I wish I could say it was someone else’s fault, but the truth was that I only had myself to blame. I had misjudged the distance between my bumper and a pole while reversing out of a dark parking lot. It could happen to anyone– a mere tap. Nothing that my car or I should be penalized for.

But when I got out to inspect the damage, I began to sulk. It was minor, maybe an inch long and a quarter inch deep, but nonetheless it was there. An imperfection on my old but otherwise dent-free car.

“Who cares?” I told myself. My 10-year-old Toyota isn’t worth much, and the dent was barely noticeable. Purely an aesthetic issue and a minor one at that.

But still…

As a lifelong perfectionist, the idea of an insignificant blemish, whether on a car on a financial statement, is hard for me to ignore. Intellectually of course, I know that nothing is perfect, and bumps and nicks are part of life.

I rushed to the body shop to get an estimate. The body shop guy smiled as he said, “It should be about $1600.” I sulked again. I knew there was no reason to spend money to fix such a minor blemish that was causing no real harm. But for me, this small dent may as well have been a giant hole in my door. It was tough to take.

As the dent and I stared at each other, I knew I had an important decision to make. Could I live with a tiny imperfection, or would it drive me nuts?

After some deep thought, I eventually concluded that maybe this dent could teach me something.

In business, learning to live with imperfections is not just required, but it’s actually helpful.

Sometimes, I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. Whether it’s losing sleep over a subscription we forgot to cancel or spending too much time trying to write the mythically “perfect” proposal, I’m occasionally guilty of making perfect the enemy of good, and it’s cost us.

It can be difficult to accept that dents are inevitable, whether on your car or your business. But learning how to deal with, and even embracing them as learning opportunities can make a business stronger.

Perfectionism has its upside. It pushes people and companies to be the best they can be. But taking it too far can do more harm than good as you can waste valuable time and money fixing things that don’t really matter.

So, I decided to coexist with my dent and use it as a reminder to focus on the things that matter.

Yes—this hasn’t been easy. Every time the dent catches my eye, I have to resist the temptation to give in and spend the $1600 to get it fixed. But so far so good. My car’s still running just fine, and I’m now a bit more careful in parking lots.

The next time you spot a dent on your car, or your business plan hits a bump in the road, don’t sweat it. Take a breath, laugh it off, and keep moving forward. After all, a few imperfections don’t diminish the journey— and they may even teach you something along the way. JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

What?

It was a relatively minor interaction I had with our college kid while he was home for Spring Break.

Since he was seven years old and took up the drums, I’ve been his unpaid roadie, hauling him and his drum set to dozens of gigs, from music camps and school performances to bars that his various bands have played in.

Playing the drums is cool. But as any drummer (or young drummer’s parents) will tell you, there’s a hassle factor. It’s no picnic loading cymbals, stands, pedals, floor toms, rack toms, bass drums, snare drums, sticks, backup sticks, and extra heads into your car (or if you’re lucky, a van.)

This is followed by unloading each piece to carry everything up a flight of stairs to a stage. From there, you must adjust the cymbal stands, attach and test the bass drum pedal, tune the drum heads, tweak the toms—it’s a complex task. Everything must be just right for a drummer to feel comfortable.

Doing this dance over and over again for our aspiring rock star, I eventually gave myself a promotion from “roadie” to “drum tech” with a sense of pride in how efficient I had become.

So, when I prepared to load his drums in my car for a gig he picked up while home for the break, I was taken aback when he very gently and politely told me he didn’t need my help.

As any good Dad would do, I protested.

“Why would you not want my help?’

He could do it on his own, but why would he when he had the (self-proclaimed) best drum tech in town ready to give him a hand?

After a few rounds of me insisting on helping him while he kindly responded that he didn’t need any help, he hit me with a quote:

“Helping is the sunny side of controlling.”

Apparently, he was learning something in college.

It’s an interesting saying that I hadn’t thought of before. Was I trying to help or control? Or maybe something in between.

In business, “helping” is generally regarded as a good thing. If a co-worker is struggling, offering to chip in is something every good team member does.

But there’s another side to offering help. As my kid told me, sometimes a helper’s motives are less altruistic but more about a need to exert some control.

Are you offering to give your sales person a hand in closing a deal because you’re not confident they can succeed or because they are overworked?

