7 Things to Include in Your 2025 Plan

Ensure Next Year’s Success With These Tips & Tricks

Have you considered everything?

With the end of the year approaching fast, you’re likely finalizing your plans for a successful 2024. But before you sign it in stone, review this list to make sure you’ve covered everything to help ensure you’re well-positioned to start the year off right!

No. 1: Conduct fresh market research. 

If you haven’t checked out your competition in a while, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with what is going on in the market so you can consider what in your current approach you want to start, continue, or stop. Check out other websites and social media, as well as those of brands you admire, to see if there’s anything you can learn.

Also, be sure to review your own guest feedback and social media to identify trends and improvement opportunities as you are organizing key experience initiatives for 2025.

No. 2: Dust off your values. 

Review your current mission, vision statements, leadership principles, and guest experience practices not just to ensure that they align with your long-term goals. Instead, use them to identify how closely your business is achieving or adhering to those. Sure, almost every entertainment venue has a mission of providing a safe place for families to make memories, but how – exactly – are you making both happen, and where can you improve?

No. 3: Assess your financial health. 

No annual plan is complete without you digging into your data to determine where your highs and lows are.  Your CenterEdge Business Intelligence Dashboard and CenterEdge reports provide you with everything you need to be able to assess your sales, attendance, membership, inventory, or product data from the year so that you’ll be able to create meaningful goals for the upcoming quarter and year. Some other useful tools to help you in this process are:

• 6 Year-End Data Insights for Your FEC
• 4 Critical Reports for Your FEC
• 3 Tips for Meaningful FEC Goal Setting

No. 4: Map out your marketing. 

Mapping out a year’s worth of marketing content can be a daunting task, but with some practical strategies, you can streamline the process. Create a marketing calendar that outlines the entire year, broken down by months, weeks, and even days. Tools like Google Calendar, Trello, or dedicated content calendar platforms can help with this, but they aren’t a requirement! Identify key dates, holidays, and events you want to promote and mark them on the calendar.

As you decide your big initiatives, plot important dates and deadlines around brainstorming, critical decisions, collateral, point of sale training, and market launch. From there, you can begin to create your editorial calendar and fill in with other scheduled content around your most important marketing launches.

No. 5: Plan for upcoming facility upgrades.

If you’re attending the 2024 IAAPA Expo, you might purchase something fun to add to your mix. Be sure to include a plan for how you’re going to integrate anything new into your offering and marketing, along with any other facility upgrades you’d like to make in the new year. And remember, any improvements you make are cause for celebration, so be sure to get the word out as you roll out new products and upgrades.

No. 6: Make room for continuous staff training and development. 

Remember that training isn’t something that only happens once. If you regularly provide dynamic and fun training sessions, you’ll improve your business while fostering a positive and motivated workplace people want to stay in. Some great topics to cover include guest experience, sales, safety, environmental responsibility, operational efficiencies, and even life skills for those who haven’t yet learned how to do things like personal taxes, applying for college and scholarships, budgeting, and even homebuying. Bottom line – anything you can do to help your team members thrive benefits them and your business.

No. 7: Assess your technology needs. 

While assessing your overall business, it might make sense to consider the effectiveness of the systems you use for facility management, such as point of sale, party booking, food and beverage, liability waivers, and even your payment processing needs. The wrong solution(s) can cost you time, efficiency, guest experience, and ultimately – money.

The best facility management solutions make your – and your guests’ lives – easier.  For example, an integrated and intuitive party booking solution that manages capacity and the scheduling of attractions, rooms, F&B, and resources in real-time helps you streamline reservations and save time that you can use to create more meaningful experiences. The right integrated merchant services programs offer you robust payment processing capabilities that significantly reduce your payment processing costs while providing the types of payment flexibility guests expect. Other native or integrated solutions for programs like inventory and food and beverage help you save time by offering a single place to look when you need to review your profitability. And the list goes on.

By assessing these essential elements of your 2025 plan, you will no doubt put your business on the path to increased guest satisfaction, operational efficiency, and growth in your business. If you’re interested in learning how CenterEdge or CenterEdge Payments can help you make big things happen in 2024, let’s get in touch!

*updated for 2025