Your guide to a meaningful end-of-year review

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Today’s talking point:

Too often we don't take time to sit and reflect on the wins and challenges we've faced. The end of a year is the perfect time to take stock and in this episode, I'm walking you through 4-step process for a meaningful end of year reflection. I'll also share some personal wins and challenges with you from my year.

At the end of every year, I do this four-step review. I don’t want you to do this just because I’ve shared it. No. You know your business best, there are no rules – but there is truly so much magic in reviewing what’s been. You can use this process at the end of the year, but I also recommend it at the end of a quarter or a month or even just a launch period. There is just so much magic and value in reviewing that time.

This is going to be especially beneficial and impactful for you if you’re the type of business owner who doesn’t tend to stop and celebrate the amazing things that you’ve achieved.

This is actually something we do every month in the Busy to Boss Academy and it’s SO impactful.

So let me walk you through this four-step review…

Before you begin

Let’s start with the game plan. First, you need undisturbed planning. This is a worthy investment of your time so take this episode, get yourself some quiet with no interruptions so you can really crack on.

Secondly, put your phone on ‘do not disturb’ mode – trust me, you’ll get SO much more done than you realise.

And finally, get ready to focus – a lot can happen in a year and that’s what we really want to take stock of.

So the purpose of this really is to identify what worked and what didn’t work in 2021 and what you really want to take into 2022 with you. And this process that I’m sharing with you today is taken directly from the annual planning parties that we do inside the Busy to Boss Academy so you’re getting a glimpse as to what we work on together to plan for our best year yet.

Step 1: Reflect

So we are going to learn from this year, replicate what worked and improve what didn’t work. And the first step to doing that is to really take a look back at the past year and ask yourself these questions…

What were the meaningful moments, milestones or emotions that you are deeply thankful for?

I encourage you to dig deep with this section and really focus on what are the things that you’re grateful for, what have you learnt from this year. It was another year where we were stretched and challenged in so many different ways.

So let’s kick off with some gratitude because it has such a huge impact on your mindset, your positivity and your energy.

Negativity grows and infects everything it touches and I’m not saying to disregard all the negative that happened in 2021, but we want to be bigger than our challenges and our problems.

Let’s look at the opportunities and really cherish the important blessings that came about in 2021. Let’s celebrate the things that maybe you didn’t feel like celebrating this year that were probably really important positive things that happened in your life.

Something I’ve learnt this year is putting things into perspective is so powerful because everything is about perspective. No matter how difficult or challenging our lives can become, there’s always someone who has a much harder time than we do so this first step is really giving yourself the gift of perspective.

Now with this, one final thing – spend time with this. You can do this month by month and write down all the positives both business and personal. It’s also helpful to look through your camera roll, your calendar and even your journal to help you jog your memory.

So go all the way back to January 2021 and start to list out the things that went really well. Let’s start on the professional side. In terms of your business, your career, what went really well? What milestones did you hit? What are you really proud of? List those things out.

And then repeat on the personal side. Instead of thinking about the way that you showed up, what did you do that really made you proud? What really worked for you? Maybe you were consistent at a certain thing, or you pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and really had a growth mindset. What really worked for you from a holistic point of view?

I highly recommend writing this out in your journal and getting really clear on what it was that lit you up. Maybe you’re thinking, ‘you know what – I did a really good job in the way I showed up’. Maybe that’s what you want to take into next year. And the same from a professional standpoint, what is it that you accomplished when you set your mind to it? When did you realize you did an amazing job?

What does that look like? If you can get super clear on that, it will help you know what you want to do more of in 2021.

