Business growth and personal development must be combined to achieve a good New Year’s resolution for an entrepreneur. Spreadsheets, statistics and graphs are as important as mental and spiritual peace and everything that can fill you with life at work.
Let’s see some ideas about New Year’s resolutions for entrepreneurs with the purpose of starting a New Year 2023 in the best way.
How to set realistic resolutions and goals
Effort is very important to make things work, all purposes, ideas and goals must have a greater effort than necessary for your business to grow. You can also make a list starting with “I should really…” so you can state your goals and come up with the potential resolutions that will have the most significant impact on your business. Let’s see some examples:
- Pick just one: To choose a resolution you must evaluate them all and prioritize to determine the most important.
- Align resolutions with business goals: It is not necessary for all resolutions to align to all goals, however, ideally if you don’t have enough goals, add more to align to your resolution.
- Be specific: It is very likely that you will have several results at the same time in your resolutions, however, the most important thing is that the result you expect is specific with your resolution to achieve it in a better way.
- Make a plan: It is important that you have everything planned, including any difficulties or problems that may arise during the process.
- Keep it small: The fewer changes or if these are small, it is much easier for them to be solved in case of problems.
- Make it real: It is a very good option to think or write down your resolution in a planner as if it had already happened, in this way you can keep it in mind to be able to achieve it.
- Build rewards: With yourself you can implement rewards, such as a prize each time you achieve a goal or item on your list.
- Communicate your resolutions: Share your resolution with your team and if they can participate it is much better.
- Check in regularly: Review your resolution during the process, this way you can see if there are any problems or if everything is correct and you can continue.
Lists of New Year’s resolutions for entrepreneurs
You can choose a specific resolution for your business, however, if the resolution is not specific there is no problem, the important thing is the whole process and the learning that you will have for your life and your business. Also, on many occasions you can find better inspiration in different places.
General marketing resolutions
Let’s look at five resolutions that can breathe new life into your marketing efforts:
- Trust the data: You can review the data collected in your business, for example, website traffic, referral traffic, email marketing impact and social media engagement.
- Align your content: You can find the type of people your business is aimed at and what is the best option for sales to your customers, for this it can be based on knowledge, consideration or purchase.
- Try something new: You can try to be on a new platform, or create another type of content for your business, maybe a podcast, or videos.
- Manage your planning: There must be an appropriate balance between planning and agility for your business, in this way your plans and the efficiency of your business can improve.
- Reduce, reuse, repurpose: You can repost items that stand out and grab attention, however, you don’t have to post all the information the same way, you can change and reuse it.
Solopreneur resolutions
You can follow these ideas to make work easier. If it’s just you in your business, it’s best that everything fits together so you don’t have stress and your business is the best:
- Firm up processes and procedures: You can write down your process of all the activities you do, for example, an order, create and publish updates on your social networks, or even publish on a blog.
- Find people to make work easier: You can find some activities that are difficult for you, and look for a person who knows about this and can help you to improve your business.
- Take business more seriously: Many times when we work alone we can think that business is just a hobby or a place while you get a new job, however, you can take your own work more seriously to achieve much more success.
- Invest in the tools you need: Depending on your needs and those of your business, you can identify what new tools you can start using to improve.
- Realize you are not your business: It is important to have a distance from your business and have your own personal activities for a while, also, you can see your business from another perspective.
Ecommerce resolutions
Let’s look at some ideas and resolutions so that your business can increase its market share, increase its sales and be more successful:
- Collect more email addresses: For an online business, it is important to have a registry and a list of clients.
- Send emails every day: With automations you can send emails to your customers with reminders, for example, to thank them for their purchases, or if they have a forgotten product in the cart, among others that can capture the attention of your customers through emails.
- Simplify your checkout process: The easier and faster it is to make a payment, the more customers can buy. For example, have several payment methods and have easy methods, such as Paypal or Amazon Pay.
- Nurture repeat buyers: You can include incentives for those customers who are loyal to your business, VIP and loyalty programs, or even exclusives and early access.
- Understand who your customer really is: You can get to know the people to whom you are selling, in this way you can achieve better advertising or better development of your products.
- Improve your product pages: You have to take into account the photos, the descriptions, how everything looks on your web pages, and if all your products are clear and in view of your customers.
