How Can You Break Ground in the New Year?

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