6 Reflection Questions for Your Business Perfect for End Of Year | 102
As we approach the new year, it’s common to look back and think about everything that happened. Maybe you are inspired by everything you’ve accomplished, or maybe your business is feeling a little out of sorts. Either way, December is the perfect time for an end of the year reflection.
Honestly, I love a good reflection and mindset reset at ANY time of year, so I want to share some of the questions I asked myself as I looked back…and began planning the way forward that you can take into your own business whether you’re listening in December, March, July or October!
#1 What are you working towards?
In episode 101, I talked about how we are so good at planning 5-10 years ahead. Generally speaking, we can identify the big goals and dreams in the future. It’s the closer years that can be hard to envision because they contain more specific steps and details to meeting our larger goals. It’s hard to know how you’ll “get there”, you know?
Think ahead to 5-10 years in the future. Where do you see yourself? Where do you see your business? What impact will your business have? What big projects are you working towards?
Don’t forget to pause between each question to journal your answers and thoughts before continuing.
#2 What did you love most about your business in the past year?
I don’t think we ask this enough in our end of the year reflections! We tend to focus on the data, but I want you to lean into the feeling. What felt good? What did you enjoy doing?
Personally, I loved working 1:1 with small business owners. I liked getting my hands dirty strategizing and digging into the data. Honestly, it was so fun and refreshing for my business!
#3 What part of your business did you hate last year?
Now this is a powerful end of the year reflection question! Be honest with yourself here. It doesn’t matter if the thing you hate made you thousands of dollars - seriously. What made you die a little inside every time you had to do it? What needs to go in 2023? What needs serious revisions?
For me it was anytime I had to create graphics. Now thankfully I work with a graphics team, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t use Canva at least a few times a month. Next year, my goal is to move away from that as much as possible!
#4 What worked well this year?
Alright, I’ll let you dig into the data on this one. Think about new projects, products, services, and so on that really worked for your business. Maybe you hired a new coach, and you grew exponentially!
For me, collaborations worked really well for my business. I was able to reach new people and extend my reach in ways I never thought possible. It’s been extremely interesting to experience the snowball effect here. As I’ve reached out and created more collab opportunities others are seeing that I like to collaborate and are starting to invite me! Sometimes we have to go first and create the opportunities before others will start knocking on our door.
#5 Where did you get “stuck” this year?
This end of the year reflection question might be a bit more of a gut question. Think about places or areas of your business you felt “stuck” in. Maybe you were making the same mistakes or finding it hard to move forward.
In my own business, hiring was a “stuck” place. I didn’t have fully fleshed-out job descriptions, and it caused me to make several hiring mistakes that cost me time and money. We can definitely learn A LOT from our patterns.
#6 What marketing and sales techniques worked well for your business?
Get out your pen and paper for this one. Make a list of everything you sold in the last six to twelve months. How much revenue did each product or service generate? Now, rank these items by how enjoyable they were.
The idea here is that if you are making the most money on things you dislike, it’s time to start making shifts and changes!
Lastly, think about your marketing efforts this year. How did you market your business? What worked and what didn’t? You’ll want to consider both your feelings and the data here. Think about the visibility strategies you used to grow your audience, your lead generation strategies that you used to grow your email list, and your marketing strategies used to promote and sell your signature offer.
There’s a lot that goes into marketing our business, I hope this end of the year reflection can help guide you in the decisions and direction you take next year. If this year didn’t turn out exactly as anticipated, don’t get discouraged. Instead, use it as an opportunity to evaluate where you spent your time and energy - and how you can change in the upcoming year.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey there, I'm Jenzaia this is Market Scale Growth, a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs, looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, and flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Okay, so before we hop into the episode, I just wanna remind you to download my free guide to Facebook Targeting Audiences. It has been created specifically for teacher business owners, and I go through the warm, lookalike, and cold interest-based audiences that you need to have set up to be [00:01:00] running Facebook and Instagram.
There are checklists and brainstorming pages so that you know you have everything. But as an exciting special, I'm opening up some audience audit calls where you can hop onto a 15-minute zoom call with me, and you'll get my eyes on your audiences so that you can make sure not only you have all of the audiences, but they truly are perfect for your business. So head to marketscalegrow.com/audienceaudit to book your free audience audit Call today.
Okay, now into the episode.
Welcome. Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host Jenzaia and this is a Saturday strategy session. I absolutely cannot believe that I am sitting down to record the second last episode of [00:02:00] 2022.
I am like mind boggled that how quickly the year has gone by, but then also how much has just happened in 2022. And it has been a crazy, crazy year. This episode is going to be one of the hashtag Real Talk episodes. We're gonna be talking about some mindset stuff and specifically how to do an end-of-the-year reset and get yourself ready for the new year.
