Title: A Look At The Results Of Our 2023 Business Outlook Survey
Guest: Chris Goldman
Peter: Why don’t we read through all the questions here real quick, and then we will go through the results. So the first question was overall, how is your business doing in 2022 versus 2021? The next question was for this year, for 2022, what is one accomplishment in your business you’re proud of? And then we went on to talk about next year. What are your expectations for your overall business results in 2023 versus 2022?
Then we ask, what is one area of your business you would like to improve in 2023? And then what challenges, if any, do you expect your business to face in 2023? We wrapped it up with a few more questions. What is one thing you hope to accomplish in your business in 2023? And then finally, is there anything else you would like to share about your outlook for 2023?
And so, you know, bear in mind, this was a survey that was pretty much filled in by folks who listen to our podcast and receive our weekly email updates. So it’s kind of our audience.
Chris: What we wanna do is, first of all, acknowledge we we this is not, like, 10,000 people.
Peter: Right.
Chris: Right? We’re this is qualitative, not quantitative. Exactly. But we appreciate everybody filled it out, and it felt like they gave us some interesting responses. The one that caught my attention first is, you know, if you’re looking at 2022 versus 2021, did you do better, about the same, or worse?
60% actually did better. About 35% did about the same. Great. That only 6% reported that they did a little bit less.
Peter: Right. The next question for 2022, what is one accomplishment in your business you are proud of? So Chris, what do you see there?
Chris: First of all, I like the question as a business coach, it’s important to pause and just note and actually vocalize. Here’s something I’m proud of. We should all be proud of something that we’re accomplishing. People, you know, talked about hiring and growing. The one that caught my attention the most was putting systems in place to run the operation more efficiently.
And I think really what anytime you’re working at efficient systems, you’re talking about being able to scale what you do, to be able to do what you do better, faster, more efficiently and effectively for people. And I love that. Along with all the hiring, what did you feel about Pete with all the hiring responses?
Peter: It seems like that really was, and I didn’t prompt it at all, but I mean, if we read through the responses, growing was one. And then as you said, putting systems in place to run the operation more efficiently, hired a new person. Here’s one that I thought was really cool. Hired our first full time employee, growth, better routing, hiring employees, finding biz marketing and keeping Yeah. Our shout Not prompted and keeping the calendar full, containing the cost.
Yep.
Chris: That was a big challenge this year. And a lot of our lot of our great clients were able to do that. How do we contain the cost while we still grow? Yeah. Yeah.
So then then I love your next question you asked is, what are your overall expectations for 2023? Now you before we jump into that, just noting some things that people talked about that we didn’t mention. You know, I’m still in business. Yep. Launched launched a podcast, 10% year over year growth while also running a company remotely.
Yeah. A lot of us have experienced that with remote work for on a big scale. I like this one. My team finally having the most professional dedicated that we’ve ever had in our business. Yep.
I love hearing those stories. Managed to add one part time staff. And it may be my favorite is to summarize my year, I got my shit together. Yeah. That made me laugh.
Peter: Yeah. So those are some cool accomplishments and definitely to be proud of. Yeah. So moving on to the next questions, this is about the expectations for your overall business results in 2023 versus this year, 2022. So even more folks are hopeful that next year will actually be better than this year.
So we got like 70% of the folks, the overwhelming majority, and again, this is not a quantitative research, this is just kind of a poll more or less of our audience, but that is really encouraging that we’ve got.
Chris: And an entrepreneur business people by nature need to have a positive outlook, not a pie in the sky, but to have a positive outlook because they’re gonna bring an organization and a business and the employees to inspire them, to make a difference in our culture and in our towns and our communities. So, yeah, you gotta have that positive outlook.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. So we had, like I said, the overwhelming majority of folks were better that next year will be even better than this year. And we had one individual said worse. And so again, that’s a great outlook.
What is one area of your business you would like to improve in 2023? So we’ve got a lot of questions now dealing with what are the challenges? What do you want to improve? You know, we can read off some of the individual things, but again, it seems like there’s a theme here. A lot of it has to do with employees hiring.
