It is a new business year. This year will break patterns and lead to the emergence of a new business order. How desperate are you to thrive in your business in the weeks and months ahead?
Here are some useful business tips to pay attention to –
Have an open mind
Ignorance is our deepest secret both in life and in business. Only a few honest ones among us could openly admit that they don’t know as much as they need to know. Ignorance is equally our greatest enemy, and knowledge is the key to defeating it.
Until you realize that nobody knows it all and give room to know more, you can’t make meaningful progress in this new era.
This demands that you have a mindset that always challenges what you think already know. Alan Alda said something I like: ‘Begin to challenge your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows to the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in’.
Everyone is ignorant in some way or another, especially as new things keep showing up in the business world.
This is not the time to close your mind, even on the subjects that you think you have mastered. It is a completely new adventure of 365 days, and you must have an open mind if you want to make the most of it. Open your mind.
There is no closed door to an open mind.
Learn intentionally
Intentional learning here means the continual process of acquiring, understanding, and using a variety of strategies to improve your ability to attain and apply knowledge in your business.
To succeed in your trade, you must be intentional about it. And the simplest way to succeed is to become more so are to do and have more, which largely comes by learning.
Learning we know is not attained by chance, but by some intentional diligence. Someone put it this way: ‘Talent and luck might happen to you by chance, but learning is a skill and practice that anyone can accomplish with diligence’. With diligence and commitment, you can master anything that will add to your business.
To harness the opportunities that this year brings would certainly require you to learn, unlearn, and relearn some business skills and practices, wherever necessary.
This will come by taking a few learning steps every day, which would add up with time.
There’s so much to learn such as how to adopt new technologies like AI into what you currently do, and also apply new and proven principles and methodologies that deliver radical results.
You cannot rest on methods that you used five years ago or even last year, and produce cutting-edge solutions today.
Skill-up
The world of business is not static but dynamic. Those that succeed in it do so by continuously improving themselves in what they do, and in how they do it. One of the ways to do that is to improve your business skills. That is, you replace outdated skills with new skills to meet the demands in the marketplace, and in your industry.
The skills that brought you to where you are can’t take you to where you want to go. There are several skills that nobody talked about five years ago that businesses can’t do without today like digital skills.
The keyword here is skilling-up. 2025 demands that you skill up through re-skilling and up-skilling. Mark those two words.
By reskilling, I mean the process of learning new skills so you can do a different job in addition to the ones that you currently do.
While up-skilling focuses more on improving your skills to meet the realities of your current trade better. Skilling-up would better equip you to do what will produce amazing outcomes.
In an increasingly digital world, skilling-up is the key to your personal and enterprise’s productivity, security, and growth.
One of the ways to skill-up is to acquire digital skills like how to market digitally, or rather how to market in a digital world. In fact, digital skills are so important that every enterprise masters them.
Tony Ajah is a Business Growth Strategist, and the author of BUSINESS SENSE, and ON BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEUR. He maintains a personal blog, where he shares proven business ideas and principles for SMEs.
