Focus on 3 strategies to succeed in 2022.

With so many obstacles, trends and new practices emerging during the global pandemic, it's easy to lose focus as an entrepreneur. The beginning of a new calendar year is always a good time to regain that focus and set some clear priorities for the year ahead. Our firm believes that three key areas will be imperative in 2022: employee experience, hybrid selling and strategic cost management.

The "Great Resignation" surfaced in North American jobs data during 2021. According to this article in the Harvard Business Review, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July of 2021 and the most heavily impacted industries were technology and healthcare. As an entrepreneur are you going to take this problem as uncontrollable? Our firm would suggest that by focusing on employee experience (EX), you can dramatically improve employee retention and minimize the absurdly high cost of turnover.

“We in HR have to get away from the idea that we alone own the employee experience. We can’t.” –?Josh Bersin

Here are three quick tips to improve employee experience:

1. Ask your team how to best improve their wellness at work. Listen, prioritize and implement.
2. Set clear metrics for each role so that employees know when they've succeeded and when then can use judgement to step back and take a breather.
3. Provide frequent coaching and feedback and re-design your compensation systems to accelerate rewards.

Focusing on the satisfaction and wellness of your team is critical to navigating the new world of work as we emerge from the pandemic. Another imperative has been spotlighted during the pandemic: hybrid selling.

Our firm is a member of Sandler Training, a leading sales training organization that helps develop sales capabilities for businesses. According to Sandler, hybrid selling "means determining the right cadence, process, tools, and technology to win the deal, while being adaptable to the way the prospect wants to buy." Here's how our firms suggests wading into social selling:

1. Have sales and marketing staff build an online audience of your target segments on one particular social media channel.
2. Have staff collaborate on thought leadership and marketing collateral.
3. Collect leads and targets in a simple CRM in order to monitor communication and activities.

Travel restrictions and lockdowns during the pandemic changed the way buyers and sellers interact. The wholesale digital transformation of sales and marketing activities has led to permanent behavioral change that must be factored into future operating plans. Mentoring between seasoned sales professionals and younger employees is an excellent method to ramp up your hybrid selling skills.

Finally, with large government debt overhangs, a lingering pandemic and geopolitical instability in Asia and eastern Europe, it is a good time to revisit your cost drivers to ensure that you're properly managing costs over the long-term.

When times get lean, most entrepreneurs cut their marketing and training budgets, at the worst possible time. In order to double down on marketing activities, you have to ensure that your teams and other resources are operating as efficiently as possible. Achieving optimal efficiency is far more complicated than knee-jerk expense reductions.

A few generic cost drivers, according to Michael Porter, that can be managed are as follows:

1. Economies of scale - in other words, spreading your fixed overhead over a larger volume of product/service sales.
2. Learning effects - employees get better as processes become better understood, well documented and easier to follow.
3. Capacity utilization - unused equipment, facilities, brand power and staff are surefire ways to have inefficiency in your cost structure.
4. Talent acquisition/retention practices - losing staff with a slow replacement time has a detrimental impact on profitability.

Of course, you can focus your efforts on many specific business initiatives that may be more tailored to your business challenges and needs. Yet we are confident that if you focus on EX, hybrid selling and strategic cost management, you will be well positioned to weather any macro storms that lie ahead.

Kit Moore, CPA, CA, CMA is the chief servant at BluePrint CPAs. Sure, he's a specialized tax accountant (CPA, CA) and can help you save in the six figures. More importantly, he's a serial entrepreneur with a tonne of enthusiasm for growth strategies and execution.