The beginning of a new year is the best time to take a step back and plan actions to grow your leadership and managerial skills for a more resilient, profitable, and goal-oriented business. 

The beginning of January 2023 is fresh, with new opportunities and possibilities. It is also “New Year’s Resolution” season, and it is the perfect time for your small business to reevaluate its business visions and set concrete goals for the entire year.

What resolutions should you make for your small business this year? Here, we will share with you seven resolutions we believe can set your small business for 2023 and why.

1. Stronger Online Presence

Did you know that people spend an average of 8 hours daily doing online activities? Yes, that’s more than half the day and even more than most of our sleeping hours. This is why a strong online presence is everything in today’s business world. While e-commerce growth has ramped up during the pandemic, so has the support for local businesses. It was reported that 97% of consumers go online to find and research local businesses.

One of the more exhilarating transformations during the past couple of years is the never-before-seen technology growth and innovation in many companies and local business sectors. 

We’re at a point where more and more aspects of life are going online, so smart, future-forward business owners should be setting themselves up for success in the online space. A strong online presence will make it easier to sell your products or services to customers and reach target audiences to whom you want your brand to be known. 

So if your small business still needs to build a strong online presence, 2023 is the best year to start. If you don’t continue to invest and diversify your online presence, you’ll get left behind.

• A strong online presence makes it easy for customers to discover you.
• Modern consumers rely on multiple sources of information before making a purchase. 83% of consumers visit a store based on the information they found online. This adds to the legitimacy of your business and what you offer.
• If you have established a strong online presence, people can discover, engage with, and reach out to you anytime they want
• Digital marketing platforms use data to tell you what’s working effectively and not. This way, you can allocate your budget accordingly.
• It takes an average of 7 encounters with a business before a lead becomes a customer. Being active on multiple online platforms makes those engagements happen more quickly.
• Having a strong online presence can earn Google’s trust.
• 63% of shopping journeys start online. With a strong online presence, your business becomes available to consumers at different points in their journey toward customership.

2. Better Employee Incentive

An excellent 2023 resolution for your small business is making sure that every single employee has at least one strong and unique reason to stick around. Consider building a better bond with your employees, formalizing a new bonus everyone cares about, incentivizing employees to work closely together, or even funding a charity the team loves. Building the right work community can be a great way to keep your employees happy about working with you.

To ensure employee retention and satisfaction, it will be great for your small business to offer a performance-based incentive plan. This lets employees know that their work within your business is valued, and that if they put in the effort it takes to go above and beyond their job expectations, they will be duly incentivized.

For example, employees may receive incentive bonuses when they hit milestones in sales (e.g., after six months, one year, etc.) or complete additional targets. 

Here are some incentive bonuses and bonus plans that can increase your employees’ engagement with your small business. 

• Incentive compensation

• Annual incentives

• Referral bonuses

• Sales commissions or variable pay

• Holiday bonuses

• Hiring bonuses

• Profit-sharing plans

Happier employees are typically better dedicated to their organization’s goals, allowing you to maintain your company’s bottom line while retaining the employee base that contributes to your company’s growth.

Using Employee Management and Timecard Software is a smart way to keep track of your employees’ performance based on data. With this tool, you can make balanced business decisions based on tracking your employees' productivity and working hours.

3. Listen To Customers Closely

Small businesses should make it a goal to listen to customers more closely in 2023. This involves taking several practical steps, like creating surveys and feedback forms and regularly responding to customers on social media platforms. It's essential to commit to hearing what your customers say and to respect what they’re saying too, especially if they are feedback for improvement. When you understand how customers think and feel, you stand a chance and create a product they’ll love and would want to keep coming back for.

Listening to customers isn’t just hearing about their problems. It is about connecting with them, paying close attention to their needs, and understanding how you can help them achieve their goals.

The best small businesses are excellent listeners. They can recall relevant details mentioned earlier in the case and are consistently in tune with the customer’s needs and emotions.

