I’ve created a short series of audios which answer questions I have been asked from people who have creative minds and a lot of ideas.
You can find them on Substack.
Episode 7 – Why should I bother reviewing my year in business?
Transcript
Welcome back to Questions from Creative Minds.
And this question actually applies to everyone who’s running their own business. It is why should I bother reviewing my year in business? So should you actually bother? You know, does it make any difference?
Well, yes, of course, it’s a good idea. It is a good idea to do it because it helps you to step back and look at the whole year, see how it’s gone. You know, because a year is a long time. If you think back to what you were doing at the start of the year, it’s probably not the same kind of combinations of things that you’re doing now, if you’re self-employed.
So at a basic level, I would normally suggest thinking about what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what did you learn? Whether something went well or whether it didn’t go well, there will be things that you learnt from that.
It’s also a great time to go back and look at all the different things you did, also to gather or review client feedback. Because it is so easy to just do stuff, finish projects, get on with the next thing without actually celebrating the successes or capturing ideas. Because quite often you’ll finish something and it will give you lots of ideas for new things. It might make you realise that a particular process doesn’t work and that you need to… You need to tweak something like that. And if it’s that it’s a kind of project or a piece of piece of work that you do quite often, it might be that you can you can see how you can improve that kind of thing the next time you do it.
And going back and looking back over your year. Also, it’s a great opportunity to thank the people who helped you or who inspired you during the year. Because, again, you sort of you kind of finish things. Maybe you stop working with somebody for a while because you’re you’re working on something else. But there’ll be loads of people during the year who who’ve helped you, whether whether you’ve paid them for that or not, whether they’re whether they’re officially collaborators on a project or something or suppliers. or whether they’re just people who are around you, keeping you going or inspiring you as you go through your year. It’s a nice idea to be able to thank them at the end of the year.
And yeah, so I mean, those are the sort of basic things that I, whenever I’ve finished projects,
that’s always something that I tend to do to review. But as well as all of the basic things, things I mentioned earlier, so what went well, what didn’t go so well. It might be that there are areas that you want to dive into in a bit more detail.
So, for example, you might want to have a good look at your finances, depending on where your financial year starts and ends. You might want to have a look at the people who you’ve been working with – whether that’s people you work with whether that’s clients whether that’s suppliers whether that’s just people you have around you generally in your communities, maybe thinking about where you got your clients from do you know where your last 10 clients came from for example – so that you can do you can do more of that sort of marketing activity
What kind of activities did you do that you really loved? What kind of activities drained you?
And you just thought, do you know what? I’d love to be able to outsource that if I could afford to pay someone else to do that. Or actually something maybe you don’t need to do at all. Maybe you just assume that you do. There are loads and loads of different things that you can look at.
And there are all sorts of people offering free guides, free lists of questions at this time of year. So you can find all sorts of different things online that you can use. I also have plenty of ideas of these sorts of things. So if I can be of help with that, you can always drop me a note and either ask questions or if you’ve got a specific need for a template, if you want some directed questions that you can ask yourself, then let me know and perhaps I can send you something.
Once you’ve done that review and you’ve looked at all of those topics, it might be a nice idea to go through them with someone else – so obviously if you’ve got a coach that’s a great time to in a coaching session it’s a great time to go through that. If you’re working with a mentor or if you have an accountability partner or a co-mentor that you’re working with and then you can both go through those in your businesses and and look at how the year went and and then decide, you know, what do you want to do next year.
Because that’s the next step once you’ve had a look at how it went, what is there that you might want to change next year, what do you want to keep the same you know – because if you’ve had a great year it doesn’t mean you need to change anything
So those are my kind of initial thoughts on reviewing your year. If you want to ask me any questions, you can get in touch at ninalenton.co.uk. Thank you for listening.