The turtle had it right. A slower pace of deliberate steps is the right way to go as companies head into this new year. Incrementalism allows us to monitor and adjust course as needed. Minor improvements in how you promote and market your business in today's economy are affordable and can pay off big down the road.

So what are some improvements a company can make that won't break the bank but are effective in growing business and promoting a company? Here are my Top 5 pics for 2011:

1) Optimize your existing website: Make sure that your site can be found in a random search by customers already intent on buying your product or service. It takes less of your budget to go where momentum lies versus creating entirely new customers.

2) Electronic Email Marketing: If you have an Excel database of your customers' names and email addresses, and you are not communicating to them often- you are leaving money on the table. It takes less budget to grow business from existing customers than to churn and burn through new ones (assuming your product or service applies). There are several companies that provide user friendly email marketing. I use ConstantContact for my clients and for myself. 

A New Year brings great opportunity. There's the opportunity to assess how things went last year (successes and failures) and the opportunity to prepare and plan for the next year based on what we learned and the new conditions we find ourselves in. 

This process is common in business and is certainly a healthy exercise for personal goal planning as well. I recently read, Jim Collins' book, Good to Great. While published in 2001, the content is revealing, motivational and appropriate for the first book review of the year.

Collins posed the challenge, "How can a company (mediocre or even a bad company) not born with great DNA achieve eduring greatness?"

Like a research scientist, Collins approached this question 

analytically and without bias. He assembled a team and set out to report on the findings-not prove a theory. His mission was to identify those Fortune 500 companies who had made the transition  from good to great and maintained it for a period of 15 years. The total project summarized in the book consumed 10.5 people years of effort.

In order to qualify, companies had to be good to great indendent of their industry. They had to generate stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of 7x in that 15 years. They compared other similar companies who didn't make the leap for contrast to determine what made the difference. The research included interviews with key executives, stock performance, all published articles for the past 15 years, acquisitions, mergers, layoffs, financial reports, etc.

It took Collins' team 5 years of analizing the histories of 28 companies. They poured through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews. There were only 11 Fortune 500 companies that met all the criteria including Abbott, Nucor and Kroger. Two sets of Comparison Companies were selected acting as Control Groups.

Here are some of Collins' key findings:

1) For all 11 companies, there was no one "big thing" or "ah ha" miracle moment that defined their break through to greatness. It was interlocking pieces that built on top of each other.

2) Ten out of the 11 good to great CEO's came from within the company. They were not outside hires.

3) There was no link between exective compensation and greatness. Money did not matter.

4) The leaders of the good to great companies were all cut from the same cloth. They were all "Level 5" types of leaders who possessed a paradoxal mix of humilty and professional will.

5) Good to great companies put their best people on their biggest opportunities not their biggest problems.

6) Greatness is not defined by size. It takes no more effort to build something great than it does to build something good.

7) When in doubt-don't hire. Keep looking. The right people make the difference.

8) Good to great companies take the Hedgehog approach. They see what is essential and ignore the rest. They are self aware and brutally honest about what they are the best at and what drives their economic engine.

What makes Good to Great an awesome read are the real stories about the companies. One story compared Walgreens to Eckerds. Walgreens realized that to be the best, they had to be the most convenient drugstore with a higher profit per customer. Therefore, Walgreens closed their inconvenient locations, replaced them with convenient ones and pioneered drive through pharmacies.

Even though Good to Great unfolds on a large Fortune 500 scale, the take away lessons are applicable even in small business. Timeless principles, core strengths and incrementalism win the day. Every good to great company embraced the Stockdale Paradox: "You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end regardless of the difficulties and at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality."