5 Ways to Improve Your Business This Year

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or a new small business owner, regularly evaluating your performance is part of building something that lasts. Even the best business owners need to update their systems and business strategy to keep things running smoothly. 

To find opportunities for improvement and business growth, revisit the core pillars of your business:

• Finances

• Systems and processes

• Customers

• Business goals

• Mission and values

1. Check in on your finances

A great place to start measuring your business performance is by looking at your finances. Financial reports provide clear, unbiased information about how well your current business plan is connecting with and converting potential customers. 

While money isn’t the ultimate indicator of success, your cash flow can give you insight into:

• If your customer base is growing

• Inefficiencies that are hurting your bottom line

• New product ideas to try out

• Whether your marketing strategy is bringing in new customers

• Your busiest and slowest months

For example, if a design studio specializes in foil stickers, their financial reports may show them that:

• November, December, and February are when they receive and ship the most orders. This may mean they hire an independent contractor for those three months of the year, improving shipping times and customer experience.

• June is historically slow. This shows the owner when they can take their time off with confidence, knowing it’s a natural lull in their selling season.

• Even though they’re selling more stickers, production costs have increased, meaning profits have stayed the same for the last three years even while demand grows. To keep up with new costs and scale the business, they can increase their prices purposefully and share their reasoning with customers.

Read our guide to managing your small business finances

2. Find places to streamline

Systems and processes that help you work smarter and faster are the fuel behind a successful business. Look at the systems and providers that help you run your business, like the logistics behind: 

Ordering materials and creating your product

• Inventory management

• Order processing and shipping

• Customer service

• Marketing efforts

• Customer loyalty and retention

Once you’ve broken your business operations into a few main buckets, ask yourself if there’s any part of that work that takes significant time or money. For example, someone selling a high volume of physical products might be dedicating two days per week to packing and shipping products. That cuts into time that could be spent developing new products or marketing their business. 

When looking for features and functionality that can simplify your workflows, look for automation capabilities. The right automations can help you do more by outsourcing some of your manual work while serving your customers’ needs.

For example, Squarespace users can set up email automations to follow up with customers who abandon their shopping carts before checking out. Or you could connect your Squarespace store with a print on demand or third-party logistics (3PL) partner to simplify your inventory and shipping processes.

3. Strengthen your customer relationships

One of the best resources you can tap for a deeper understanding of your business and performance is your customers or clients. Your customers have invaluable, unbiased insight into what it’s like to work with your business. Building strong relationships with your customers ensures that they get to know your business and feel loyal to it. 

There are plenty of places where you can request feedback, depending on where your business interacts with customers.

• Customer communities

• Email marketing

• In-person or virtual events

• Product review requests

• Social media stories and posts

• Testimonial requests

• Website contact form

Any feedback is useful feedback, so learning what does and doesn’t work for your customers will help you get a clearer idea about how to update your processes. Look for patterns in the feedback to decide what to prioritize. 

Learn more about building customer relationships

4. Re-evaluate your goals

Regularly take stock of how you’re tracking against your current goals and set new ones. This process not only keeps you on track but keeps your business in a constant state of growth and improvement. 

You may develop your own system for evaluating your goals, but if you’re not sure where to start, try one of the options below to kick things off.

Start small

Rather than setting only one giant goal, break your biggest goal into smaller, more approachable milestones. For example, if one of your goals is to increase revenue over time, it can feel discouraging and intimidating to set a single goal of boosting your profit by 20% in the next calendar year.

However, if you break it down into smaller touchstones—such as aiming for an increase of 1.7% each month—it increases the likelihood that your goal will stay top-of-mind. Or focus on bringing in a certain number of new customers each month. With more approachable milestones to celebrate along the way, you’re more likely to make steady progress toward the big picture. 

Set non-financial goals for your business

While finances are often seen as a core metric of business success, there are plenty of ways to measure business improvement. After all, better finances are typically the result of a business that runs well—but not necessarily why it’s succeeding.

For example, to boost productivity and focus in your business, you can set a goal around improving the quality of your rest over the next four weeks.

If stress levels have been high, you can set a goal to create two email templates in the next two weeks. That will take away the recurring work of typing it out each time, freeing up the mental space you need to focus on other priorities.

Most importantly, remember that an unmet goal isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a necessary part of striving for greater milestones and growing your business, and it’s all data to help you make informed choices going forward.

Learn more about setting goals for your business

5. Revisit your vision, mission, and values

If you’re not sure what to explore next, come back to the “why” behind your business. Your mission statement, vision, and core values are the foundation of your work. 

Check in with yourself about each of those things. Do they still apply? Is an updated version a better fit for where your business is today? Reviewing and updating the core drivers behind your business can reinvigorate your work and add new energy to your business.

Once those are in a good place, think about how they could guide you toward places to improve or grow. If you value customer relationships, could you create automated emails that help you maintain a connection with them but save you the time of writing and sending each individually? Or could you ask repeat customers what products or services they want to see from you and bring them into the process of developing something new?

This post was updated on June 28, 2023.