How Will You Transform Your Business In The Next 12 Months?

No business can afford to stand still, and even if 2024 has been a hugely successful year, you need to go into 2025 with plans to build on that and prepare a platform for long term stability and sustainability. This largely involves looking at what has been achieved and not resting on your laurels. It is true that you shouldn’t change a winning team and you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken, but at the same time there are subtle changes you can make and some tweaks you can implement to streamline the business and make it leaner and more profitable. Ultimately this will put you in an even better position while also taking advantage of the leading position you have earned yourself already.

With that in mind, here are six ways to transform your business in the next 12 months, to make 2025 an even bigger success:

Revisit your marketing strategy

However successful you have been this far, a business can quickly become stale and customer trends are so fickle that the market soon moves on to something new, and you shouldn’t assume you are immune from that. You should therefore start a new marketing campaign which can address some fundamental questions:

• Are you still reaching your target audience?
• Do you still have the same target audience?
• What messages now resonate with your target audience?

Invest in new market research to make sure you are in tune with what your market now demands, and you can evolve in line with the results by starting new campaigns with tangible results you can monitor.

New business partnerships

Building new partnerships can give your business a new lease of life:

• Enjoy a unique standing in the marketplace
• Access new markets
• Benefit from an economy of scale with new financial support and resources
• Access new expertise and find new ways to get to the market quicker

Through networking you can connect with potential new partners who can make your business stronger. You can learn about new trends and developments and ultimately make the business more reactive and future proofed.

Diversify

Taking stock of your staple products and services at this time is an opportunity to keep things fresh and consider diversifying. Even the biggest selling products can evolve to bring a new dimension to the market and your brand and to take the business in a new direction, without necessarily forgetting everything that got you there in the first place. Diversifying opens up new markets, reaches a bigger target audience and grows the business, as long as it fundamentally makes financial sense.

Evolve the brand

This might look like a generic and largely meaningless objective, but there are ways you can update and modernise your brand to ensure it reflects your market position and target audience. A new PR strategy could involve a revised social media push, with new visual content, or you could try to become a ‘thought leader’ with insightful written content which marks you out as a trusted and reliable authority. You could undergo a subtle evolution of your logo or visual branding too. Look at the competition and see what is trending, and consider if your branding can evolve to fit in with that, while still maintaining your original message.

Look at new technology

A successful business should always be looking at how new technology can help it become a more efficient and profitable organisation. Can you automate processes? Can you use AI to build forecast models and drive better decision making? Or can you adopt cloud storage to cut IT costs? All these things will streamline the business, reduce costs and build solid foundations for the future.

Consider employee ownership

Employee ownership is proven to be a successful tool in building high employee retention through loyalty and commitment, but also making the business more appealing. You can attract a higher quality of employee through profit sharing and a fairer and more inclusive business philosophy. And a highly motivated workforce will drive productivity also.

Employee ownership can take many forms. It could be selling some or all of the shares in the business to an Employee Ownership Trust, or it could be looking at creating some form of share scheme for employees such as an Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) scheme for certain employees or growth shares.

If you are considering an employee ownership model then contact our experts at the Employee Ownership Advisor. We can use our experience and knowledge of the process to guide you through what is needed, and what the various benefits are. Making the move to an employee ownership trust is the best thing our business ever did, and we want you to experience that success also, so get in touch today.