During a time when technology, politics, and consumer confidence are at an impasse, small businesses have an opportunity. Main Street shops, startups, and brands with a small footprint have room to grow, command market share, and thrive in 2025. The nimble nature of a smaller enterprise means that leaders can act quickly on new ideas and test promising concepts. Learn how to leverage the momentum of the new year and set the tone for the decade ahead.
1. Strengthen Financial Controls
Business accounting means more than just balancing the books; Financial management demands strong controls, analysis, and forecasting to ensure long-term profitability. Incorporate cloud-based accounting software to manage the day-to-day wherever you are. Increase financial visibility amongst your leadership team and automate reports to provide timely updates to improve transparency.
Software decreases financial risks by collating quotes, invoices, and customer data all in one place. Use automated reminders to improve on-time payments, elevate past-due invoices to account representatives, and set parameters aligned with customer agreements. You’ll reduce time-consuming manual work, secure financial data, and gain access to critical financial analysis and dashboards.
Analyze financial dashboards to improve reporting and management throughout your organization. This data can help sales teams identify opportunities and track monthly progress and impact gained in the field. Financial managers can better forecast revenue and identify potential challenges, risks, and opportunities for growth.
2. Diversify Revenue Streams
You’ve been told not to put all of your eggs in one basket, but small businesses often forget this advice. When you’re starting out, the niche market you serve is your opportunity to command market share. While this small market can serve as a great foundation, relying on one client or client type adds unnecessary risk.
Analyze your current client roster and identify areas of growth, slowdown, or stagnation. Assess your service list and rank the areas where you’re strongest and those with opportunities to improve. Incorporate factors like human capital, inventory, and the time required to complete the work or deliver a final product.
Service-heavy deliverables require staff and time but decrease upfront materials costs and inventory management. Production-based enterprises will need to consider the benefits of growing their custom-order clients or those ordering hundreds of units. Strive to strike a balance that protects your business from supply chain issues, staffing challenges, and economic factors. Ink contracts that include retainers or subscriptions to establish a baseline of expected revenue. Update customer agreements to reflect these terms and establish the process for cancellation and fees to protect your bottom line.
3. Build a Customer Community
Humans are social by nature, so investing time in building your customer community is a smart move this year. First, clarify your customer base, as your strategies will differ for individual consumers versus business clients. Next, understand your customers’ needs and the reasons they continue to patronize your business. You may have the highest quality, offer the best price, or be convenient and easy to work with. Finally, devise your community-building strategy, implement it with your client base, and incorporate it into your company culture.
A software provider serving business clients might gamify customer training dashboards, making them fun to use and explore. However, your clients may have unique questions that you can’t always respond to immediately. Add a collaborative customer messaging widget to your customer-facing area to spark conversations, build relationships, and troubleshoot unique issues.
Assign a community manager to facilitate discussions and offramp conversations that need individual support. Brand this customer space in a fun, fresh way, and issue badges for completed training and engagement. This strategy empowers clients to engage, support one another, and builds proficiency in your product, ultimately improving loyalty and retention.
4. Incorporate Automation
Every business has repetitive tasks, but modern automation makes the repetition less manual. Plus, your existing business software may already have automation built in that you can start using right away. Before you start automating everything, identify the automation-ready processes your business has today.
Review your current policies and procedures documents to pinpoint repeat actions that could be automated. For example, a monthly report featuring your website performance could be scheduled to generate automatically. Email campaigns can be built to collate your most recent blog posts into a newsletter for your subscribers. Accounting software can be programmed to reconcile your bank transactions and issue a report automatically.
During your review, you’re likely to identify gaps in your current policies and procedures, so work to fill them now. Collaborate with your team and the subject matter experts in each area to establish procedures, even if they can’t be automated. Doing so will set a baseline for how your team can be efficient and can be used for training. Your team can use this reclaimed time for value-added work, creativity, and customer service.
Observe, Report, and Adapt to Compete and Succeed
Implement any change in your business with a strategy and assign a leader responsible for managing its adoption. Create a plan with a detailed timeline and goals, and set deliverables to ensure you’re making progress toward completion. Budget time and money for reworking ideas, training your team, and reinforcing changes in behavior and processes. Change takes time, intentionality, and reinforcement, but doing so can ensure your small business adapts to customer and market expectations. By the end of 2025, your small business can enjoy stronger financials, more engaged employees, and happier, more loyal customers.
