Beyond New Year’s Resolutions: Building a Business That Actually Changes in 2026

Beyond New Year’s Resolutions: Building a Business That Actually Changes in 2026 

Author: Tom Glover 

It was January 2nd, a Tuesday morning, and the air outside was cold enough to make your lungs ache. I pulled into the gym parking lot at 4:50 AM, bracing myself for the chaos. 

You know the drill. It’s the New Year. The world has collectively woken up with a hangover of regret and a sudden, desperate need for reinvention. I expected to fight for a parking spot. I expected to wait in line for a locker. I expected the weight room to look like a chaotic scene from a Black Friday sale. 

But when I scanned the app on my phone and walked through the double doors, I stopped. 

The gym was quiet. It wasn’t empty, but it was calm. There were about a dozen of us scattered across the floor—the same dozen who are there every morning. Mark and Ross were already on the treadmills, just like they are every single day, logging their miles before the sun came up. Shane was over by the racks starting his routine. 

It was the same crew as December 20th. The same crew as November 10th. Just like it is every single morning at 5:00 AM. 

I realized something as I started my warm-up that has stuck with me as I look at the terrifying, beautiful potential of 2026. The “Resolution Crowd” doesn’t come at 5:00 AM. The Resolution Crowd comes at 5:30 PM. They come when it fits their schedule. They come when they have “energy.” They rely on motivation, and motivation is a fair-weather friend that rarely wakes up before dawn. 

The 5:00 AM crowd doesn’t have resolutions. We have systems. Mark and Ross don’t get on those treadmills because they feel inspired; they do it because their morning routine is architected in such a way that not doing it would feel weirder than doing it. 

As business leaders, we love the energy of the New Year. We love the fresh P&L. We love the clean whiteboard. We stand in front of our teams and we preach the gospel of “More in ’26.” We set targets that look like hockey sticks. We announce “The Year of Efficiency” or “The Year of the Customer.” 

We are the Resolution Crowd. We are relying on the sheer force of our willpower—the “Controller” mindset—to drag our organizations into a new reality. And just like the gym-goers who will flood the place this evening and disappear by February 15th, most of our business initiatives will fail. They will fail not because we lack vision, but because we lack the architecture to support the weight of our ambition. 

This year, I want to challenge you to do something different. I want you to ignore the seduction of the New Year’s Resolution. I want you to stop trying to “motivate” your business to grow. Instead, I want you to build a business where growth is the inevitable byproduct of the system you have designed. 

The Trap of the Controller’s Resolution 

There is a fundamental distinction I’ve observed over thirty years of watching leaders succeed and fail. It’s the difference between the “Controller” and the “Architect.” It is the single most difficult transition a founder or executive has to make, and January is usually when we slide back into our worst Controller habits. 

The Controller looks at 2025’s revenue numbers, sees they were flat, and says, “I will fix this. I will push harder. I will micromanage the sales team. I will approve every expense. I will will this company to grow by 20%.” 

This feels like leadership. It feels heroic. You are the captain gripping the wheel in the storm. But it is actually a trap. When you rely on your own intervention to drive growth, you become the bottleneck of that growth. You are creating a system that can only move as fast as you can think, and in 2026, that is simply not fast enough. 

The gym at 5:00 AM is an ecosystem of Architects. We aren’t deciding to work out. The decision was made years ago. The gym bag is packed the night before (a system). The alarm is across the room (a system). The coffee is on a timer (a system). The friction has been removed. 

If you want your business to actually change this year, you have to stop treating growth as a project and start treating it as an operating system. You have to move from asking “What is our goal?” to asking “What is the machine that produces that goal?” 

This brings us to the uncomfortable reality of the “Convergence Crisis” we are all living through. The collision of AI acceleration, economic volatility, and the changing psychology of the workforce means that the old way of forcing growth—brute force, more calls, more hours—is broken. The friction is too high. If you try to push a boulder up a hill in this environment, you will just get crushed. 

You need to build an engine that pulls the boulder for you. 

