Your 2026 Business Growth Plan

Author, Bill Oelrich, is a Business Advisor with The Resultants.

To learn more about Bill, visit our Team Page or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Around this time of year, business owners start thinking about goals for the new year.

You might want to add to your crew, expand your services, or finally step back from the day-to-day.

But if you're honest, you're not sure how to get there without working even more hours than you already are.

Maybe you're thinking: "I need more leads." Or "I need to hire someone." Or "I just need to push through for another year."

Here's what I've learned after looking at hundreds of businesses: that's not what's holding you back.

The number one thing holding you back from more revenue and more freedom is your systems.

That’s probably not what you expected to hear. 

Let me paint a picture. 

This is what it looks like when you have systems problems.

Does any of this sound familiar?

You're maxed out personally. 

You're working 70, 80-hour weeks. You can't do any more yourself, which means you can't increase your top line without hiring somebody. 

But hiring that person needs to be funded either by earning less or through growth. It's a catch-22.

Your best people are frustrated. 

Your top employees may be upset because you don’t have good systems in place. They're set up for failure, and it's causing tension. Good people don't want to work in a messy environment. A-players are going to look for visionary owners who are looking to push the envelope.

You're missing out on opportunities. 

There might be trends emerging—a massive opportunity you could capitalize on—but you're not nimble enough. You can't pivot and put in the time or emotional energy to take advantage of it because you're stuck in the day-to-day.

Customer service is starting to slip. 

You can't be in 17 places at one time. People are starting to say, "I can't get their attention anymore. I used to call and they'd be right there. Now they don't even pick up."

You see the potential, but you're hitting a ceiling. And that ceiling is what's preventing you from getting to where you want to go.

Most business owners assume that what they need to grow is more customers, more sales, more leads. 

When I listen to podcasts about service businesses, it's question after question: "How do I get more leads? How do I get more leads?" 

But if you’ve hit your growth ceiling, you don't need more leads (yet). You've got to clean up your house first.

Think about it this way: if you just throw a bunch of leads at a horrible booking system, you’ll lose most of them. You might grow a little, but it won’t be sustainable.

Every business that grows sustainably does one thing well: it builds systems that make success repeatable.

Many business owners think of systems in terms of technology. But systems are more than that.

The easiest place to start thinking about systems is to look at your business in two parts:

1. The customer journey.

2. The employee journey.

   
   

When someone comes into your world — whether they’re a paying customer or someone you just hired — they’re taking a journey through your company. 

Your job as the owner is to make that journey as easy and predictable as possible. 

The easier you make it for people to succeed with you, the easier your business becomes to run.

On the customer side, that journey looks like:

Lead generation → Lead conversion → Deliver the service → Get paid.

On the employee side, it’s:

Recruitment → Training → Execution.

The foundation for building systems is to ask: Are we doing this well? Are we efficient or not?

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• When a call comes in, what happens? Does it go to voicemail? Does someone always answer? What do you want your customer to experience?

• When you book a job, how does the information reach your team? Is your best person set up to win with the customer, or set up for frustration?

• When you bring on a new hire, how do they learn what to do? Is there a clear process, or are they left to figure it out?

• When you deliver your service, is it the same excellent experience every time — or does it depend on who shows up?

  
  

Start documenting how things work today, then improve them one by one. 

You don’t have to invent everything from scratch. It’s much easier to take an example and edit it to fit your business. 

Bring your team into the process. Ask, “How do we do it here?” Then refine it together until it’s “good enough.”

Because “good enough” is what frees you up to tackle the next challenge. And that’s how momentum builds.

Business is magic. You can create wealth from work.

Most business owners I talk to want the same thing: they're tired of the grind. They want to make the same amount of money (or more) without having to do all the work themselves.

But if you want to build something that doesn't require you to be everywhere at once, you have to create systems.

Once you have systems in place, growth stops being stressful. You stop being the bottleneck and you start experiencing real freedom. Time freedom, mental freedom, and eventually, financial freedom.

That's not just a nice-to-have. That's a valuable business. A company that has freedom for the owner is a very valuable company—whether you keep it for your kids, sell it to your top people, or exit to an outside investor. You have options when you build something that can run without you.

Ready to Build Your 2026 Business Growth Plan?

If you're stuck at your ceiling and you know what got you here won't get you to where you want to go, let's talk.

We'll start by mapping out your vision: where you are, where you want to go, and what needs to happen to get there. We'll identify which area of your business you need to focus on first. Then we'll create systems to free you up and let you move forward.

Book a call to map out your path to scalable growth in 2026.