While the holiday season is always packed with plenty of travel since I live a few thousand miles from my family, the best part of it professionally is that it gives me time to focus on my own business every year.
As my company has grown, I’ve quickly learned that it can be easy to put my business on the backburner, especially in a year like 2023 when Pyrois relocated as well as brought on some new clients. That made my yearly evaluation even more important this time around, so I could get a good look at what I can improve upon in 2024 and help my clients in the process.
An end-of-the-year evaluation may sound like a daunting and long task, but I’ve gotten it down to about a day’s worth of work. Here are the five steps I take to make sure that I am doing everything I can to make both my clients’ and my own business successful every year.
1) Find My Weaknesses
I’m one of those people who wants to hear the bad news before anything else, so I go over Pyrois Media’s weaknesses first to get that out of the way. Learning what you do wrong is the most painful part of the process but is probably the most necessary step in the process. This step includes looking at every project I did for clients in addition to in-house projects/marketing for Pyrois. I knew this would probably be a bit of a downer this year since I did indeed push internal Pyrois-focused work to the backburner instead of, and I wasn’t wrong.
2) See What I Did Correctly
After the pain that is seeing what I did wrong and can improve upon, it’s time for what I call the “sunshine and rainbows” step. In all honesty, I do a large part of this concurrently with the weaknesses part for many projects since I’m already looking over them. After getting the project evaluation part of this step out of the way, I sit down and review the notes I’ve taken then compare them to my weaknesses. Many times, those weaknesses I’m down on after the first step don’t look nearly as bad when I see my strengths as well
3) Write Down Short and Long-Term Goals
I’m always thinking about where I want my company to go, but my year-end evaluation is when I sit down and put dedicated time toward really thinking goals through. I break these down into monthly, quarterly, and yearly goals and always make sure that I have one that is even farther out than 365 days from now. Once I’ve figured out my goals, I write them in a few different places where I’ll see them often.
4) Come Up with a Plan
Once I know what I did well the previous year and what needs to be improved upon, it’s time to plan. The thing about running a company like this one is that you can’t plan everything down to the second because things often change throughout the year (or even the month). Social media platforms love to change their algorithms and humans are fickle so they’ll decide they’re bored of looking at something that has been popular for months, and that’s only two things that can put a kink in anything you’re thinking of doing. This means the plan can’t be full on locked-down “I’m doing this every month to get to x goal” but having an idea of how to approach every day or week can go a long way. For me, this overarching, tentative plan for the year gives me an outline that helps me come up with my weekly to-do lists.
5) Think It Over
Once I’ve looked over everything and written it down, I put it away for a few days and try not to think about it. It’s easy to read over what you’ve put together right away and have your brain imagine what you meant to say instead of what you wrote so looking over everything with a fresh eye helps make sure the plan makes sense. Just like every other project I double check, a few edits are made that make everything run smoother. Not surprisingly, the hours it takes me in January to do a complete evaluation saves me time in the future since I refer to it throughout the year.