- Never stop learning: It is important to be learning, the industry and the market are always changing and evolving and there are new trends every time.
Local business resolutions
Let’s look at some local business resolutions, having to do with website, social media and email marketing:
- Optimize social media pages: You need to make sure that you have clear information, as well as that your cover and profile photos are new and improved. Also you can answer Facebook reviews.
- Create a content calendar: With an organization of publications on special dates you can attract the attention of customers and with useful and attractive content.
- Reconnect through email marketing: Through email you can give much more information about your business and products to your customers, as well as be present at all times with your customers.
- Rejuvenate your website: With a responsive website, your customers can see your products better and have an easier time buying.
- Collaborate with your neighbors: You can create promotions or an event together with other small businesses that relate to your business and can grow together.
Web designer and developer resolutions
Let’s look at a list of WD&D business purposes to keep in mind in case you’re having difficulty creating your purposes:
- Pay yourself a salary: As a web designer or developer you can designate a salary for yourself, this way you can set a goal.
- Hire help: You can assign tasks to have more freedom to create and grow your business with the help of others.
- Don’t work on vacation: If you have a vacation planned, enjoy that time for yourself, you can also hire help and optimize business processes so that the business continues to grow.
- Don’t work on the weekends: It is important to have a schedule, which customers can understand, however, if you need your business to be active on weekends, you can hire help.
- Stick to processes: It is important to stick to your business processes and not make exceptions, as these can harm your business.
- Refer away wrong leads: You can have a network that helps you find the ideal client, and also potential clients, in this way your work and business will be more specific.
- Be profitable: This part depends on you and your planning so that the business is profitable according to the decisions you make during the year.
Nonprofit resolutions
Let’s look at these resolutions to improve your organization’s overall performance and look ahead to the coming year:
- Update your site more frequently: You can make new announcements, new posts, even new posts on your blog, in order to keep your customers updated.
- Get more visitors’ perspectives: You can run surveys to get to know your customers better or use tracking software to learn how users interact with your site.
- Experiment to get more donations: You can do more experiments to see what factors increase or decrease the probability of conversion and do practical tests.
- Use more visual storytelling: You can make posts that show the experiences and impact of your organization and business in the community.
- Offer more opportunities for engagement: You can include a chat or more options that bring you closer to people and that they have more contact with your business.
Law firm resolutions
Let’s look at some resolutions for your law firm and have more clients in the coming year:
- Embrace content marketing: You can show all your information with videos, blogs or series of posts on social networks, many law firms have blogs.
- Personalize your messaging: You can use the information that people give you when they sign up for your email newsletter or blog, so you can personalize the messages.
- Be consistently social: You must keep your customers in mind through social networks, since they can see your publications and important information.
- Publish videos: If you decide to publish videos of your business, it is important that they have excellent quality to attract the attention of your customers.
How to ensure you achieve your resolutions
You have to honestly evaluate performance and make business decisions for the next year in your business, despite the fact that many times those decisions are not met, you can raise them.
Let’s look at some objectives that you can keep in mind to set goals for the new year:
Identify your biggest win
You can make significant changes that achieve great benefits for you, so you can think of a goal that helps make this happen with changes.
Identify your easiest win
Likewise, you can identify simple changes that can improve your work and that of your team to improve your business.
Take it one quarter at a time
Many times there are many things you want to implement, however it is best to spread everything out and have quarterly planning in general, it is often best to stick to a one or two quarter horizon.
Define “done”
It is important to have clear and real statistics, and in this way you and your team can build clearer guidelines on what really constitutes success or failure.
Alternatives to New Year’s resolutions
Let’s see now some alternatives to have a great start to the year in your business, since many times there are people who do not like to be guided by resolutions:
Write a dear-future-me letter
You can imagine what the next year could be like and write it in a letter to yourself, so you can also include what happened in this year.
Choose a word of the year
Thinking about how you want your next year to be, think about the words that are key, you can also go to thesaurus.com and have the meanings, in this way you can have your word of the year all the time, printing it and placing it on your desk, or calendar.
Pick one thing (and break it down)
You can think about what you want to work on next year and what will have the greatest growth and impact on your business. However, do not think that just doing one thing will not leave you the time to do others that you want to do, you just have to do them one by one.