Is your offer to help the marketing department edit a press release born out of a desire to help them meet a deadline, or a fear that they won’t do a good job on it?

Did the person you’re helping ever ask for help?

You may be asking, why does it matter? Most of time I’ll take all the help I can get.

In a work environment, where helping for the wrong reasons can be perceived as stepping on toes, battles for control can ensue and company culture can suffer. Resentments on the part of the helper and “helpee” can build, resulting in a dysfunctional team—something no one wants.

My kid reminded me of this.

If you find your offers of help meeting with resistance, it might be wise to step back and consider your motivations, as well as how it might be

received. It’s even possible that your good intentions come across either as control, or worse: as a lack of faith in another’s capabilities.

As my kid drove off with the drum set that he’d easily packed on his own, I realized that my drum-tech days have likely come to an end. But you’ll still see me somewhere in the audience, ready to jump in if needed (or maybe just enjoying the show.) JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

They remind me of my beautiful wife.

Now before you cringe, it’s not what you think.

As it so happens, our outdoor wedding 26 years ago happened to perfectly coincide with the cyclical 13-year emergence of the cicadas.

It was a joyous occasion as we proclaimed our love for each other while being serenaded by thousands of bugs. They seemed to scream louder just as my wife said, “I do” (they were happy for her, I think…) And some of the more friendly cicadas were even able to join us for the reception as they enjoyed dinner and dancing with our human guests.

But my fondness for cicadas isn’t just purely sentimental.

As these strange insects emerge, they bring with them some valuable lessons that apply to both business and life.

Preparation is critical…

Cicadas spend the better part of a decade or two just chilling underground, sucking on tree roots, growing up, and presumably swapping stories of the great above. Then, when the time is right, they burst forth, ready to sing (or scream) for a mate. This epic reveal is akin to the R&D phase in business, where a lot of time is spent behind the scenes perfecting a product. Like cicadas, companies might appear dormant, but they could simply be biding their time, preparing for a market debut that’s as noisy and unavoidable as a cicada’s mating call.

Timing is everything…

Timing, as the cicadas will tell you, is everything. If a cicada misreads the calendar, it might arrive at a party where it’s the only guest—or worse, where the predators have all the invites. In business, launch your product or service too early, and the

market yawns; too late, and the competition eats you for lunch. Cicadas have perfected their timing over millennia; companies need to catch up, or they’ll find themselves either partying alone or on the menu.

Resilience is a key to success…

Imagine spending your formative years underground only to have a few weeks to make all your life’s dreams come true, amidst predators who consider you a tasty snack. Cicadas are the epitome of “tough it out.” They survive underground, dodging moles and other dangers, to emerge en masse, betting on sheer numbers to overwhelm the threats. For businesses, resilience might mean surviving economic downturns or adapting to new tech disruptions. Either way, like cicadas, businesses must emerge ready to sing their hearts out, or risk getting stepped on.

Think long-term…

The cicadas plant seeds (literally) for the next generation before making their exit. Businesses would be wise to adopt this cicada-style forward thinking. It’s not just about what you’re doing now, but how it sets the stage for future growth—doing the groundwork for the next cycle of business life, ensuring your company doesn’t just end up as a forgotten fossil.

In the grand scheme of things, whether it’s the noisy crescendo of bugs at a wedding or the bustling dynamics of business, the message rings clear: Prepare diligently, consider your timing, be resilient, and always think of the future. JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

In my last column I brought up the question that many companies have been asking themselves the past few months:

“Are we ready for AI?”

For the most part, the bigger players asked this question a few years ago.  Large enterprises with big budgets have been the vast majority of the early adopters.  Using AI for everything from customer service, to sales, to recruiting—the big kids have been off to the AI races.

But for the rest of us, the small and medium-sized companies of the world, the AI revolution is just starting.  Many of us are not only asking if we’re ready for AI but are also wondering specifically about how to get started.

How much will it cost?  Will my competitors pass us up?  How do we get started?

Every company is different, but the process to becoming an AI-enabled business is similar for all of us.

As I mentioned in my last column, the first step is to do an “AI Assessment.”

The goal is to proactively identify your company’s challenges and opportunities and then figure out if AI can address them.  There are common themes on where AI can help, but the list itself is unique to every company.  Factors around industry, budget, long-term goals, and company culture must all be taken into consideration.

