Where you should spend your time now to help you crush 2025

Where you should spend your time now to help you crush 2025

Welcome to Ryan’s Rant, my weekly newsletter aimed at helping companies drive customer-centric growth.

We all tend to start a new year with a lot of optimism that this year will be better than last year. We hope that we’ll experience more growth, hit more targets and achieve bigger and better goals. 

So we spend a lot of time working and reworking our annual plans. We focus on priorities and metrics. We crunch the numbers to come up with something achievable that will grow the business. 

But where I tend to see businesses fall down is that they spend all this time on the plans — but don’t take the time to drive clarity through their organizations. 

The power of clarity 

Every person in the organization needs to be crystal clear on what the expectations are for their role this year. They need to know what the company goals are and how they personally fit into the plan to achieve that goal.  

When they don’t have this clarity, they’ll spend valuable time trying to make sense of everything they’ve heard. They may get conflicting information that sends them in different directions. Time they could be spending accomplishing the company’s 2025 goals is instead spent on swirling due to lack of clarity. 

I think we often assume that people can read the kickoff slides or sit through a dry 60-minute presentation and be all set. That they have all they need to tackle the new year. 

And then suddenly it’s April and you realize that six different teams aren't working well together because the leaders aren’t on the same page. Those leaders had slightly different interpretations of the goals and set different expectations within their own teams. And as a result, no one was able to work in lockstep to achieve company goals. 

Clarity now can help you get ahead of those problems later.

If you’re a team leader, make sure you understand the company goals inside and out. Make sure you know what your team is responsible for in achieving those goals. Make sure each member of your team has clear priorities that ladder up to the company priorities and they know their path to achieving them. 

Don’t make assumptions that everyone just knows this intuitively. Have the conversations and connect the dots now. It will pay off through the year. And once you’ve done that, do what you can to make your team successful. That’s the primary job of a leader, after all!

If you missed it

It’s a great time to get caught up with my podcast, Inside Insights. If you can’t commit to a full episode, we’ve got a bunch of short, insightful clips on YouTube: 


Jason Hauer

CEO, HauerX Holdings | Transforming Business through AI-Driven Innovation & Growth Tech | Investor and Commercialization Expert | Inc. 500 Founder & Exit | Agency M&A Advisor | Board Member

2w

Love this, Ryan Barry!! Your article made me think of this Peter Drucker quote: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” Without clarity, there's often a ton of wasted effort. For 2025, I'd add focusing a lot more on results/outcomes v. how/what you do. AI changes a ton re: operating models, how work gets done. Operating in clarity with AI as an accelerant will make for a productive and disruptive 2025!

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