Step 2: numbers

I know – it’s a stark contrast since we’ve just been leaning into gratitude. And that is done by design. I want you to grab your metrics from this past year and take a good hard look at what did work and what did not. Now, what do I mean by metrics? Well, here are some of the things you could look at reviewing:

Your Total and Monthly Revenue - how much did you make every month, how much did you make every quarter and how much did you make over the whole year.
Your Total and Monthly Expenses - how much did you spend on delivering your product? How much did you spend on coaching? How much did you spend on systems and tools?
And then I want you to go in and subtract your total expenses from your total revenue to give you your Total Profits. This is going to give you a great idea of what your net profits look like.
You also want to look at your Average Monthly Profits as well.
Where Did The Majority of Sales Come From? Take a look at your analytics - did they come from your website, did they come from referrals and word of mouth, did they come from a platform like IG, or a third party platform like Etsy? What was the tool that allowed you to get in front of the people that you serve and get them to say yes in terms of working with you or buying from you?
I also want you to track and measure your Email List Growth as well as your General Audience Growth - your social media pages, how many subscribers did you add collectively and individually to your individual platforms as well as metrics for each platform so for IG.
And then I want you to track the Total Traffic to your website and we also want to talk about your Traffic Channels (and where did your traffic come from?)

It’s often not until you look back over these numbers you can fully appreciate how far you’ve come. One of my Busy to Boss Academy students recently felt like she was experiencing a really slow period in business. But by going back and looking at her numbers compared to 2020, she was able to see evidence that she was doing better in terms of sales than she had in the previous year.

That is just incredible, but she only realised that when she looked back at her numbers. Looking at all of these things is going to help you paint such a clear picture as to what’s going to work and what to focus on next year, next month, or next quarter.

Make this part of the review your own and gather the data in whatever way works for you. It could be a spreadsheet, it could be graphs and charts.

This is the perfect opportunity to look at patterns, to look at correlations, to look at what is actually happening behind your business. Even if you’re just getting started, even if you haven’t made your first sale yet, getting in the habit of looking at your numbers and doing so in a deep and methodical way will make such a big difference when you become a seasoned business owner.

Knowing these numbers will allow you to also work out, for example, which social media or marketing platforms aren’t performing as well as you’d like. I want you to have a sustainable business that focuses on turning your followers into actual customers no matter what – no matter the algorithm changes, no matter what new shiny thing shows up in the online space.

I want you to be ready to adapt and pivot and use the same skills that you’ve used throughout your journey. That’s why it’s so important every year to take note of what’s working in terms of your marketing, what’s not working and also what’s working financially.

what if I haven’t launched yet?

Now you might be thinking ‘Holly, I’m launching my business next year, I don’t have a product to sell or even a website, what do I put in this section?’

In that case, you will look at your personal life. You’ll look at your personal finances. What worked? Maybe having a job worked this year. Maybe your side business really took off this year. Look at what actually made a tangible difference, what made you be attracted to starting a business and changing the trajectory of your life. All of that is so important.

How do you feel about these numbers?

Really take a look at these numbers and once you’ve got them, spend some time thinking about how you feel about these numbers. Do you feel good about how much money you made? Do you feel like you spent too much money? Did you not spend enough? Is your profit margin where it needs to be?

Really take a look at these numbers and just reflect on where you’re at. Then we’re going to move on to starting to get deeper into these numbers and see what they’re telling us because this review is not just about reviewing your performance. It’s about letting the data tell us things so that we can understand where we can actually make improvements.

3: Your one thing

In his book ‘The One Thing’, Gary Keller narrows in on a basic but compelling principle of business success and that is knowing your one thing. He says The ONE THING sits at the heart of success and is the starting point for achieving extraordinary results.

So what is this and how do you find it? Simple. Ask yourself, what was THE ONE THING you did last year that made everything else easier or unnecessary in your business?

So you’ve taken time to review your year, you’ve gone over your numbers and this now is about looking at your findings so far to look for essential clues that can help you zero in your focus.

This step is about taking a moment to interpret the data. What were the lessons that you learnt, what are the past experiences you’ve had throughout this year and really try to narrow down the single, most important action you took that led to the most significant results in 2021.