Once you have your list of challenges and opportunities that AI-based products can potentially solve, the fun part begins.

It’s time to deep dive into all the AI tools available and decide which one’s deliver the most “bang for the buck” for your company’s needs.  The end result will be your “AI Tech Stack.”

Here are some examples of just a few of the tools that make up our company’s AI Tech Stack:

• Sales: We decided to use HubSpot ChatSpot (an AI-based chatbot for our website) and Apollo.ai to automate part of our email marketing.
• Accounting: We are taking hard look at Booke.ai, an AI-based accounting tool that automates and streamlines common finance tasks like accounts payable and bank reconciliation.  We plan to test this more to decide if it’s the right fit for our needs.
• Marketing: We have already been using various AI tools to help us manage our social media accounts.  But we decided to try MarketMuse, which is an AI tool that helps us analyze and perfect the specific content we generate.
• Productivity: We have been using ChatGPT to save time on common tasks like building PowerPoint presentations or generating agendas for meetings.  This has worked well, but we plan to add Microsoft Copilot as it improves, which could save us time using Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook.

Once you have your AI Tech Stack in place, the final piece of the puzzle is what we call our “AI Roadmap.”

The AI Roadmap is simply a plan of attack to implement the AI tech stack.  It covers prioritizing, timing, and the project planning needed to deploy each tool into your organization’s work.

So, there you have it.

The path to AI is to assess your needs, determine the AI tools that will meet those needs, and then put together a plan of how to deploy them.

Are we ready for AI?  It’s an important question that every business leader should be asking themselves.  If the answer is no, it’s time to dive in.

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

Our company had its annual strategic planning retreat a few weeks ago.

We usually start with a recap of the past year and then move on to defining our plan of attack for the next 12 months. How can we grow? What mistakes have we made that we can learn from?  Do we need to adjust our budgets?

There are a ton of questions we hope to answer over a couple of days camped out in our conference room.  All of them are important in helping us on our constant quest to be the best we can be.

But this year, there was one question that stood out among all the others.

Are we ready for AI?

As a software development and IT support firm, AI has been top-of-mind for us for the past decade or so. We initially saw demand for AI development only from larger companies and well-funded startups who could afford its relatively high cost.

But in the past couple of years the AI landscape has changed.

With the advent of ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and literally thousands of other great products, the costs have dropped, and technology has improved.

Large, medium, small—AI is now within reach of pretty much every company.  And what’s more, those who struggle to implement it are likely to find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

But where to start?

The first step is to do what we call an “AI Assessment.”

This is the all-important planning phase, the blueprints for the house.  It’s essential. Without some planning and analysis, there’s a risk of making an AI mess.

Our own AI assessment project, which we code-named “AtibaAI” so it sounded cooler, took shape as a planning phase with the goal of defining the internal business challenges and opportunities that AI could help us solve.

Some of the challenges we have are common to most every company.  Sales, marketing, finance, and operations—there’s always room to improve.  And other challenges are unique to us, or at least unique to our industry.

To organize our AI assessment, we decided to focus on three areas:

• Risks. This is simply a list of the “what could go wrong” items that we could potentially mitigate with AI tools.
• Operational inefficiencies. This is a list of routine tasks and processes that AI might help us do better.
• Opportunities.  This is the fun one and explores how we can use AI to meet our long-term growth goals.

We then ranked our list by priority, putting the items with the highest potential impacts at the top.

We were now ready to find AI solutions to help us reduce risk, become more efficient, and help us grow.

Finding the best AI-based solutions for any business takes some time.

Just like every organization can have its own unique challenges, choosing the right AI solutions is not a one-size-fits-all.

Cost constraints, ease of implementation, cultural implications and ROI (return on investment) calculations all come into play. We were of course tempted to use AI to help us do our AI assessment, but we quickly realized this was a process that needed the human touch.

The end result of our AI assessment project is our “AI Tech Stack,” a set of tools we decided to use and in some cases program ourselves to meet our needs.

Embracing AI as an opportunity rather than a threat is our mindset.  In my next column, I will share the AI tools that are working for us and some of the ones we recommend to our clients.

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

Better later than never?

When it came to getting COVID, I was hoping for never.

I’m that guy.

