Episode 95: How to Do a Year in Review (2.0!)
Welcome back to Making Good, the podcast for small businesses who want to make a big impact. I'm your host, Lauren Tilden. And this is episode 95.
Are you surprised to see another Making Good episode pop up in your podcast player just a couple of days after our last episode? Well in Episode 91, I announced my holiday gift to my amazing Making Good community, and that is double the episodes in December. Instead of the regularly scheduled for Tuesday episodes, there will be eight episodes coming out this month.
So yay, happy holidays. Today's episode is all about doing a year in review for your business. Taking a close look at 2021 before we close that chapter and move into 2022. This is a super important exercise that I want to encourage every single person listening to do. And in fact, I'll be doing one of my own that I'll share in a later episode.
But before we get into the episode, I have one thing to chat with you about first, and that is Making Good Happen.
What is Making Good Happen? Well, one thing that I know all too well, is that it's one thing to learn the things that will help our businesses thrive. And it's another thing entirely to actually take the actions we need to take. It's the action that changes things for us, not the learning by itself. And that's what Making Good Happen is all about.
Making Good Happen is a monthly membership designed to help you custom build a marketing plan for your business. And more importantly, actually take the steps necessary to see the results you dream of. Making Good Happen includes a private members only podcast, there will be short and sweet episodes every weekday ranging from many pep talks to journaling prompts to action items. It includes deep work sessions. So these are kind of like co working on Zoom but with no video or audio to minimize distractions. It includes monthly marketing plan creation, an online community of other like minded small business owners, accountability tracking of your most important deadlines, guest expert presentations each month, and more that is a surprise. So that we can all pick off 2022 at the bang Making Good Happen officially launches the first Monday in January and that's January 3 of 2022.
So if you want to start 2022 with an intentional strategic marketing plan that you actually execute, coming out with me and some other really amazing small business owners inside of Making Good Happen. And speaking of amazing other small business owners, I want to gush a little bit about the folks we have signed up already. We have jewelry, candles, makeup artists, live events services, photography, apparel, accessories, paper goods, calligraphy, and so much more. If you have a creative business you want to take to the next level by consistently taking marketing action join us in Making Good Happen.
The doors to Making Good Happen will be open until December 31. And after that, I'll be closing them for a while so I can focus 100% on the members who sign up in this first round. I have some fun bonuses in store for those of you who get signed up before January. So if you're interested, this is a great time to join. If you're new, you're ready to be a part of Making Good Happen head to makinggoodpodcast.com/mgh to sign up. Or if you want an email sent to you with all of the details you can go to makinggoodpodcast.com/happen I cannot wait to work with you inside of Making Good Happen.
Okay, so let's talk about today's episode, which is all about doing a year in review. There's a quote that doesn't seem to have a clear attribution, but I love the sentiment, so I'm going to share it anyway. The quote is this. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. This is so so true for a small business, it might feel like you never really get through your to do list. And as a result, it's hard for us to really step back and look at all that we've accomplished in a year. A year in review takes us through a process of really looking at what happened here and celebrating everything we did accomplish. More importantly though, doing a year in review helps bring some attention to our businesses. And that will help us make decisions for the future. That helps us look at what we've done, the way we've spent our time and energy and then decide what's right for us moving forward. So as eager as you might be to run straight into the arms of 2022 with a New Year's resolution and leave this year behind, I hope you'll consider first joining me in doing a year interview. Last year, I did an episode on my year in review process. And I think it's so important that I decided to update it and improve it and release it again this year. So before we jump into the process for those of you that this is a new concept for what is a year interview.
Well a year in review is exactly what it sounds like. It's an exercise of really looking at your last year in business and reviewing how it went. The good, the not so good and most importantly, what you learned. When you do a year in review, you're giving your business the time and attention and thought that it deserves. So you can celebrate the highs, learn from the lows, and figure out how to make things even better moving forward. I'm keeping this episode super short and sweet. So you can use the time you would normally spend listening to this episode actually doing the review. Remember, while this exercise might seem simple and straight forward, the important thing isn't that you listen to the episode, the important thing is that you take action and actually do this exercise. So get your favorite pen, a blank sheet of paper or a notebook and start reflecting.
So let's talk about my process for doing a year in review of your business. The first step is to make a quick timeline of the major events of 2021 that relate even tangentially to your business. Before we start asking ourselves the big broad questions about our year, it's really helpful to first have a bit of a bird's eye view of what actually happened this year. If we're not careful, we can put a lot of weight on the events in the last couple months, and then kind of forget about what happened in the earlier parts of the year.
