We all know 2020 was a shocker for almost every business in the world – either you lost customers, staff, or your entire industry disappeared.
Even if you had more downtime, you probably weren’t feeling like launching a new business improvement project.
2021 has the chance to be different.
After some downtime over December and early January, it’s the right time to think about new ways of strengthening your business.
You don’t have to lock anything in, just consider these ideas and start researching the ones you find most intriguing.

Learning How To Double Your Web Traffic Through SEO
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the process of making your website more Google-friendly, so that Google sends you more traffic.
I am not going to pretend that it’s a captivating topic.
What I will say is that no baby in history has been born who is naturally good at SEO.
Every single business who is good at it has had to deliberately refine their skills.
Changes to your headings, images, alt text, links, layout and keywords can easily triple or quadruple the number of people who visit your landing page, and the majority of these changes cost nothing to implement.
The best place to get started is with Neil Patel, his articles are highly engaging and his advice genuinely works.
If you’re reading this, it’s probably because Google sent you here, and that’s thanks to Neil.

My suggestion is to commit to a few bursts of reading, a few small tests, more reading and more experiments.
You should see a decent change, then you can decide how much more you want to improve.

Doubling Your Margins
This sounds more difficult than it is.
You don’t need to double your prices per se, but either make a small increase to your prices and/or reduce your costs, and your margins will double.
In other words, you’ll make the same amount of profit as if you’d doubled your sales.
The first consideration is “How might we raise our prices in 2021?”.
This might come through a rebrand, a new menu, removing your cheapest offers, or being brave and changing the number on your products.
The second consideration is “How might we reduce our costs in 2021?”.
This might come through eliminating some expenses altogether, or shrinking some expenses by a small amount.
You can revisit your Customer Journey to see which parts of your product and service experiences are creating the least value and joy, which become the easiest costs to remove.

Design A New Cash Cow
If you can’t raise your prices on your current menu items, it might be time to design a new menu item with deliberately high margins.
These “Cash Cows” aren’t for everyone, but rather the small group of high paying customers who want an additional level of value – like designing your equivalent of Business Class seats.
The first thing to think about is “What do my competitors offer their biggest spenders?”.
How might you create something similar?
The second thing to think about is “What would my customers dream about?”.
The third thing to think about is “What tasks are disproportionately valuable to customers but cheap for me to deliver?”.
The fourth thing to think about is running a short test, possibly by adding the new Cash Cow to your menu and seeing who enquires about it.
You spend zero dollars on this new product or service, at least until you’ve validated the idea with your market.

Create Digital Assets That Work Without You
We’ve previously discussed the concept of “Making money while you sleep”, and seen that one of the biggest opportunities to do so is through digital assets.
e.g. instead of teaching in person, record content and let students watch it online at their leisure.
These digital assets might help you acquire customers (like online ads, a website, an automated email campaign), distribute your products or services (drop shipping, download or stream your content), or train your new team members (manuals, procedures, templates).
Generally speaking, these are all the things that you typically overlook because “Oh that’s easy, we know how to do that”, and so you manually repeat and deliver these yourself.
I highly recommend the book 24 Assets by Daniel Priestley, which gives a great overview of this topic.

Implement Systems That Halve Your Responsibilities
Most new founders struggle to take holidays at first, since every part of the business is built on their shoulders.
As they grow the company, this burden gets heavier and heavier, even as they add team members.
That’s because the systems they had in place at the start can’t handle the increased revenue, and often rely on the founder making key decisions.
Roughly speaking, every time your headcount triples, you need a new set of systems.
e.g. what worked when you were alone doesn’t work when there are three of you, since your team members can’t read your mind.
What works with 5 people doesn’t work with 15, since you no longer all go to the same meetings.
What works with 20 doesn’t work with 60, because you won’t be the person making each new hire or training your new team members, and so on.

These systems include things like your marketing, product development, internal operations, finances and your growth strategy.
Michael Gerber said “Systems run the business, and people run the systems”.
That means your job is to design the right systems for the coming year, then bring in the right people to run the systems in your absence.
Ideally you want someone smarter than you, so that they can proactively make improvements rather than constantly asking you for help.
I highly recommend starting out by reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.

Conduct A Series Of Customer Interviews
I have never heard of a founder who regretted conducting good customer conversations.
Every single time, they have either have a breakthrough or develop a new level of insight into their audience.
The key here is the word “good” in good customer conversations.
Bad customer conversations are contrived, misleading, biased or boring.
Good customer conversations let your customers tell you about their life, their job, their problems and their desires – all of which is design fuel for your future products and services.
They don’t have to be formal interviews, just a decent enough sample size, some well thought out questions and a fair bit of patience.
I recommend starting out with the book The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, which gives a clear and straightforward overview of the process, and takes a lot of the nervousness out of talking to customers.

Level Up Your Social Media
Everyone knows that social media accounts can be lucrative for your business, but they’re often missing an important distinction.
Actively-run social media accounts are great, passively-run accounts plod along.
Improving your results isn’t hard, it just requires three decisions:
1. Deciding to become an active account manager, rather than staying passive.
2. Researching methods of improving your platform.
3. Putting your pride aside an implementing some changes.
From what I’ve seen, steps 1 and 3 hold the most people back.
If you only do step 2, you’ll increase your knowledge but not your traction.
Fortunately, step 1 only takes a few moments to implement, you simply decide to make a change and set some goals.
Step 3 takes the most guts, since part of your mind will talk you out of doing anything that presents the risk of embarrassment.

As a starting point, I’ve found Dave Talas Instagram Crash Course to be really well paced and straightforward, it’s free and genuinely interesting.
There are a lot of great creators who teach people how they improved their own pages, my advice is to choose an instructor whose content you like.
While social media accounts are free to start, there is a cost to producing high quality content, and it’s universally agreed that high quality content is essential if you want to get good results.
Rather than cutting corners to avoid spending any money, it might be worth deciding to commit a small budget to your content creation over the next few months.

(Bonus Eighth Project) Actively Work On Your Mindset
All the productivity hacks in the world won’t work if you’re operating with a damaging and negative mindset.
Time and money spent on your mental health and wellbeing always pays huge returns, and could be the ideal starting point for your work in 2021.
I can’t tell you what to do here, but I highly recommend dedicating a budget and some time towards anything that contributes to good health.
It could be fitness equipment, a new routine, therapist sessions, a business coach or a new workspace – trust your gut and take a first step, and see if it makes a difference.