I’m the germophobe, who, despite the pandemic being over, remains at the ready with a mask and a bottle of hand sanitizer in my pocket at all times. I’ve still been dining outside as much as possible (even when it’s cold,) avoiding crowds, and holding my breath at the grocery store.

Undeterred by some eye rolling from friends and family, it took 1,503 days (about 4 years) by my count from the first case of COVID until this past week when I felt the beginnings of scratchy throat and a stuffy nose.

I hoped it was a cold, strep throat, or some psychosomatic ailment that would go away in an hour.  Anything but COVID!

But alas, with the onset of a fever and positive test, I accepted my fate.

The timing was par for the course for me.

Unlike COVID, where it’s impossible to completely control when you get it, in most everything else in life I’ve always been what marketing people refer to as a “late adopter.”

Despite being in the tech field, or perhaps because of it, I’ve always been one of those people who takes their time before jumping on any bandwagon.

I waited for version two of the iPhone before giving up my Blackberry. I sat on the sidelines for years when Facebook began to catch on preferring to wait and see before going all in. And I let others try Uber before I finally felt comfortable trying it myself.

Like many things in life, my late adopter tendencies have been both good and bad.

On the one hand, here and there my late to-the-party strategy has put me behind the curve on things that have proven to be useful.

I loved the technology behind the cloud, but before moving all our company’s infrastructure, I wanted to see how it worked for others.  I have gotten deep into using AI to make our business more efficient, but I spent a year testing it before making the leap.

But as a techie, I know that early versions of new products can sometimes come with kinks that take some time to be worked out.  And just because something is initially popular doesn’t mean that it will continue to be.

Laser disks, Bitcoin, Google Glass, 3D TV’s—the world is littered with innovations that in hindsight would have been best to avoid.

So, where’s, the sweet spot?

Business is a game of taking calculated risks and making smart tradeoffs.  Too much caution around embracing innovation carries with it the risk that the competition will pass you by.  But jumping on an unproven bandwagon too soon can be costly if you’re wrong.

Being an early or late adopter isn’t an exact science.  And while most of us trend toward one or the other, I’ve found it’s best to recognize your comfort zone and then take on innovations as they come—one at a time.

As I came out of my COVID fog, I was reminded that there are many times where being early or late isn’t something you can choose.  So, for me at least, when I do have a choice, I’ll likely continue to be just behind the crowd—with my mask on.

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

Click, click again, and then click again.

To most of us it’s tedious, but to a select few it’s fun.

The little-understood role of “tester” takes an eye for detail, patience, and technical know-how.  And the good ones are both perfectionists and good communicators.

Testers are the unsung heroes of the tech world, and outside the tech world they are just plain unsung.

Some call themselves “test engineers” while others are described as QA (quality assurance) professionals.  Although there are differences, the mission is the same: make sure that the software, websites, and mobile apps we all use work to perfection.

Testers play a critical role in the software development process but rarely get the credit they deserve.

No one I know grows up with a dream to become a tester.  Most of us in the tech industry started with the ambition of becoming a genius software developer, a highly respected network engineer or tech startup founder.

But those who land in these more sought-after roles know that without great testers, building great software would be next to impossible.

A tester’s role is to try to break the software that the development team has built.  They test for everything from bugs, to security, to performance with the goal of making sure that when a product is released into the wild it will work as expected.

There are different types of tests that software applications must pass before it goes live.

Load tests check to see if an application can handle a large volume of users without crashing. Security and penetration tests emulate hackers to ensure that by the time an application is launched it will be secure.  And functional tests are designed to confirm that the features of an application or website work as intended.

There are also different techniques that good testers master.

Manual testing is just what it sounds like—painstakingly trying to find issues one click at a time.  Automated testing involves writing scripts that emulate manual testers with the push of a button.   And now, AI-based testing is starting to catch on.

When I first started programming, I figured I could just test my own software myself.  As every developer knows, this never works.

Just like writers need editors and bookkeepers need auditors, anyone who undertakes complex endeavors needs someone looking over their shoulder to make suggestions and find errors.

So, it’s not only time we give testers, editors, auditors, and the like their due, but it’s time we embrace these roles in all aspects of business.

As a custom software development firm, we recognized the value of QA professionals long ago.  But while we have always prioritized testing the applications we build, we’ve not always applied this to other parts of our company.