Chris: Hire hiring, finding the right people, putting the right people as Patrick Lencioni says, getting the right people in the right seat on the bus. It’s always a challenge for management and for ownership. But beyond that, what I’m noticing are people saying, look, I wanna look back at the 2023 and say that, look, we we continue to improve on our systems and our schedules. Mhmm. We improved our systems for our billing, hearing a lot of things that we’ve been talking about on the podcast and in our newsletter about scalability, how can you make everything scalable, and where you can grow your business.
I did like this increased revenue through much improved Internet exposure. To be able to use the Internet as an effective tool to not only build the business, but specifically to hire the right employees. Mhmm. This business owner put there. I like that very much.
Peter: If you if you look at the responses here, I mean, I’m just glancing at them. More than half have to do with staffing.
Chris: Yep.
Peter: And that seems hiring and staffing and as a as a business owner, business manager, that’s really the only way that you can work on your business instead of in your business is by hiring folks. So I think this is helpful and kind of illustrates the point that, you know, with the podcast, we should probably look at focusing on topics that are related to hiring more.
Chris: Yeah. We probably need to talk about, you know, some business coaching for employee recruitment and satisfaction because the next question, which was, what challenges do you expect in 2023? And we did prompt these. Yeah. We prompted these, but the number one and two got my attention.
Employee recruitment was the number one. Over 50% of the people said, that’s gonna be our number one challenge. And then employee satisfaction came in right with it with 17% of owners feel like they’re gonna be doing it. Those are alphabetically grouped together. Yeah.
But that was a a strong note.
Peter: The
Chris: employment came to the top.
Peter: So it’s it’s firing finding and hiring qualified candidates or qualified people is number one. Then actually number two was inflation. That seems to be weighing in on a lot of folks minds. And what goes hand in hand with that is fuel prices and supply chain issues. And that was securing a predictable source of goods and supplies.
So those, those were sort of the big themes that really jumped off the page here.
Chris: If I might jump in here and just relate a story, a person I know in my life works in a five star resort. Mhmm. And specifically is tasked with operating and managing one of the restaurants and bars within that system. And I was asking them about, you know, how’s it going? How’s the job changing?
And his comment was this. He said, before, because of the nature of our reputation, all of our vendors give us first dibs on food, on the supplies for the bars, everything that they need. And he said for the first time in the existence of this chain, they are having serious supply chain issues where they’re having to negotiate, kind of beg, and and plead, can you get our supplies here? So for small businesses, which are the main listeners of our podcast and readers of our newsletter
Peter: Yeah.
Chris: When you’re dealing with this, just be aware everybody’s dealing with it. Even the big chains, the five star resorts, they’re dealing with this. And so we wanna work through it together and share the best ideas for the best outcomes. I love that one of our responders, obviously, a couple of our responders have businesses that require fleets that use a lot of fuel. Yep.
And they’re they’re concerned about that as we all are. So you’re in good company, I guess.
Peter: So the next question was what is one thing you hope to accomplish in your business in 2023? So
Chris: Yeah. So you hear have a steady business, more efficiency, and grow revenue. Those are really three quick responses that in the next responses, they get fleshed out more. For example, to be more proactive in identifying any downward changes in the business and take steps to maximize impact, increase revenue while minimizing impact of the negative parts. I love that.
Learning to delegate more to my team so I can focus on developing the business, which is going to help that optimization that you’re after. You know, if you’re doing the business all the time, you don’t necessarily get to back up and help grow the business, which is what keeps it sustainable.
Peter: Yeah. Yeah. Again, that’s working on the business, not in the business.
Chris: Yep. Managing to increase revenue in spite of a slowing trend due to inflation. Yep. Something we’re all sharing. So cost management, growth, growing the business, these are just mentioned over and over and over.
Peter: It seems like folks are a little split in looking at these. You’ve got growth and then others are looking to be more efficient and optimize operations. So it seems like there’s a little bit of a split. Here’s somebody wants to increase capacity, and then you’ve got other folks that are talking about better cost management. So you really do have kind of a tale of two outlooks.