When I do this process of outlining major events, I find it really helpful to actually look at my calendar to see what I did and what happened last year, then make a quick bullet point list of events in my business and life that will help inform my year in review responses. I'd have a really hard time doing this process without first making some notes for myself. A lot can happen in a year, which is why before you go into the questions that I use for year in review, definitely make this quick outline of events to create an overview that you can work from. Don't overthink it, just write some stuff down.
So as an example, here's what my outline for 2021 might look like. I tend to view life and work as one big category that are very connected rather than two distinct ones. So I've included some big personal family life stuff as well. But you can choose to approach this however you like. So my major events this year were that first our baby Casey James was born in April, and I started contending with being both a parent and a business owner simultaneously. I delegated most of the operations of Station Seven and Good Sheila to the amazing Mary. I got the COVID vaccine, two doses and a booster and continue dealing with COVID and retail shop. We experienced two big losses in our family. We have some major drama with our home remodel, which is still not done even that was supposed to be done in April, or all day long daily commutes for childcare. We dealt with a team member at the store getting COVID and figuring out how to handle that and communicate it to our community. We teamed up with a couple of other small businesses to host a community maker market to celebrate small businesses over the holidays. I continued with this podcast and I will hit 50,000 downloads before the end of the year, I explored a new platform social audio in the form of Clubhouse, I launched a new holiday collection for Good Sheila and had my biggest product launch ever. We ramped up for the holidays at Station Seven and we are aiming to beat last year's holiday season numbers TBD on that and I launched Making Good Happen, my new membership for people who want to take things to the next level in 2022.
When you refresh your memory and create this at a glance view of your year, it's time to get into the year in review questions. As you're answering these questions, try to think as comprehensively as possible. Yes, think about your business revenue and other quantitative measures of your business's performance. But if I were to guess, I would say that you probably started your business for reasons beyond just making money. So let's look at how our business affected those things to how did you feel in your business this year? What was your overall satisfaction with your work? What kind of impact do you think you're able to make? How is your personal life, or balance of time between your home life and your business, what about your mental health? The point of our year in review is to assess how things went in our business so we can celebrate and make tweaks for future but also to understand how our business is fitting into our lives overall, which is why it's important to think as comprehensively as possible about these questions.
Okay, so without further ado, here are the questions that I suggest you answer for your year in review. There are eight, number one, what went well. Number two, what didn't go well. Number three, what do I want more of next year? Number four, what do I want less of next year? Number five, what did I consistently take action on this year? Number six, where did I struggle with consistently taking action this year? Number seven, what am I proud of? And number eight, what did I learn?
If you happen to do this exercise with me last year, you may have noticed that there are a couple of new questions this year and those are what did I consistently take action on this year and where did I struggle with consistently taking action this year? If you've been listening to my podcast episodes this year, you probably heard me talking about action. I believe that taking action is the number one factor related to the results we see. So I've added these two questions in to reflect on where we consistently took action and where we lacked the consistency that may have led to us seeing different results.
So to recap, here are my suggested questions for your year in review. One, what went well, two, what didn't go well? Three, what do I want more of next year? Four, What do I want less of next year? Five, What did I consistently take action on this year? Six, where did I struggle with consistently taking action this year? Seven, what am I proud of, and eight what did I learn? I think you will find going through this process to be super powerful. If you're like me, you'll come out of it feeling really proud of yourself in a way that we can forget to be when we don't take this time to intentionally reflect and think about our year.
This is the time of year for planning, but I really don't think we can make a fully informed plan for the year to come without the information about the current state of things. This exercise helps us have a really good sense of what this year looks like. So we can make the best, most intentional plan for the year to come. So now if you're thinking okay, I did my year in review. What's next? Well, you might choose to share this content with your audience or save it for posterity so that you can reflect on it in the future and see just how far you've come. The year in review is designed for you, but if you do want to share it, I think your audience would definitely love to hear it. And then if you're ready to use what you learned in your year in review to plan for next year, I have some good news. Next week I'll be releasing an episode about creating a plan for the year to come. Make sure you're subscribed to making good so that that episode pops up for you in your feed.
So did you do your your year in review? Let me know on Instagram at @LaurenTilden. I would seriously so love to hear from you, read it and see what you learned.
You can find the year in review questions on the show notes page at makinggoodpodcast.com/95. Finally I would so love to work with you inside of Making Good Happen my brand new membership kicking off in January to reserve your spot before the doors closed for a couple of months. Make sure you're signed up by December 31. You can find the details at makinggoodpodcast.com/happen, or if you're ready to sign up head to makinggoodpodcast.com/mgh. Thank you for being here and for focusing on making a difference with your small business. Happy Holidays and talk to you next time.