This is Pareto’s Principle (or the 80/20 rule) – please don’ skip this part.

If you feel stuck don’t worry - I asked this question on the group VIP Day I hosted recently and of the 5 business owners that were on that VIP Day, each of their answers was different.

One of them said her one thing was having structured launches and a process for her launches. Another said her one thing was that she stopped thinking of business as a hobby and started thinking of it as a business. Another said her one thing was having a structured daily and weekly routine. Another said her one thing was showing up consistently. And the final one said her one thing was being organised and creating spreadsheets to help with her back-end systems which made everything so much quicker and easier.

What was your one thing in 2021?

As part of this as well, I want you to break down your revenue by product or service. So to keep things simple, let’s say you’ve got four products, one may have brought in 30% revenue, product three was 50% revenue. So already that’s 80% of your revenue in two products. And then there are two other products that brought in 20% between them. What does that mean for you?

I then want you to do a similar thing for your time. So I want you to see if your time spent is relative to how much money you’re making. Let’s say you spend 60% of your time between product two and four and 40% of your time between product three and one. But that’s not reflective of how much money you made.

What this would tell us is that you could probably cut a couple of products because they’re not generating a ton of revenue and they take a lot of time and you could go all-in on two products.

So you’re simplifying in order to amplify. We don’t need to have a very specific, every minute of your time accounted for, but just roughly how much time are you spending on products or services?

There might be products that we spend a ton of time on selling or optimising, but they’re generating such a small percentage of revenue. We need to look at them objectively.

You’re really diving in as a CEO Here and looking at your business from a 50,000-foot perspective.

4: what worked/what didn’t

So you’ve looked at your numbers, you’ve analysed your metrics, you’ve figured out what your one thing was. For the final step, we’re going to document what that looks like.

Take some time to analyse what worked and what didn’t. Remember, the numbers don’t lie. What are they telling you? How can you continue leveraging what worked and how can you learn what to do in the new year differently?

This is where all that magic will happen and I want you to break it down into two sections: number one, what worked and what didn’t, and number two, what the heck did you learn?

It’s good if this section is lengthy because it shows that you learnt so much and you get to decide what you’re going to take forward. This is going to set the stage for creating a really profitable new year business plan.

And when you’re looking at this as well, think about your learnings. These are the areas in which you didn’t necessarily hit your goals or show up how you would have liked to, and you’re learning from it. It’s not failure, it’s not a mistake. It really is just, what could we have done better?

Start with professional again. What goals didn’t you hit? What didn’t you accomplish? What didn’t you see through till the end? What did you learn from this? Again, scribble down anything and everything that comes to mind.

Make sure you go all the way back to the start of the year and work through it.

And once you’ve done professional, let’s move on to personal. So how did you show up what didn’t work for you? What would you like to change? Were there certain things you just didn’t commit to doing or what did you do that you just really didn’t enjoy? What would you like to change about the way you personally approached 2021?

It doesn’t have to just be business-related. It can be just as a whole, as a snapshot of the year. What would you like to change? So this is really, really important because we can learn a lot from what didn’t work for us or what didn’t feel good.

Now at this point, hopefully, you have a notebook packed full of things from your finances to your wins and more.

Because 2022 and having success in 2022 whatever that looks like to you starts now. It really starts with getting clear on all these things that you are so far ahead of everyone else. So really, really think about that. You want to be further ahead than you were last year. Think about what that looks like in personal growth.

What did you realise about the way you showed up in 2021 that you want to change in 2022? What do you commit to changing in 2022? Do you need a mentor? Do you need long-term accountability and support? Do you need to commit to doing one thing and let go of those three other things? What does that look like for you?

Again, use this as a general prompt and go away and fill it out because the more work you do here, and the more you reflect, you’re going to be able to show yourself the path. We can’t do that for you. We can only unlock what already exists for you. Really taking that time to review your year is going to be so powerful.