5 expert-backed resolutions for entrepreneurs in 2025 Shaping the future of business with bold strategies for resilience and sustainable growth

As 2025 nears, it's time for businesses to consider resolutions that go beyond the usual focus on profit and growth. In this Entrepreneur UK piece, leading experts offer their insights into the strategies that can shape a more resilient and successful year ahead. From creating a corporate happiness plan to embracing flexibility and digital innovation, these resolutions point to a broader vision for business leadership, emphasising the importance of culture, adaptability, and long-term thinking.

1: Create a corporate happiness plan
Lord Mark Price is the founder of WorkL, a UK-based platform dedicated to enhancing workplace happiness and employee engagement through surveys, tools, and insights, and author of Happy Economics: Why The Happiest Workplaces Are The Most Successful.

WorkL's Global Workplace Report 2024 found that pay, purpose and flexibility are core drivers of happiness at work, and whilst global engagement is showing signs of improvement many employees still pose a flight risk, which could have big consequences on productivity and growth going forward. It's clear that organisations need to address shifting employee concerns if we are to feel the commercial and cultural benefits of having happier working environments. So if there's one resolution that businesses should prioritise in 2025, it's to make a corporate happiness plan.

All businesses make plans, at least the most successful ones anyhow. They make plans for strategy, finance, operations, risk, quality control, tech implementation and much more. Without a detailed plan, it is impossible to guide their actions, effectively allocate resources, anticipate challenges or identify opportunities. Creating a happy organisation doesn't just happen so I'd like to propose that a corporate happiness plan takes its rightful place alongside all the other strategic plans that underpin businesses. This plan should be built around an understanding about what it is that drives a good culture and happiness at work. This plan will tackle all areas, from staff development to diversity and inclusion, to wellbeing improvement and rewards and recognition, to ensuring the whole team has a sense of pride and satisfaction in their career.

2: Propel your planning forward with strategic thinking tactics
Michael Watkins is a professor of leadership at the IMD Business School, co-founder of Genesis Advisers, and a bestselling business author of books including The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking and The First 90 Days.

Watkin advises as you launch into 2025, strive to combine forward-looking strategic thinking with organisational adaptability. Commit to scanning the horizon for emerging opportunities and challenges and then rapidly reconfiguring your business model, operations, and team responsibilities to meet these challenges. This resolution is not about developing a strategic plan but embedding strategic adaptability into your everyday decision-making.

To support this, focus on nurturing a culture of curiosity and openness to change. Encourage your teams to experiment and learn from setbacks, treating each challenge as a stepping-stone rather than a stumbling block. Invest in developing leaders at every level who can read market signals, anticipate shifts, and respond swiftly. Simplify processes, decentralise authority, and give your people the tools and information they need to make timely, informed decisions.

He goes on to say to ensure that your strategic insights guide your adaptation. Continuously refine your understanding of customer needs, technology trends, and competitive landscapes. Align your evolving structure and culture with a clear strategic vision that secures your market position and propels your growth. Make 2025 the year you shape the future by combining strategic foresight with operational agility.

3: Adopt the "both/and" mindset
Thirdly, Sarah Miller, CEO at Principia, the leading global advisory firm on organisational ethics, says as we transition into a new year, it's time to reflect on the lessons learned from 2024 and set our intentions for the year ahead. For business leaders, one crucial resolution should be to cultivate an open, empathetic, and pragmatic mindset that embraces the "both/and" approach, rather than the limiting "either/or."

The complexities of 2024 have underscored the need for a nuanced leadership style. The challenges of managing diverse generational expectations and navigating deeply held social and political views within teams have become increasingly apparent. The focus on commercial goals and ethical considerations as inherently at odds is dated, and requires sophisticated ability to work through the range of short and long term considerations.

By adopting a "both/and" mindset, leaders can navigate these challenges more effectively. This involves understanding the validity of multiple perspectives, finding common ground, and seeking solutions that benefit all stakeholders. It requires active listening, open communication, and a willingness to compromise.

In 2025, leadership will be defined by the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously and create solutions that balance inevitable tensions and trade-offs. Cultivating a both/and mindset will be a key leadership trait to guide businesses through an unpredictable, complex environment.

4. Reimagine your business as a digitally native company
Chetan Dube is an AI Pioneer and founder and CEO of Quant and he warns with the advent of Agentics, business owners will face a choice to either innovate fast or die slowly. Agentics is galvanising a shift from information to action models. This will lead to digital employees who will provide margin and efficiency gains of over 50%.

Often for large enterprise, change is hard, as it is difficult to swap out propellers for jet engines while in mid-flight. But given the magnitude of spread, leaders should resolve to adopt a policy of reimagining their company as a digitally native company. Once they have that blueprint with a hybrid workforce of humans and digital workers, they should create a transformation plan that moves towards it. Incrementalism will not cut it. The technology gains require a quantum shift. The seemingly less risky strategy of doing stepwise, minimal changes is indeed the riskiest strategy. It will leave companies exposed to the bold digital attackers and the other giants who have taken advantage of a competent digital employee to redo their delivery and customer care models. Owners can either ride on the wave, or be swept under.

5: Use business as a force for good: combine altruism with your ambition
Lastly, Jono Hey, author and illustrator of Big Ideas Little Pictures and creator of Sketchplanations says doing good isn't just for non-profits— businesses have a unique platform to create positive impact. Richard Reed, co-founder of Innocent Drinks, calls altruism and ambition the twin jet engines of lasting success. Altruism fixes your purpose, while ambition drives growth. Too much of either creates imbalance, but together, they empower businesses to thrive and make a meaningful difference.

This New Year, consider how your business will be a force for good, aligning your goals with a purpose that benefits both people and profits.

As businesses look ahead to 2025, experts urge leaders to adopt resolutions that go beyond traditional profit goals, focusing on culture, adaptability, and innovation. From embedding happiness into the workplace to rethinking digital transformation, these strategies are key to building resilient, purpose-driven organizations ready for the future.