The Friction Audit: Why You Are Stuck in the Parking Lot 

Let’s go back to the gym metaphor for a moment. Why do the Resolutioners quit? It isn’t because they don’t want to be fit. It’s because the friction of the new behavior is higher than the pain of the status quo. 

Driving to the gym is hard. Changing clothes is hard. Being sore is hard. Feeling foolish because you don’t know how to use the machine is hard. Eventually, the friction wins. 

In your business, you have “growth friction” that is invisible to you because you are the boss. You say, “We are going to cross-sell cybersecurity to all our legacy IT clients!” That’s the resolution. 

But you haven’t looked at the friction. 

• Does your sales team actually know how to talk about the new stack, or are they afraid of looking stupid? (Competence Friction) 

• Does your quoting tool make it easy to add the service, or does it require a 45-minute manual workaround? (Process Friction) 

• Do your incentives align, or are you paying them more to renew the old contract than to sell the new one? (Economic Friction) 

If you don’t remove the friction, the resolution dies. 

At Responsive Technology Partners, we faced this exact challenge when we rolled out our “ResponsiveEdge” model. We wanted to shift from pure reactive support to a proactive, AI-driven strategic partnership. But we knew that asking our market leaders to change how they spoke to clients was a massive ask. 

If we had just set a “Goal,” we would have failed. Instead, we acted like Architects. We looked for the drudgery. We realized that our best people were spending 40% of their time fighting with documentation and ticket triage. They didn’t have the time to be strategic advisors. 

So, we implemented what I call the “Drudgery Defense.” We used AI to automate the intake. We used business process automation to handle the low-value noise. We didn’t do this to fire people; we did it to clear the runway. We removed the friction of “busyness” so they could actually do the new work we were asking of them. 

You cannot ask a drowning person to learn how to swim butterfly. You have to pull them out of the water first. This January, before you add a new goal to your team’s plate, ask yourself: What friction am I removing to make this behavior possible? 

From Unicorn Fantasies to Camel Reality 

There is another reason New Year’s Resolutions fail: they are often delusional. We set targets based on what we wish were true, rather than what our structure can support. 

In the startup world, we see this in the obsession with “Unicorn” growth—the desire to hit a billion-dollar valuation overnight. This mindset leads to “Hyper-Growth,” which is often just a fancy business term for cancer. It is growth that consumes the host. It’s the guy at the gym who tries to bench press 300 pounds on Day 1, tears a pectoral muscle, and never comes back. 

I have always preferred the Camel. The Camel is not glamorous. It’s lumpy. It smells a bit weird. But it can walk across a desert for weeks without water. It is built for survival. It is “Antifragile”—a concept Nassim Taleb introduced that is essential for 2026. 

An Antifragile business doesn’t just survive chaos; it gets stronger because of it. 

When you are planning for 2026, are you planning for a perfect world? Are you assuming interest rates will drop, clients will sign instantly, and no one will quit? That is a Fragile plan. That is a Resolution. 

Or are you building a Camel? 

A Camel strategy looks different. It says, “We want to grow by 20%, but we are going to do it by increasing our retention, not just our acquisition.” It focuses on the “Invisible Assets”—the tacit knowledge of your team, the trust of your clients. 

We talk about “Growing Smart, Not Fast.” This means respecting the seasons of business. You cannot harvest in winter. If your team is burned out from Q4, you cannot demand a sprint in Q1. You have to Stabilize before you Expand. 

This January, instead of a revenue number, maybe your goal should be a “Resilience Number.” How much cash reserves do we have? How much “Tribal Knowledge” have we captured from our senior staff so that if they leave, the company doesn’t stumble? How much “Slack” have we built into the system? 

Optimization—the obsession with removing all slack—is the enemy of resilience. If every person is working at 100% capacity, you have no capacity for change. You cannot change a tire on a car that is moving at 100 miles per hour. You have to slow down to speed up. 

The Architect’s Toolkit: Three Systems for 2026 

So, if we aren’t making resolutions, what are we doing? We are installing systems. Here are three specific systems—Architectural moves—that will do more for your growth in 2026 than any pep talk you could give. 

