Our eldest daughter Anastasia just celebrated her 19th birthday. Over dinner, we discussed her experiences, what she saw as the highlights, and what she’s learned in the past year.
In your business, do you celebrate your birthdays, think about what you’ve experienced and learned, and plan for the next year?
Entrepreneurs and their privately held companies drive 54% of the GDP in the top 17 economies in the world, according to the World Bank.
As a business owner or leader, can you imagine the impact if you improved the performance of your company by just 2%? If everyone could do that, you would all lift the global GDP by 1%!!
That’s why entrepreneurs are the modern-day heroes of our economies. They also aim for a lot more than 2% growth.
Let’s talk about how you can celebrate your business birthday.
- Identify your anniversary date and let everyone know how old your business is. This gives you something fun do once a year. And, it shows credibility and stability. When you’ve been in business for 40 years and have 354 employees, like EMW Industrial, you’ve helped a lot of companies feed the world. That’s a great message to share with the market.
- Hold a party and share stories. Another client, MuniSoft, holds an Annual General Meeting and brings everyone together from across the country for training and team building. They have a great culture and a great business.
- Ask your leadership team, individually and as a group, what their biggest accomplishments and learnings were from the last year. Their answers may surprise you.
- Drill deep to discover the experiences gained and lessons learned in the past. This helps you codify and share the lessons throughout your company. And it helps to prevent repeating the mistakes. (New ones are much more interesting!)
- Celebrate the mistakes and new perspectives gained. Your employees will take chances and not hide information from you.
- Try new things that might delight your customers. Just don’t bet the farm. This is strategy at its best. Protect and strengthen your core while developing new valuable offerings for your best customers.
- Prepare an annual report. You can share whatever financial information (or none) that you want. You can talk about your strengths, industries served, strategies, risks, and goals. In other words, run your private business like a public company. That will strengthen your credibility with your shareholders and partners.
- Blow your own horn. If you don’t, how will we know how great you are?
Celebrating birthdays and accomplishments are important in business. Learning from your successes and experiences will help you to be even wiser and more profitable next year.
If you’d like to discuss how I can help you celebrate your business, prepare an annual report, or plan to have your best year ever, please give me a call.
You can reach me at 1-306-992-6177 or by email at [email protected].
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