A Message from the CEO: Forward Into the Future

Happy New Year, BQE family!

With every new year comes new opportunities and I would like to share some thoughts about how you can take advantage of these opportunities and achieve the goals you’ve set.

2019 is a big year for BQE because we’re rolling out many new innovative features for CORE, but we know that your success depends on more than just the software that you use. So to help you move confidently forward into the future, I will share 5 ways you can improve your chances of succeeding with your goals. I use these five tactics the beginning of each year to prepare myself for the road ahead.

But first I want to start with a number: 8.

That is the percentage of new year’s resolutions that are successful each year. This means that 92% of all resolutions made every year fail.

I mention this only because when I first learned that number, I was quite surprised and decided to do some digging into what the 8% who succeed do differently. My recommendations are a compilation of what that 8% does differently combined with what I personally and professionally follow and recommend to my team

1. Do a postmortem on 2018.

Good teams are constantly observing and taking away lessons from their team's wins and losses. Answer these questions about last year, being as brutally honest as possible.

• What were the organization's 3 biggest accomplishments last year?

• How can we capitalize on the strengths that led to those successes?

• What were the organization's 3 biggest failures/misses last year?

• What were the root causes, and how can we address them this year?

2. Check your talent capabilities.

The human capital in your organization is so critical that companies would be remiss not to take an active role in evaluating and growing it.

Ask yourself:

• Do we have the right leadership in place? If not, what will we do about that?

• What strategic hires might we need to make in 2019?

• Who is being over or under utilized?

• Who can we delegate more responsibility to that will help them grow?

• What training can we provide our employees to remain cutting edge?

• What can I do as business owner to stay educated?

3. Understand the trends likely to impact your business and be ready to respond.

It is important to do an evaluation of your market and to determine likely changes during the year that you will need to be prepared for the possible positive or negative impact of them. You should also ask yourself what are the best resources for you to stay educated on the latest tips and trends within your industry, set alerts and take time to evaluate each of them.

It is no secret that the business environment faces a high degree of change in our post-digital world. Thinking ahead about how to address the intense shifts in the economy and demographics, the global pressures, and quickly maturing automation will help business owners face complexity head on and maximize competitive advantage.

4. Give yourself time to think.

Most leaders have so many demands on their time, it’s easy for them to fall into a pattern of reactive behavior such as attending meetings, replying to emails and returning calls.

Great leaders recognize the importance of carving out time to think, whether it’s to develop a new strategy for customer acquisition or to reflect on what’s going on. It’s not easy, but it pays dividends.

5. Identify what not to do.

It’s simple to plan for the new year by considering only what you need to do to be successful. That’s an easy trap to fall into. Instead, identify the hurdles. Pinpoint the behaviors to stop, the thinking to halt, the projects to pause.

Where have you been putting energy and getting little to nothing? Once that is done, seeing how you’re on track and how to continue is more clear. One great way to do this is selecting business management software that can give you actionable business intelligence in real-time.

-Shafat Qazi, Founder and CEO, BQE Software

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