1. The “Fire Yourself” Protocol

This is the hardest one for founders. If you want your company to grow, you have to shrink your involvement in the day-to-day. You have to fire yourself from a job every week. 

The Controller says, “I have to do the pricing approval because I’m the only one who understands the margins.” The Architect says, “I need to build a Pricing Calculator that understands the margins so my sales lead can do the approval.” 

When you fire yourself, you aren’t abandoning the ship. You are moving from the engine room to the bridge. You are liberating your brain to think about the horizon. 

The Action: Look at your calendar for last week. Pick three recurring tasks that sucked your energy. Do not just delegate them (that’s passing the buck). Architect them. Document the decision matrix. Build the tool. Hand it off. Verify it. Then never do it again. 

2. The “Verified Human” Strategy

In 2026, the internet is going to be a messy place. It will be flooded with AI-generated content, deepfakes, spam, and synthetic noise. Trust is collapsing. 

Your growth strategy cannot be “more noise.” It has to be “more signal.” 

We are doubling down on being the “Verified Human.” In an age of chatbots, we are putting real faces on everything. We are using video, not just text. We are picking up the phone. 

This is a system, not a vibe. It means changing your metrics. Instead of measuring “Call Duration” (efficiency), measure “Relationship Depth.” Stop hiding your phone number on your website. Stop using “noreply” email addresses. 

The businesses that grow in 2026 will be the ones that act as a safe harbor in the storm of artificiality. People are starving for reality. If you can systematize “Radical Humanity”—if you can make every interaction feel like a relief to your customer—you won’t have to chase leads. They will run to you for safety. 

3. The “Centaur” Workforce

Finally, we have to address the AI elephant in the room. The Silicon Valley narrative says “Replace everyone with bots.” The Luddite narrative says “Ban the bots.” 

The Third Way—the Human-Centered Way—is the Centaur. 

A Centaur is half-human, half-horse. In our context, it is a human employee amplified by AI. 

Your goal for 2026 shouldn’t be “Implement AI.” It should be “Upgrade our People.” We need to give our teams the tools to banish drudgery. 

At RTP, this is the philosophy behind our service evolution. We aren’t using automation to replace our market leaders; we are using it to make them Super-Empowered Professionals. We are teaching our staff to use AI not to do their thinking for them, but to handle the “Robot Work”—the sorting, the scheduling, the basic data analysis—so they can focus on the “Human Work”—the empathy, the strategy, the judgment. 

This creates a culture of “Employability for Life.” You aren’t threatening your team with obsolescence; you are promising them evolution. “If you stay here, you will become a Super-Empowered Professional.” That promise drives retention. And retention drives growth. 

The Quiet Victory 

Let’s go back to 5:00 AM. 

The reason the gym is quiet is that the work required to change is unglamorous. It is repetitive. It doesn’t look good on Instagram. 

Building a business that actually changes is the same. It isn’t about the big launch party. It isn’t about the viral marketing campaign. 

It is about the boring, unsexy work of documenting processes. It is about the difficult emotional work of trusting your team enough to stop micromanaging. It is about the financial discipline of building reserves instead of buying flashy toys. 

It is about showing up at 5:00 AM when no one is watching. 

The Resolution Crowd will be gone by February. The competitors who are chasing the latest “growth hack” will burn out by Q2. But the Architects? The Camels? The leaders who are building systems that honor their humanity and the humanity of their teams? 

We’ll still be here. 

We will be here in March, when the market dips. We will be here in July, when the new regulations hit. We will be here in December, looking back not at a year of frantic, failed wishes, but at a year of solid, structural engineered progress. 

So, keep your resolutions. I don’t want them. 

Give me a system. Give me a process. Give me a culture that values the “B-flat”—that human intuition that hears the problem before the sensor picks it up. 

Welcome to 2026. The gym is open. Mark and Ross are already halfway through their walk. And the opportunity is massive for those of us willing to do the work in the quiet hours. 

Let’s get to work.