4.Create A More Positive Work Environment

After such a challenging year, we should focus on creating a more positive work environment. This includes being open to and encouraging employee feedback, listening, and responding to their needs. A happy team is productive, while an overworked, miserable team gets you nothing but resignation letters. 

It may surprise you how much productivity can be cultivated from positive motivation. We encourage all businesses to look closely at what they can do to support their team moving forward. You should apply this newfound kindness to yourself too. It’s hard being in charge, and nothing will ever be perfect. Just remember to be kind to yourself and breathe!

5. Save Time By Automating More Business Process Automation

While it may sound like robots are taking over, automation is essential in scaling your business in 2023. Automation allows you to maximize profits and free time by taking over specific tasks. Automation is integral to our daily lives, especially how we run our businesses. So, how can we use automation in your small business, and how can it save you time and money? 

Business automation refers to the technology businesses can use to perform specific tasks so that human employees don’t have to complete them manually, which often leads to errors and loss.

It saves time. Employees don’t need to spend so much time on repetitive administrative tasks. Automation also performs tasks much faster than a human could, with no breaks. 

It improves efficiency. With automation, there is less room for error as it’s built to operate within specific rules without variation. Automation software can also collect data and analyze these problematic situations to “learn” from manual processes, allowing it to adapt should similar problems arise. 

It standardizes processes. Automation standardizes the steps that must be followed in the business process, lessening the risk of anything falling through the cracks or getting off-track. 

It reduces errors. Automation reduces the odds of an error or mistake, saving you time and money. In addition, because automation frees up employees’ time, it allows them more room to deal with errors when they do happen.

It increases productivity. Because automation tools can perform tasks faster and around the clock, you can do more within a specific timeframe. In addition, human employees can perform non-automated functions in parallel, increasing productivity even more.

6. Start Making Business Decisions Based On Data

Data-driven decision-making (DDDM) uses facts, metrics, and data to steer strategic business decisions that align with goals, objectives, and initiatives.

Your small business needs to make data-driven decision-making the norm. This creates a culture that encourages critical thinking and curiosity. People at every level have conversations that start with data, and they develop their data skills through practice and application. Finally, having administrative advocacy and a community that supports and makes data-driven decisions will encourage others to do the same.

Encouraging data-driven decision-making across all job levels, business groups will regularly question and investigate information to discover powerful insights that drive action.

Thanks to modern business intelligence, businesses are moving closer and closer to understanding the value of data-driven decision-making across all roles and departments.

This leads to faster, more informed decisions. And these decisions will generate a more robust bottom line, greater creativity, and commercial success, and more employee engagement and collaboration.

See: Loyverse Dashboard helps you instantly analyze your store’s sales, and track inventory directly from your smartphone anytime, anywhere. Complementing the Loyverse POS app, it shows vital information about your business at your fingertips in real-time, allowing you to make important decisions immediately.

Loyverse Back Office provides a wide variety of reports and sales analytics which you can access via a browser on any device. Analyze your sales by different parameters, such as time, stores, employees, payment types and more. Manage your inventory, employees, and customers, set the features necessary for your business, bulk import/export a list of items and customers, export sales reports.

7. Have A Better Growth Mindset

Every business owner should aim to be better every year. With a growth mindset, business owners can tackle the significant challenges in their businesses that are preventing further growth. At any given point, no matter the stage of your small business, there are plenty of processes you can improve to streamline your business further and capitalize on your prospects. By directing focused efforts toward building, measuring, and improving upon a sales strategy, business owners can solve what is often a significant challenge. Every business has different major hurdles that stand in the way. The resolution to solve these hurdles, rather than ignoring them, ultimately determines success.

How to Expand your Retail Business: 7 Retail Expansion Strategies to Try Today

See: Multi-Store POS System

Conclusion

As you look forward to the rest of the year, give yourself a good pat on the back. It has been a tough year for small businesses, but you made it this far. Despite the severe economic and societal challenges you’ve endured to the end of 2022. You’ve also likely acquired several business survival skills that have strengthened your business.

We hope that this article has helped you set your mind for the year 2023 to achieve your goals and maximize your revenues.