportunities and making the most of 2024 requires more than just desire. It requires strategy. It requires intent. It requires discernment.
Fall is, naturally, a time of reflection. It is the perfect opportunity for business owners to look back on the year thus far, but also look forward and prepare for the year to come.
There are three essential things that every business owner should explore during this golden period of strategic thinking. Let’s explore.
1. Assess Your Current Annual Plan
Analyzing what went right and what went awry over the past three quarters offers unparalleled insight. No business owner can avoid it: Some aspects of your plan likely took off, while others proved to be duds.
The wisdom lies in recognizing these differences and then acting accordingly. Double down on your efforts that yield results and unpack those that are falling short. Should you refine these ideas or move on? The decision is yours.
This advice, of course, assumes that you have an annual plan for your business. If you don’t, that should be your first step. It’s an essential tool for any business to thrive, and partnering with owners to develop annual plans is our bread and butter.
If you have metrics to inform this assessment process, even better! If you don’t, that’s a signal to identify metrics and deliverables that can help guide your decision-making in the future.
Meaningful metrics reveal information about your business that intuition alone often misses. Look beyond conventional numbers like sales and gross profit and explore numbers that can really indicate how your daily operations impact your bottom line. Is there an opportunity to measure revenue per labor dollar or revenue per contract? Identify metrics that are most useful and learn to lean on them.
If you don’t already track these data points, explore opportunities to measure and track your results so that come Q4 of 2024, you’re assessing your plan with the data to back your decisions.
2. Ideate and Filter for Actionable Opportunities
A business that never changes is a business that can’t expect to experience growth. Change is not just inevitable, it’s essential to building a long term, viable organization, especially in a world that is changing faster and faster by the minute.
Change requires ideation, but it also offers careful calculations surrounding what to pursue and what to table for the future. (Here’s a tip: I keep a manilla folder to store all of my grand ideas that I don’t have time to implement. Sometimes just writing it down and saving it for later is all I need to satiate my entrepreneurial spirit.)
As you look ahead to 2024, ideate expansively but act selectively. You may generate 100 ideas for your business, but only one or two are worth pursuing. An essential part of this process: Involve your entire team. Us owners can only see so much. By listening to those who spend their days in your business, you’ll learn so much more about untapped opportunities.
At MACKEY, we use our Grow 4 Ways Workshop to help owners and their teams generate ideas from the disruptive to the rudimentary. But the process doesn’t stop there, it also reveals the most impactful opportunities: the ones that are no-brainers, the ones that can transform.
Sometimes the flashiest ideas aren’t the ones that come with the biggest ROI. Incremental changes — those foundational tweaks and shifts — frequently drive the most meaningful and profitable growth.
The goal here is actionable insight. Sometimes understanding the path forward is about adding something new, but oftentimes it isn’t. Instead, the path forward might require refining what already exists.
By harnessing the power of both expansive ideation and sharp discernment, business owners can uncover the actionable opportunities that will most inform a prosperous year ahead.
3. Check In With Yourself
You’ve reflected on your business, but what about yourself? Every year, I set time aside to reevaluate my role. Asking questions such as:
What do I want for my business?
Have I achieved my intention for my business? What work remains to achieve this?
What am I doing that I don’t care to do anymore?
How should I best direct my focus?
What will I release to others?
What will I embrace for myself?
It is easy to lose sight of our intentions if we don’t make time to check in with ourselves. Without intention, we risk focusing on goals that don’t necessarily reflect our true wants and desires.
Perhaps you want 10x of growth for your business, after all, many business owners do. But perhaps that’s not actually a top priority for you. Just because that’s what others aspire to achieve doesn’t necessarily mean it should be your goal, too.
Instead of adopting popular ambitions, return to your foundation — your intention. Reflect on your original vision for your business and measure your current circumstances against that backdrop. Are you staying true to yourself? Have things changed? If things have changed, that’s ok! Just adjust the course, but do so mindfully, not reactively.
Preparing for 2024 isn’t just about developing external strategies to set your business up for success. It’s about your inward journey. It’s about realigning your self with your vision and moving forward with purpose at the helm.
Why Q4 Should Be Your Strategic Launchpad
The final quarter of the year is a unique and significant one for businesses. With the changing colors of the leaves often comes an instinctual urge to reflect on our growth and plan for future change. It’s a season that marks not just the culmination of the current year, but that also celebrates all that next year may bring.
Q4 is, inherently, an opportune time to evaluate, adapt, and strategize.
In essence, it’s more than just the end of a year; it's the launching point for a prosperous future. Don't just pass through it — embrace it.