3 Critical Things Every Business Must Do To Be Successful In 2016, Says Epicomm

Andrew Paparozzi presented at EFI Connect 2016 and ran down some of the most crucial points business owners need to address in the coming year. As Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of Epicomm, it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about how to manage your bottom line.

According to Paparozzi, none of the things on his list are optional. Here are five things you MUST do to survive and thrive in the coming year:

1. Improve your relationship with your best customers.

Paparozzi says that too often companies are focused on finding new clients or spend too much time managing relationships with smaller accounts. He says the most important thing is to make sure you are doing everything humanly possible to make your AAA accounts happy. After all, your biggest customers can also deal the biggest blow to your cash flow if you lose them.

Paparozzi says it’s all about asking the right questions. Instead of focusing on customer satisfaction surveys, ask “Is there anything we do, however slight, that annoys you or has annoyed you in the past?”

“It runs contrary to the convention that we should focus on the big things and not sweat the small things,” he says. “You want to uncover the things that are just bad enough that they will remember them, probably affecting your customer loyalty, retention, and advocacy.”

“Focusing only on big things means we often miss lots of little things that in themselves can have a significant, but not obvious, impact on our businesses. These little things if not addressed can add up and together pose serious problems for our business and the customer experiences that we are delivering.”

2. Ask the right questions.

Paparozzi makes this point by stating, “In business, one does not begin with answers. One begins by asking ‘What are our Questions?’”

When you start with questions, it helps orient your business to working toward solving the biggest challenges you face. Here are some questions Paparozzi recommends asking:

• What are we going to do better in 2016 than we did in 2015?
• How are we getting more valuable to our most important clients?
• What is our biggest INTERNAL barrier to profitable growth?
• What trends are we hearing about, but not experiencing yet? (Never assume that because something isn’t affecting you today, that it isn’t going to affect you tomorrow.)

Once these questions are addressed, your business is in a much better position to tackle what lies ahead. But of course, these aren’t the only questions you should be asking, but rather a thought starter. Think about the specific needs for your unique business and begin with questions, not answers.

3. Get rid of CAVE people.

Paparozzi provides a helpful acronym for what he describes as “Citizens Against Virtually Anything,” or CAVE people.

He defines CAVE people as such: “They oppose every initiative. They are cynical—management is up to something. Yesterday was better. The way we’ve always done it is the best.”

The problem with CAVE people is that they restrict your ability to be adaptable and flexible. As Darwin proved, it’s not always the strongest who survives, but rather those who are most adaptable to changes in their environment.

Any business needs to be constantly evolving and always improving. CAVE people stand in the way of that progress.