Chris: You know? I like I like one, though, that comes out in the midst of our current climate professional development to expand skills. One thing that’s really good to do if 2023 slows down more than you expect is to immediately ask yourself, what can I do with this time? How can I make it a plus? And development and expansion of skills is the perfect thing to do when things get a little bit slow so that you’re ready when the uptick comes.
Peter: There’s a marketing comment I’d like to make as well. I mean, sometimes we hear the knee jerk and I don’t mean this in any way, just trying in a self serving way, I just mean this very honestly is that, a knee jerk reaction when things slow down is for folks to stop advertising. The other knee jerk is to pull all your money out of the stock market. And empirical research has shown that when you do that, when you do the latter, when you take your money out of the market, when the market is down, you’re obviously going to find it very difficult to get back in at the right time. The same thing happens in marketing.
The worst time to stop marketing is when the demand slows. You have a golden opportunity at that point to pick up market share and to grow. And then as the economy does come back online, you’ll be that much further ahead. The last question, is there anything else you would like to share about your outlook? And you wanna go through some of these verbatim responses, Chris?
Chris: Yeah. We have you know, just reading a few of these, it looks like my customers are gonna face hard economic times, which means I may as well. That’s kind of a realistic view. Yeah. I think 2023 could be turbulent, but based on most people I talk to, demand is outpacing supply, so people are busier than ever.
Peter: Mhmm.
Chris: One another one said, overall, I feel positive, but also realistic that things may slow a bit due to the economy. So there was a lot of conversation around that lack of security or confidence about what’s gonna happen. And in the middle of that is one comment I wanna just highlight. I am choosing optimism, optimization, overall well-being, and course correction as needed. And I think that this is a great outline for obviously, somebody who’s really using some strong language with their team to motivate is we we need optimism.
Yes. But we also are gonna need optimization to make the most of what we have. Overall well-being. Because if you get to where there’s not overall well-being, you will have a downward spiral. And then course correct is needed.
And that’s a healthy approach for a business owner to say, look, we’re not gonna get, we’re not gonna start 2023 just saying, hey, this year is gonna stink, so we might as well just accept it. They’re taking that optimism, but they’re coupling it with things that will support that even if you need to make a few course corrections. So good good language there. And I have to say one more before you pop back in with some
Peter: Sure, go ahead.
Chris: One person just simply said, Fasten your seat belts. Suck. Like that. Fasten your seat belts, here we go. 2023 is gonna be an adventure no matter what.
So, Pete, look at the ones that I skipped over and which ones caught your attention?
Peter: What I see big time is folks are, I guess I would say cautiously optimistic. I know that’s super cliche, but that is what I see here. I do want to mention that we did have a lot of folks give their contact information. And so we’ll be reaching out to you over the next while here. Looking to have a couple of you on the podcast to maybe discuss your results and just kinda talk about your business and anything you’d like to share with us.
But I was really encouraged by the results, Chris. And I think, hopefully, I think you were as well.
Chris: I wanna make one more comment about what we’re hearing from some of you that I think is shared with a lot of owners about hiring the right people, getting them there. There’s a couple of comments. Even in a recession, growth is possible with the right employees. Another one said, I’m I’m trying to keep my employees and find employees, and my inability to hire has completely halted my growth. So one thing I just wanna point out to everybody, I hear these two stories all the time from businesses and people is I’ve got to hire some more employees and find the right people.
And right next to them are people all around me saying, I have applied for hundreds of jobs Yeah. And cannot find work. So one of the things that I’m suggesting to people is that our online deluge of resumes and applications Mhmm. Might be overwhelming everybody. Yeah.
And every now and then it can be helpful to go back to the old ways of doing things and actually interview some people in person, sit down with them, find out who they are, what they do, and what makes them tick to find the right employees. Sometimes the electronic filters may be filtering out some really good people that you could use.
Peter: That’s good feedback, Chris. I appreciate that. Yeah, I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for helping me dissect the responses. I really appreciate everybody’s response and participation in our survey this year.
We’ll do this again next year and who knows, maybe we’ll even do it in six months. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us, and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again.
We’ll see you soon.