Whether it’s coming up with a sales strategy, hiring a new employee, or designing a new logo, having someone to check your work is something we could all benefit from.  As we make our way into the new year, I’m looking for ways to road-test all of our business practices.

For us, the first phase of this is to re-emphasize an office culture where there’s no shame in making a mistake.  The idea is to make sure all of us know that ”business bugs” (like software bugs) are unavoidable—no one is perfect.

Our next step will be to analyze the mistakes (bugs) we have made in the past and figure out how best to test our work to avoid them in the future.   In the software development world, this is the “test plan.”

After a few more click, click, clicks, I’ll report back to share the results.

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

I crept up the driveway and cautiously looked both ways.

The coast was clear.

As I slowly made my way on to our snow covered street, I was careful to keep an equal distance between the wide but shallow ditch on my right and the narrow but deep ditch on my left.  They both looked treacherous.

With no one else on the road, my strategy was simple: drive slowly, stay in the middle, and avoid the ditches at all costs.

Making my way down our hilly street I noticed several of my neighbors’ cars were already stuck.  Two were on my left, in the wide shallow ditch that appeared to have gently slid off the road. And one was in the narrow but deep ditch on my right, that looked to have a decent amount of damage.

To avoid joining them, I kept my focus on staying in the middle, careful to avoid the pitfalls that threatened on both sides.  It wasn’t easy, but I was holding my own.

Like many of us that live in the South, my ditch-avoiding experience during a snow storm is limited.

But the concept of avoiding ditches isn’t unfamiliar.

As a businessperson, whether it’s winter, summer, spring or fall, I have to navigate around ditches every day.  In many ways, these “business ditches” are even more treacherous than roadside ditches because they are more difficult to spot.

In business as on the street, there are three types of ditches you can fall into:

• Narrow but deep.
• Wide but shallow.
• And the worst of them all…wide and deep.

Narrow and deep ditches are easy to jump over, but if you happen to fall in it’s bad news. These are tasks that have low risk of failure but if you do fail, they can have severe consequences.   There’s a low chance of losing your top three clients in one week, but if it happens it can be a deep hole to climb out of.

The wide but shallow business ditches are nearly impossible to avoid but with careful planning they are quick to get out of.  An internet outage at your office, a typo on social media post, double booking a meeting—these are the everyday pitfalls that we all fall into but recover quickly from.

Wide and deep business ditches are the ones you must make every effort to avoid.   These are challenging because they are both easy to fall into and hard to get out of.  Cash flow issues, company-wide employee morale challenges, client concentration risks—the scary list goes on.

None of these dicthes are fun to fall victim to.  But, staying in the house forever, never taking any risks at all, also has its downside.  Deciding whether to take a chance on an ice-covered hill or stay inside is tricky.

I’ve found that when you do venture out, whether it’s navigating snow or navigating business risks, the key is to slow down, keep your eyes peeled, and resist the temptation to make any sudden turns that can send you sliding.

 JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.

Well, that was cool. Literally.

For a post-holiday company outing last week, we decided to do something different—curling.

Yes, curling.  That weird sport that you see every four years at the Olympics with a sheet of ice, a dart-board-like target and a bunch of people with brooms frantically sweeping.

Like many, I’d never understood curling and was never sure why it was considered a sport. It’s always been the one Olympic competition that seemed like even someone with limited athletic ability (like me) could quickly learn.  Using a broom is easy, right?

We showed up at Tee-Line, Nashville’s first “curling bar” at about 6 p.m.   My first impression was that the size of the curling “sheets” looked much bigger in person than they did on TV.  And of course, it was very cold.

After being equipped with no-slip rubber covers for our shoes, we divided up into teams of five for a quick training session.

The “thrower” is the person who slides on one knee and aims the 40-pound “curling stone” toward the target (aka “the house”) over 100 feet away.  Once the stone is on its way, the “sweepers” take over frantically using their brooms to reduce the friction along the stone’s path to guide it to the center of the target.

There are a lot of nuances that determine who wins or loses. But overall, the rules of the game aren’t complex. When we finished our 10-minute training session, we were ready to start.  After some friendly curling trash talking it was game on.

It only took us a few minutes to realize none of us had any chance of making the Olympics.

