13 Ways To Make Your Business Flow in 2024

We all start a new year off with good intentions and good habits.  But as the year unfolds, it’s easy to get drawn into the day to day and lose sight of the BIG things that take your business to the levels you want it to.

Your role as a leader, is to ultimately create the strategy, communicate it and enable the delivery of it through your resources.

This week, I want to share my list of BIG things to help you and your business in 2024:

1). Make sure you know what you want- without this a business exists, rather than has a purpose.  Every day is the same, rather than focused and driven.

2). Make sure you have a plan on how to deliver itand communicate this to everybody so they can help you achieve it.

3). Ask your customers what they want, get it, and deliver it to them — simple business model.

4). Stop chasing revenue – a bigger company is not necessarily a more valuable one if the extra sales come from products and services that are too reliant on you to deliver them. Think Margin and who!

5). Start getting lessons from your customers using the feedback methods like NPS – it’s a fast and easy way for your customers to give you feedback.

6). Sell less stuff to more people- the most valuable companies sell a few differentiated products and services to many customers. They are famous for a few things, not average for many things.

7). Move away from the products/services that depend on you – if you offer something that needs you to produce or sell it, consider dropping it from your offerings. Services and products that require you to break your T.E.R.M.S (Time, Effort, Resources, Money, and Sanity) are not worth it in the long run.

8). Collect more money up front and stop spending unless it brings a return – turn a negative cash flow cycle into a positive one and you boost your business’s value and lessen your stress load. We’ve learned that when we have the money, we also have the leverage.

9). Create more recurring revenue – predictable sales mean less stress in the short term and a more valuable business over the long run.

10). Be different- get out of that Red Ocean and create your own Blue Ocean where your results are based on YOU being market productive and predictable rather than reactive.

11). Do a risk analysis of your key areas – look at your key partners, staff, resources, customers, and tasks and work out what would happen if they were taken away from you.

12). Teach them to fish – answer your team’s questions with: “What would you do if you owned the business?”.

13). Create your own key process manual- document your most important processes so your team can do their work without you.

Finally remember to Create FLOW – Flow of Money, Flow of Customers, Flow of Ideas and Flow of Resources….

Review this list EVERY month and see where you are…

Here is to 2024.

BW,

Martin

Martin Norbury

Investor | Business Mentor at Advocate | Author of I don’t work Fridays