Two thoughts to kick off a successful 2015

As the curtain goes down on 2014 it’s a good time to reflect on what went right and what went wrong in the last twelve months. It’s also when you will be pushing the start button on your plan to improve your performance in the year to come. Most businesses tend to let their hair down a little at the turn of the year, but what for many used to be a time for celebrating successes is now, more a collective sigh of relief merely at having survived another year. However, this doesn’t have to be the case.

Looking back now I can’t think of a business that I have encountered in the past year that is doing as well as it could. There’s plenty of scope for improvement in pretty well any firm. In fact, that improvement is going to have to be realised as competition increases and the screw tightens further on those that haven’t brought their structure, practices and business model up to date during 2014.

While it’s always good to reward people for their contributions in the run up to the holiday, your focus now should be achieving a head of steam in January. You can view business as a race. Strategically it’s a marathon. The next two or three years need to be planned carefully and the plan executed meticulously, but like a marathon the race breaks down into sections and in the case of a business plan the first quarter of the year is a sprint. As every runner knows, sprints are won in the first few metres. It’s vital that your business gets up to full speed as soon after the starter’s gun as possible. You can view your business performance in quarters if you like, but the die is set in January.

If you are going to strike out you’ll already have gone through strategic planning at the top level and each of your directors will know what they have to do to kick off the new year and have their own plans in place. A good CEO will have already set the year’s kick-off board meeting for the first day of 2015 trading, which for most will be 5th January.

This is the critical meeting where the CEO counteracts the holiday lethargy and gets all the directors firing on all cylinders. If that’s not fixed and the CEO doesn’t have his script ready you are already behind the leaders. This meeting will set off a chain-reaction of similar meetings at senior, middle and junior management levels right down to the shop floor and by the end of week one everyone in the organisation should have attended such a gathering and be focussed and running at full speed.

Over the past few weeks I’ve spoken to senior managers in businesses around the world and while there were opportunities for everyone in 2014, I’m surprised to hear so many people bemoaning their lot. If you failed to exploit your opportunities and still survived you should be grateful for your luck and straining at the leash to respond with a compensatory extra effort on 2015.

To help you get in the right frame of mind, here are a couple of key thoughts that all of us need to keep in mind as we go through the year.

Embrace change

The face of business has changed unrecognisably in the past five years with the rate of change accelerating year on year. 2015 will require a very different approach to 2014. A modern business is a marketing organisation with marketers being the most influential people in the business. Few existing marketers measure up to the broadening demands of new model marketing, but a Marketing Director who knows his stuff will have devised a working model with new practices a new focus and be out-sourcing the skills he/she needs to make it all happen.

Be more giving

This applies to organisations and employees alike. We are in the era of the customer and businesses that recognise this will be focussing on building customer relationships. A business’s relationships are built around their brands. Brands are what consumers relate to and that’s why I call these relationships “brandships”.

Technology has enabled everyone, but especially businesses to treat people individually and 2015 will be the year of “customisation”. The data that smart businesses have been collecting for the past decade will finally be put to use in the development of better-designed products and tailored offers, but this is only part of the “giving” thing. I hear organisations everywhere talking about being customer centric, but they rarely are. This year you will have to be, because if you aren’t your more “giving” competitors will easily entice your customers away.

This same giving-ness applies inside your organisation. Your business success depends on the commitment of your employees and their feeling of belonging. One of the organisations that are best at this is Apple who go to what most firms I come across would consider lavish efforts to make every employee feel special. Believe me, this is one of the most worthwhile investments you will make, so start thinking about how you can make your employees feel special. This should all be embraced by your brand development programme.

Of course, giving is a two-way street. While Apple go to considerable lengths to ensure that they hire people who are the “right sort” (A friend of mine was recently hired for an executive position with them, but only after a recruitment process that lasted eighteen months and involved numerous interviews in different parts of the world) being the right sort, among other things, means being prepared to give as well as take. Success, for organisations and individuals alike is won by collaboration and sharing. Takers are not welcome in any organisation, but to some extent, businesses get the employees they deserve.

I repeat, there is no reason why your business shouldn’t be successful in 2015. You need to make it happen though and that takes planning and determination, but that’s just business as normal.