Happy 2025! We made it! 

We’ve reflected, renewed our commitments, and set new goals for the coming year, but I have one more challenge to throw at you as you plan for the next 365 days of business growth. 

• How will you innovate this year? 

Goals are great, but pushing yourself is even better. We’re really good at setting safe goals – ones we know are doable or just so barely out of reach they might as well be doable, and this year I’m challenging you to set a BIG HAIR AUDACIOUS one that requires you to approach problems and business differently. 

Luckily, I’m here with a few ideas on how you can redefine your approach to business growth and challenges to unlock new opportunities in your coaching and writing practice – all by thinking just a little differently!

Meet: Systems, Design, Blue Oceans, and Disruptors. 

These are four problem-solving methodologies that you can apply to business to reveal new potential. It’s quite possible you already naturally gravitate towards one of these, but knowing your strongest approach to problem-solving can help you intentionally look at things with a new lens. 

Here’s some food for thought: 

Systems Thinking

Thinking about the whole. Systems thinking is about taking a big picture look at the broader impact of a decision or a solution. In other words, everything we do in our business is interconnected, so looking at downstream impacts can be beneficial.

The same goes for our clients, where we often work to address more than an immediate concern by understanding how various elements of their professional and personal lives interact. 

For instance, when a client struggles with work-life balance, you might explore how their job demands, family commitments, and personal interests intersect and define the parameters of their search. This approach allows you to suggest comprehensive solutions that could involve setting clearer boundaries or adjusting work hours, thus creating a more sustainable balance.

How can you do the same in your business. If you add a new service line, how will it impact your other high-revenue offerings? Will it help you build capacity or cannibalize a strong revenue generator? 

Looking at your business as a system, instead of the ad-hoc, “hey, maybe I’ll try this today,” can add a layer of intentionality that drastically changes future possibilities. 

Design Thinking

Thinking about the human. This is the one I gravitate towards and will likely resonate with many of you who have gone through Build Your Business where we focus on developing solutions to meet a specific problem. 

Design thinking focuses on human-centered solutions, which is a perfect match for client-focused services like coaching. This methodology encourages you to empathize with your clients, define their core challenges, ideate solutions, and then see how those solutions resonate with the goal audience. 

If you’ve never sat own and evaluated how your offerings align (or don’t!) with the audiences you specifically want to serve, this is a great exercise for you. It’s kind of like tailoring a client’s résumé to the job at hand: present a clear value proposition that solves a problem. 

Yep, it applies to you, too! 😉

Exploring Blue Ocean Strategy

Create a new space. Imagine stepping away from a fiercely competitive market (“red oceans”) and to create or discover your own uncontested market space (“blue ocean”). 

For a career coach, this might mean identifying a niche such as helping clients transition into non-profit careers—a less saturated and highly specific market; it could also mean specializing in government résumés or helping teachers transition out of the classroom, but it doesn’t just have to be a niche-specific strategy. 

They sky is the limit – and you’ll push your creativity – when you start thinking about what makes you unique in our space and how you can leverage that to be different, in a great way. 

I don’t know about you, but I like being different!

Innovating with Disruptive Innovation

Think about the next big thing. Disruptive innovation involves integrating new technologies or approaches that fundamentally change how a service is delivered. This could be everything from using (or developing) technology to assess, track, or monitor job-search related data, or it could be a proprietary framework you’ve created to help a client discover the goals for a career change. 

Where can you innovate? Just because everyone else isn’t doing it (yet), doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for it, especially if you create it!

This is an area where I’m particularly excited to push in 2025 [teaser?]! 

One of the most fun things about being an entrepreneur is the ability to create, try, fail, try again, and see what works. Why limit yourself? Having autonomy and freedom are two of the reasons we all started businesses, so don’t force yourself into a box! 

Step outside of it and have fun this year. 

As you reflect on these methodologies and their potential applications in your business, consider how you can incorporate them into your strategic planning for the coming year. Challenge yourself to think differently, not just in terms of what you offer but how you approach the very problems you aim to solve.

