Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help you increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before I get into today's topic, I just wanna thank you. Today is episode 350 of the Awarepreneurs podcast. I can't quite believe I'm saying that out loud, but I am just thankful to be here with you and to have been doing this now for seven and a half years. Thank you for listening.

Thank you for telling your friends, and just I appreciate you. Today is our monthly solo episode with me, Paul Zellizer, the founder of Awarepreneurs and the host of this podcast. Our topic today is creating a 2025 growth plan for your impact business. Before I get into it, I do want to acknowledge, in addition to the celebration of this podcast, just acknowledge the recent election here in the US. There's been a lot of, you know, ups and downs. It was a very intense election. There's a lot of reflection and concern about where we might be headed with the new administration coming in. And if you're somebody who's, you know, feeling that, I've certainly got a bunch of messages.

So just acknowledging it. It's beyond the scope of this podcast, although it does factor into today's episode. We're gonna talk about the change in administration, what it might mean for your growth plan for 2025. But I do want to acknowledge it's been an intense time for many. So to set the context, we're in a time of, yeah, economic uncertainty, a big shift in the political landscape, certainly true in the US, but also around the world. The, you know, current administrations and elections around the world are being disrupted, and we have new forces coming into play. Certainly true here in the US. We have high prices and real concerns about how we got there with high inflation, and bit less focus or less willingness to engage in dialogue about things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, and women's rights, and LGBTQ rights, and much more of a sense of just I just want to cover the basics.

I wanna get back to a world where economics, look, you know, rosy, and, there's just a lot of uncertainty. So given that, I think it's really important for us as entrepreneurs and particularly impact business founders to think about this era that we're going into in 2025 and to find ways to create resilient and values driven growth that really continue the impact focus of who we are as social entrepreneurs, but really take into consideration the context as best we might be able to tell going, you know, looking into 2025 from this vantage point of the middle of November in 2024. In this episode, I'm gonna share 4 strategies with you, and they are, number 1, to reaffirm your mission and your values proposition, number 2, to increase your financial resilience, number 3, to strengthen your local partnerships and networks, And number 4, to prioritize customer retention strategies, maybe over acquiring new customers that can be expensive. Doesn't mean we don't wanna do it, but how do we be smart about providing all the value and retaining as many existing customers as we can? So those are gonna be our strategies that I recommend as you think about your growth plan in 2025. Let's dive in. Strategy number 1 is in this time of a lot of uncertainty and a lot of change and a lot of consumer just, you know, people being nervous and seeing things like some big companies in the tech space, some automotive companies around the world really seeing disruptions. Nissan just announced 9,000 layoffs. It's not clear whether Volkswagen is gonna survive.