Anyone can think of New Year’s Day as just another day. Nothing really makes it different from any other, except your perception of it. You can watch it pass by, or you can join the millions of people who are choosing to, at the very least, say they want to make this year better in some way.

Over the last 8 years, we’ve had the pleasure of working with small business owners from every walk of life, in every industry. To put it plainly, we don’t get too many calls from business owners who aren’t driven or seeking out a way to improve. The stagnant, happy somewhere-in-the-middle business owners aren’t exactly flooding our inboxes with RFPs and frankly we like it that way. So, in the spirit of a better 2016, these are three New Year’s resolutions we propose all of the small business owners out there with some hustle consider…

1) Work on customer retention.

On the blog, we’ve discussed the importance of the 80/20 rule -about 20% of your customers bring in about 80% of your revenue. Finding out who that 20% is comprised of and how to retain them should pretty obviously be on your to-do list. You can’t and shouldn’t try to please your entire customer base. Consider how much further your marketing dollars can go and how much more tailored, refined, and effective your message can be, when you target that 20% as opposed to 100%?

Want to know more about figuring out who your 20% are and how to keep them? Click here.

2) Take control of marketing initiatives and understand their impact.

Do you have your finger on the pulse of your marketing efforts? Not everyone is a marketing expert and not everyone has time to stick an iron in every fire, but we strongly recommend business owners have a basic understanding of what is happening and what results are coming from their organizations’ marketing initiatives.

In order to measure the impact of marketing efforts, the right software is essential to determine the success of campaigns. While it’s fantastic to have an expert at the helm of your marketing, ultimately the buck stops with you. It’s hard to make pivots or call shots when you’re in the dark.

Need help getting started? Start here.

3) Invest in workflow management.

Whether you’re a helicopter boss, or you spend an average of two hours in the office per week, you need workflow management. Workflow management isn’t just about fixing a broken process (although we do plenty of that). It’s about finding the cut corners, locating the mysterious cracks that everything seems to fall through, and in general, making organizational resources go farther. What could be getting done with fewer steps, people, or processes? How can this department or entire organization run better? If nothing else, that’s the question to start the new year with.

If you’d like to talk about customer retention, gaining a better understanding of your marketing efforts, or running your organization in a more effective and efficient way, we’re the guys and gals to talk to. Let’s make 2016 better.