You never know what “next big thing” will come out of that brain when you workshop in new and innovative ways.

Here’s to a great year!

Your Friend and Coach, 

Angie Callen, CERW, CPCC, CPRW

I was recently having dinner with my wife at a high-end ramen restaurant, and it struck me how much my life had changed. Back in college, I, like many others, lived off of $5/1 packets of ramen. While I’ve since learned that I need to live off more than sodium and starch, the lesson that night came when I inquired about the eating utensils at the restaurant.

For the record, I know how to use chopsticks. What I’ve never understood, though, was the function of the deep, Chinese-style spoon that they give you (I’d later learn that it’s called a renge). Determined to finally have an answer to one of life’s eternal questions, I asked the waiter if he could explain how I was meant to use this unfamiliar tool.

After a quick lesson and demonstration, for which my wife and I were extremely grateful, we felt confident using our respective renges. It definitely enhanced the meal, and it was more enjoyable knowing that we were eating the ramen as intended, with effective but non-offensive slurping. In other words, we felt equipped with the right tools for the job.

And so it goes in business — and life — today. Just like you wouldn’t try to eat ramen with a fork, you can’t navigate the increasingly chaotic world of politics, technology, and business with outdated or inadequate tools. 

As columnists, people like me love to take a few minutes at the beginning or end of the year and share our forecasts on what’s coming up in the new year. As I do this, I’m reflecting on where we are right now. As I write, France’s elected officials have chosen to dissolve the current government, where the two extremes came together to oust the middle.

To me, this echoes the chaos that we saw in the U.S. House of Representatives when Kevin McCarthy was ousted without a clear path forward. In the next four years, I think we’re likely to see a lot of that kind of sudden, abrupt upheaval in the political world — disruption is not a byproduct or a possibility, but the clear, stated intent of the new power in Washington.

We can all hope that whatever new solutions get developed will work, but as we see similar movements gaining ground in Germany, a likely shift in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and big changes in the Middle East power structure. One could call this a “rapidly changing landscape.”

This isn’t just political, either. New technologies, specifically AI, are having far-reaching consequences on financial markets, the workplace, and traditional jobs. What jobs will be lost in this process? What industries are going to be destroyed by these changes, and which ones will harness them to achieve new success?

“Many,” is my best answer. If you’re a business leader, this period of disruption probably makes it feel like you can’t catch your breath. Much like when a tree falls in a forest and knocks over another, every move in the political, technological, or economic world seems to have a ripple effect. The connections between politics, business, and technology are tighter than ever, and a mistake in one area can create a cascade of challenges elsewhere. As we consider the next few years of business and world markets, the only certainty seems to be uncertainty.

But this is where the lesson from my ramen dinner comes in. When there is mass uncertainty and a whole lot of the unknown barreling toward you, your best defense is having the right tool. And as a business leader in uncertain times, your best tool is information. In the face of precarity, your ability to absorb, process, and act on information will define your success (or lack thereof).

Unfortunately, this confluence of disruptors is also happening at the same time that we’re seeing a stark decrease in the number of reliable, omnibus sources of information. Traditional media has by and large bifurcated along partisan lines, and this leaves all of us in the unenviable position of filtering out the noise while accessing the information that we critically need to make informed choices.

So what can you do about it?

Start building up your information network now. Include some classic traditional media, but don’t limit yourself. Find thinkers or bloggers or even TikTokers (while the platform is still around) who present up-to-date information on subject areas that matter to you and your business.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for taking everything you hear on TikTok as fact. You need someone (ideally a few someones) who does their research and analyzes credible sources to give you the information that you need to know. Remember, information is a tool, and in the coming years you’ll want the sharpest tool you can get your hands on.

So, as we enter 2025, yes, we’re looking at uncertain times. But uncertainty doesn’t have to be paralyzing. Take some time to look critically at your information sources and ensure that you’ve got a healthy, regular diet of information that’s enriching and will keep you prepared in an exceptionally chaotic environment. While the future is here, it is unevenly distributed. You want in on it first. The most effective tool? Information.