It’s hard to believe that half of 2023 is already in the books! This is a time where many businesses reevaluate their strategies and realign their goals to ensure a successful end to the year.
What are your company’s top priorities for 2H? We posed that question to our VP Team of Mike Gaydos and Paige Sawin. Here are their thoughts and priorities.
Mike
June was an incredibly busy and productive month for us. It was gratifying to see growth in both organic expansion with existing clients and new business wins. Also, nice to see the new opportunities come in through a mix of our biz dev efforts including sales, partner referrals and our ongoing content outreach strategy. We even had one major initiative finally get approved after working on it for 18 months!
This gives us great momentum heading into the 2nd half. More importantly, the influx of activity gave us profound insights into what services and data clients are looking for as we build out the next generation of Digital Business Information (DBI).
That is a big part of where my focus will be in the second half. Two areas that keep showing up in our discussions with our multi-location businesses are the need for competitive market research and location intelligence data. While we have always had capabilities in these areas, we are ramping up with new partners and new software to take this to another level.
Of course, like every other business we are also exploring how we can utilize AI to drive additional insights for our clients especially as it relates to call data analysis.
We really have the wind at our backs for the rest of 2023 and I couldn’t be more excited.
Paige
Having fairly recently returned from maternity leave, it was amazing to see how things had changed in just 3 months! As a result, one of my primary projects has been to make sure that we were operationally aligned to handle the current mix and workload.
As Mike mentioned, there was quite a bit of activity in June. In addition to the account activity, we hired two interns from our Spring class (welcome Gabby & Chris!) as well as took on two new interns for the summer.
With the inflow of new work, we first and foremost want to ensure that we are tying up all outstanding tasks on existing projects, ensuring client satisfaction, and fulfilling all obligations. So, we are affectionately referring to the first few weeks of 2H as “clearing our plates”.
Then, for me, it’s a matter of allocating resources where they need to be so that our teams succeed in over-delivering to the clients.
This will include reconfiguring our account teams to strike the right balance of skills, experience and capacity. Also, I will be enhancing and upgrading both our client facing and back-office software to deliver deeper insights, improved reporting and greater efficiencies.
The DBI universe is constantly evolving. Our clients depend on us to keep on top of these changes and to have the vision to understand how to meet their future needs. As we continue to develop and expand our services, our company content and messaging strategy must reflect and inform the changing landscape. This is a big part of my focus for the second half as well. We are working on an exciting new format for our podcast that will be launched in the coming weeks. We will also be rolling out new features that will continue to build our thought leadership in our DBI niche.
Lots of momentum heading into the second half and now is our time to take execution to the next level!