Can you believe we’re halfway through the month of December already? The shorter days and longer nights in the northern hemisphere offer a time to reflect, assess, and most importantly, celebrate.
Your business deserves this too.
The end of the calendar year is a wonderful time of the year to look at all that has happened with your business throughout the past year. To do that, I'm inviting you to create a year-in-review for your business.
Last year at this time I talked about why this process can sometimes be difficult for some coaches, healers or other creatives, especially if their financials are not where they’d hoped they’d be. In that article, I offered a powerful process to shift your focus, gain fresh insight and renew your sense of possibility going into the new year.
This week I’d like to offer you a simple way to create a one page business year-in-review document for 2021.
It’s Not Just About the Numbers
This is about more than just gathering numbers and facts, although that’s what involved in completing the exercise. Doing this year in review offers you so much more.
First, it gives you the chance to see and look clearly at all that happened during the past year. There’s likely so much on your plate, it’s easy to forget all the love and care and tending you’ve given to your business. Having the chance to see that all in one place is powerful.
In addition, this also gives you the chance to face the reality of where your business is. It lets you see it for what it is and not where you worry it should be or wish it were. Accepting where your business is now helps you come into a healthier relationship with it, and facing it enables better decision making and opens the doorway for so much love.
The Year-in-Review
A year end business review can be in any format you’d like. If you'd like a place to gather and note your information, here’s a simple PDF worksheet that can help. Or you can simply find your favorite pen and a journal or open a blank document on your laptop, whatever feels most fun to you.
Gather and record the following:
Number of clients served (paid or unpaid or volunteer - they're all clients)
Source(s) of clients
Number of discovery/sales calls conducted
Total income and sources
Total expenses along with any exceptions
Names on your email marketing list (beginning of the year, end of the year)
Networking events, conversations, collaborations started this year
Major projects you started this year to help your business
Examples of things to include here could be setting up an email marketing system, creating a coaching agreement, developing a cancellation/refund policy, etc.
Any special marketing campaigns or programs you ran
Any courses/books/learning you did for your business
Add in any graphs, stickers or just plain fun graphics
Miscellaneous fun facts
Wrap up with a summary statement including any insights, feeling states, things of note
Once you've gathered all your numbers, record them. If you're not using the worksheet and if you’re a little like me, you can have fun formatting, decorating or creating your presentation. After all, it’s going in front of the CEO – you! <3
Take Note
Your mind may choose to be unhelpful during some or all of this exercise. For example, you might have the thought “Oh my goodness, I only had two payments in the entire month of March! Two!” Or “I didn’t have any new clients for three months!” Or “My email list didn’t grow at all!” All these types of thoughts and many others are normal and to be expected.
Remember that you don’t have to change anything about the way you’re feeling as you pull this together. There’s room for it all.
Moving Toward Acceptance
One of the best things doing a year in review helps us with is strengthening the foundation of acceptance for your business. So much of the culture tells you that you should be able to grow your business exponentially and almost overnight. This just isn’t the reality for most coaches, healers and creatives. If you can accept and love your business exactly exactly the way it is you’ll be in a much better position to make resourced decisions about what’s needed next.
When you finish your review, celebrate! Celebrate what you did, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, and what happened in your business, big and tiny. And, by the same token, have compassion for yourself and your business for the things that didn’t happen or the things that didn't happen the way you wished they would have.
What did you discover doing your year in review? What will carry you forward? I’d love to hear what arose for you!
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
See Your Business in a New Light
For a more right-brain approach to seeing your business, consider booking an intuitive business energy reading with me.
An intuitive business energy reading lets you be seen deeply. It offers you an affirmation of what's working well in your business and ushers in clarity about what needs attention and how that's impacting you and what you want to accomplish right now. You'll leave with deeper insight as to what's needed and a practical next step to help move you forward.
Click here for more information