The tradition of making a New Year's Resolution dates back to ancient Babylonian culture, when the most popular resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment. Today, many are still using New Year's Resolutions as their way of setting business goals.

If you're an entrepreneur -- or even if you aren't -- here are eight New Year's Resolutions that could lead to success in 2008.

#1) Don't be afraid of new things.

In 2008, you will see a lot of new websites, new software, new companies, and old companies offering new products and services. Get rid of the mentality that some of these new offerings don't affect you. Rather, try as many new products and services as you can. Make predictions on which you think will work. Watch to see which ones DO work and refine your strategic thinking accordingly.

#2) Find someone you hate, or someone you love, and follow them.

Many people are motivated more by hate than by love. Find someone who is really successful that you don't like and use them as a benchmark. If that scoundrel can be successful, so can you. Follow that person, and when they succeed, force yourself to succeed as well. Or, if you prefer, follow the career of someone you admire, and each time they succeed at something, emulate them by working harder in order to succeed yourself.

#3) Develop a NEW To-Do list.

Look at your To-Do list, and you'll find that it probably has things on it from a year ago. Delete those things. Create a new list of only the things that MUST be done in order to be successful in 2008. Create a plan to achieve those things.

#4) Talk with your current and prospective customers.

Entrepreneurs often develop the mindset that their ideas are great and will work. They often don't like getting feedback from customers and prospective customers, because it might be negative and burst their bubble. Go out and talk with customers. Even if they HATE your idea, they may spark you to come up with another idea that they LOVE.

#5) Organize.

Organization sucks. But once you do it, you'll save time each and every day. Organize your email inbox and your filing cabinet so that you have easily accessible folders and can find everything quickly and easily. This will save you many, many hours in the coming year; hours that could be used to create new products/services and better fulfill on existing ones.

#6) Make sense of something that doesn't currently make sense.

For some people, words from a Shakespearean play seem like gibberish. For others, a world renowned painting looks like paint that a child could have splattered on a canvas. Find one thing that you have avoided for years, or something that you have discarded as unimportant, or that just doesn't make sense to you. Analyze it. And make it make sense to you. Even if you end up interpreting it in a different way than others, that's OK. What's important is that the process will train your brain to look at problems and situations differently, and give you an improved ability to overcome obstacles.

#7) Keep a blog, diary or other method of tracking your progress.

We've all heard the saying that you can't improve what you can't measure. Measure your progress in 2008. Our lives today are so incredibly busy, and every day, each of us is working on numerous projects. Track your progress on each important project. This will allow you to see what you've accomplished, come up with ways to ensure that your goals are completed on time, and help you to forego the non-critical tasks that eat up your time.

#8) Do it and do it on time.

How many ideas did you have in 2007 that you never found time to execute on? How many phone calls or emails did you want to make (or send), but you didn't find the time? I just did the math; there are 525,600 minutes in a year. That should be enough to accomplish the key things!

Growthink Co-founder David Lavinsky was interviewed on BusinessWeekTV recently regarding his core understandings of strategic business plan development gleaned from nine years of working with hundreds of entrepreneurs.

Entitled "What the Business Plan Expert Knows," key takeaways from the interview include:

• Changes in the Nature and Expectations for Business Plans over the Years. Because of the nature of technology and the "flat world," investors today are less interested in first mover advantage as a key value driver and more interested in the track record/experiences of management and the initial execution/market traction of the business.


• The Importance of Writing the Business Plan Right Away. The biggest cost in any business is the opportunity cost - or the cost of pursuing the wrong opportunity. The best way to minimize this cost is to undertake a formal business plan development process at the start of any new business or any new growth initiative for an existing business. This is especially true for the market research and feasibility study components of a business plan: the analysis of the industry, competitors, and customers that is the core of sizing and scoping the prospective market opportunity.


• The Difference Between an Investor-Focused Business Plan and an Operational Plan. An investor-focused business plan is, at heart, a marketing document. It must contain all of the elements of an operationally-focused business plan, but needs be developed and presented in such a way as to have a clear call to action to invest. It must have a compelling, flowing narrative. An operations-focused plan, which Dave believes should be created on an annual basis (and reviewed consistently), should primarily be focused on key milestones - such as number of visitors to the Website, headcount, customer attrition rates, etc.


• The Rise of the Niche Investor. More than ever, investors have grouped themselves into various niches - software as a service (SaaS), healthcare, renewable energy, franchising, etc. It is important to draft the business plan in congruence with these niche orientations.

The full interview can be seen on BusinessWeekTV here.

Amid the tumult in the public markets, venture capital investments in U.S. startups remains very, very strong -- climbing to a six-year high of $29.4 billion in 2007. It was the busiest venture capital investing year since 2001, with investment spread across 3813 deals, and 11% more money invested than in 2006.

Perhaps most encouragingly, both the venture and individual investor forecasts for 2008 early-stage investments are robust - in spite of and perhaps even driven by public market equity and debt investment uncertainty.This robust outlook is confirmed by the amount of new investment capital that venture capitalists raised in 2007 - $34.7 billion -- 9 percent more than in 2006.

Key market arenas spurring this optimistic outlook include health care and biotechnology, Internet-based business models, and alternative energy. These three sectors accounted for more than 55.1% of 2007 VC investment -- with positive and recession-resistant outlooks for these sectors in 2008.

Growthink's long-term view regarding the early-stage private company investment market remains strongly bullish. Long-term investment return data supports our view that early, or seed stage, private equity investing will always, over the long-term, out-perform all other classes of investment. According to Thomson Financial's US Private Equity Performance Index, 20-year early/seed stage private equity investment has averaged over 20.6%/year in investment return - easily out-performing investment classes including later-stage private equity and public market indices.

Our more prescient short term guidance -- avoid listening to the chattering classes with their "it bleeds it leads" mindset to stoke fear and crisis. The capitalist system that has and will continue to create prosperity to the world is led and driven by entrepreneurs and managers with the resiliency and foresight to act while others dawdle and fret. The great ones are acting now. What will you do?

An overlooked benefit of The Federal Reserve Board cutting interest rates by 75 basis points last week and an expected additional 50 points is the palatable benefit it has and will have for equity investments:

• As money market, bond, and other debt instrument yields decrease there is a natural movement of capital to equity
• A companies' cost of capital decreases, the required return on that capital is less, thus spurring investment
• For companies with leveraged balance sheets, operating cash flow increases as debt service costs decrease
• A declining interest rate environment generally tends to move equity earning multiples, and thus prices, upward -- in lower interest rate environments investors are willing to pay more for the same expected stream of future incomes
• In today's economy, the cuts effects on equity values are almost self-fulfilling. The markets assume that in a lower interest rate environment equity values will increase because they have usually done so historically. Psychology is often as important as fundamentals in influencing market movements, and nothing has proven to be more beneficial psychologically than declining interest rates.

Further to this point, the noise of the chattering classes often drowns out the remarkable resiliency of American capital system. In America, there is an enormous institutional commitment to maintaining stability and fluidity to economic markets. Rarely do things, on a macro level, get out of balance either very badly or very exuberantly (or when there is exuberance, it is usually contained to a particular sector).

It is no accident that the United States is the unrivaled venture capital investment center of the world, and no accident that a significant plurality of most the leading technology companies in the world are American firms. Capital usually feels safe in the United States, and it is safe capital that inve sts in growth investments. Stable monetary policy, which Americans often take for granted, plays a key part in inculcating this sense of safety.