Getting Your Business Ready For 2025

With Christmas just behind us, a new year beckons.

All thoughts of turkeys, mince pies, and Christmas pudding are a distant memory with just a lingering hangover showing on our credit cards and vague reminders of embarrassing faux pas made due to too much Christmas spirit, if you know what I mean.

The recycle bin is full of old Amazon packages, shiny Christmas wrapping paper, bottles, and cans. It all came and went so rapidly, although the older we get, the more quickly it comes around again. 

So, it’s a new year! 2025 is upon us, and fresh challenges and opportunities appear. 

Time to put your business hat back on. 

For business people, the beat goes on, and all the things that confronted us in the past year, both good and bad, have probably not gone away, but January is a great opportunity to revisit plans and strategies and see this month as a fresh start.

It’s probably a good time to do a root and branch review of your strategy and business model to identify any changes and how to succeed in the future.

A strategic review is a structured process to identify new value-creating opportunities within a business. This could be about improving the performance of an existing product or service or taking advantage of a new market opportunity.

Don’t confuse the difference between the purpose of a strategic review and a business plan.

Strategic reviews are a key first phase before preparing a business plan.

Take a step-by-step approach by addressing the following questions:

Where are we now? (Situation Analysis)
Where do we want to be? (Direction)
How will we get there? (Alignment)
Who must do what? (Execution)
How are we doing? (Evaluation)

Some useful tools include:

A PESTEL analysis is a framework to analyse the key factors (Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) influencing an organisation from the outside. It offers insight into the external factors impacting your organisation. 

SWOT: is a comprehensive audit and competitive analysis that analyses the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats facing a business. Conducting a SWOT analysis of your business will enable you to formulate a solid strategic plan for its growth.

Scenario planning is a technique that allows you to assess future events and help make decisions that support your long-term business goals. It's a process where you examine hypothetical events in the future and try to understand the possible consequences of your decisions and actions. People typically perform scenario planning to prepare for uncertainty, analyze possible risks, and predict future events' potential outcomes. Depending on the analysis, you can prepare an effective response or create contingency plans if necessary.

Horizon scanning is used as an overall term for analysing the future: considering how emerging trends and developments might potentially affect current policy and practice.

Risk assessments: Risks tend to fall into four categories: Strategic Risk (the probability that it will interfere with your business model), Operational Risk (the prospect of loss due to poor procedures, systems, or policies), Compliance Risk (losses resulting from failing to act according to industry laws and regulations, internal policies, or best practices), and Reputational Risk (the potential of negative publicity, poor public perception, or uncontrollable events to damage your company’s reputation).

Taking time out to review your current strategy and to evaluate it against new market conditions is time well spent and can save your business from making a major, even existential, mistake. 

American economist Michael Porter had a view on this; he said, "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do."