Most of our throws either stopped way short of the target or just went right over it thumping against the back wall. Sweeping went well, but not well enough to save our off-the-mark throws.  And even when one of our stones landed on the target, our team would accidentally knock it off on the next throw.

After an hour of playing, we’d only managed to land one stone on the target across both teams.  The final score one was one to zero.

Despite our lack of success, there was laughter and plenty of high-fives as we walked off the ice. What a unique and fun way to spend time together.

But it also reminded our team of an important lesson.

Curling, like business, is something that is much harder than it looks.

From the sidelines, curling looks like a sport that could easily be mastered by anyone with a broom and willingness to simply give it a try.  But as we quickly discovered, looks can be deceiving; it only took a few minutes to be humbled.

Business is similar.

When I first got into the business world, I knew it would be a challenge, but it didn’t take me long to discover that it was even harder than it looks.

Sales, marketing, HR, legal, customer service, macro-economics, micro-economics, negotiation, mental fortitude—being good at business takes a lot of skill. And that’s on top of needing a good product or service and a good worth ethic.

There are some that make it look easy. But for every success story there are hundreds who are just getting by, missing the target more often than hitting it.  Just like curling, in business, mastering the right combination of luck, hard work, and know-how can make the difference between a clean sweep and getting left out in the cold.

Hopefully 2023 was a good year for you.

Whenever I’ve had a good year, I’m tempted to give myself a gentle pat on the back and celebrate.  Business, health, personal—nothing is easy.  A good year is something to be proud of.

But then I see it and my inner Debbie Downer clicks in.

Like clockwork as the year winds down, I run across the line that throws everything off: “Past performance does not guarantee future results.”

Always in small print in the footnote of my retirement plan statement, it can turn a moment of celebration into a moment of trepidation.  “You did great last year, but that doesn’t mean you will do great this year.”

What a bummer!

But it’s true. New technologies, macro-economic cycles, life-events, aging, everything is in a constant state of flux. As the world changes year over year if you want to maintain or improve your lot in life you may have to change along with it.  Sears, Kodak, Blockbuster—the business world is full of examples of companies who had great past results only to miss the boat on future earnings.

But wait a minute.

Failing to change with the times isn’t the only factor behind the “Past performance does not guarantee future results” warning.

Although I’ve never seen it in any financial disclosures, there’s another statement that I always hear that seems to say the exact opposite: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

This is true as well.  If something’s working well, why mess with it?

Whether it’s Tiger Woods’ golf swing or the original formula for Coca-Cola, fixing something that’s not broken can be equally dangerous to future results.

So, if you want to build on a good year, the trick is to decide what to tweak and what to double-down on.

I think about this challenge for our technology consulting firm every January.  What levers do we need to pull and what levers should be left alone to keep our momentum going?  How do we decide?

To keep things simple, we make two lists.  The “ain’t broke don’t fix it” list and the “needs to change” list.

Here are just a few of the “ain’t broke don’t fix it” items we came up with for our company:

• Our culture.  Our core values of empathy, responsiveness, and flexibility have worked for us, and we feel like we need to build on them long-term.
• Our “end to end” technology focus.  We have always provided both IT (information technology) support and custom software development to our customers.  There’s been debate over the years on whether we should focus on one or the other. But in the end, with all the interdependencies of technologies, we have decided to stick with our vetted approach.
• The “office optional” stance for our team members. We were office optional even before the pandemic, allowing each employee to decide for themselves where they are most productive.  This works for us.

And here are a few examples of our “needs to change” list:

• AI focus.  We’ve already started our AI implementation push for ourselves and our clients.  We need to push harder on this in 2024.
• Growth by acquisition strategy.  We want to formalize a proactive plan (in the past we have been more reactive.)
• Our internal communications. We’re going to redo our company SharePoint intranet site to make it easier for employees to find information.

After 30 years, you would think filling out each list would be easy. But it’s not.  It’s half art and half science, requiring a combination of intuition and data analysis every year.

Of course, your company’s lists will be different, but the process can apply to everyone.

So, it’s an important warning for all of us—past performance does not guarantee future results.  If you’ve had good 2023, pat yourself on the back and then start pulling the levers to make 2024 even better.

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, a custom software development firm and Nashville IT support company. Visit Atiba.com for more info.