Now, I would like to just caveat this with you don't need it to be a new year for it to be a new you. Or to reset or to reflect on how things are going. I absolutely do not believe that the only time of year that you can do this kind of activity is December. I think it can be really, really helpful and healthy to look at these different pieces of your [00:03:00] business at different times of the year if a big change is happening. If you're feeling like you wanna pivot, if you feel a little bit lost in your direction, just slow down to speed up. So we're going to look at some of the bigger picture pieces, do some emotional feely kind of reflections, and then talk about numbers and forward planning.
So let's dive in with the bigger picture. What are you working towards? This is a huge question. What are you working towards? Not next week, not next year, but in five to 10 years. And if you listen to last week's episode, I think I talked a little bit about this, that we're apparently, according to things I've read, apparently, we're not great at imagining how the next year [00:04:00] is going to go, but we are pretty good at envisioning our life five or 10 years from now and making that happen.
So it's pretty cool when you like write a letter to yourself and then open it five years later and you realize so many of those things that you were wishing and have been wanting have actually come true.
And I think, I have no research to back this up or anything, but I think it's because when we have these big visions for our lives, we're able to filter things through the lens of "is this going to bring us closer to that dream, to that vision?" And if yes, even if it isn't something that really is in our short-term plan, we can make it happen.
And then it brings us closer to our vision. So I think that that's part of it and that we can't, we can't guess what is gonna be thrown [00:05:00] our way in the short term, but our decisions about what is thrown our way will lead us to that big vision long term. So what are you working towards? Where do you see yourself in five to 10 years?
And then I also want you to take some time if you haven't done this recently, to consider your business vision, your mission, and the two or three overarching goals that you're working toward. So just to differentiate these a little bit, your vision is the big impact that you want your business to make five to 10 years down the road.
So when you are envisioning where you see yourself in five to 10 years, you may have focused a bit more on the personal, but your vision, "how you're helping people", like high level, your mission is more specific and shorter term right now. " How are you making that vision come to life? How are you [00:06:00] impacting people today? What are you doing?"
And then your overarching goals are the big projects that you're working towards. Maybe you wanna launch a podcast or a course or fill your one-to-one spot. Those are gonna be the overarching goals that you're taking action steps towards. So that's your first step. After each of these steps, if you wanna pause, re-listen.
Get out a piece of paper, a pen, and actually take some notes. Write out these exercises like whatever you feel like is gonna be best for you, please do it. Now if you're driving or running or washing dishes, which are the three places that I most frequently listen to podcasts. Maybe don't pull out a pen and a paper, but schedule in some time to go back. Listen to this episode again with that pen and paper, and do these activities like actually work through.
Next is reflection. We're gonna add a little bit touchy-feely, not touchy at all, just feely. [00:07:00] We're gonna talk about our feelings. So the first question that I want you to think about is, what did you love most about your business in the last year?
For me, I absolutely love working one to one with businesses. I absolutely love strategizing and data and numbers and using that as a guiding post. So that's my absolute favorite, is working one-to-one with clients and supporting clients one-on-one.
Next question, what part of your business did you hate last year? Is there anything that needs to go? And for me, what did I not like last year? I really didn't like the struggle of hiring, and I talked a lot about this in episode 100. So go back and you can listen to lessons learned about hiring, but I really struggled with hiring. And so that was probably what I didn't enjoy. [00:08:00]
Unfortunately, I know that there is more hiring in my future, but that was the biggest struggle for me last year. What worked well this year? So things like selling methods, marketing strategies, that kind of thing. So what worked really, really well for me this year is collaborations. I loved collaborating with other service providers, and other teacher business owners.
And so that's what worked really well for me. And then the last question here is, where did you get stuck or notice yourself repeating the same thing over and over and over again? And for me, this is the hiring again. I got stuck. I made the same mistake with hiring multiple times where, again, I went into this in much more detail in Episode 100, but I just kept getting stuck on hiring somebody, but then not having a fleshed-out job description for them.
So, mm. So just to repeat those four questions, what did you love most about your business last [00:09:00] year? What did you hate or dislike most about your business last year? What worked well in the last six to 12 months and where did you notice yourself getting stuck or repeating the same things again and again?
Okay, the next section is on sales and marketing. You should have a list. And if you don't have this, then you need to create it. Of all the things that you've sold in the last six to 12 months, how much revenue did each one generate? So revenue is top-of-the-line dollar the gross amount before you take off any expenses or pay yourself or anything like that. So what did you sell and how much did you generate in revenue for each one last year? And maybe you're gonna pick a six-month timeframe, maybe it's a 12-month, whatever you're picking, just stick with it. And then once you've done that, I want you to rate them from one [00:10:00] to five, one being absolutely hated, dislike, no thank you to five. Love, love, love, the offer. So how much did you enjoy each offer and actually fulfilling that offer, making it happen for your clients?
So for example, one of the things that I sold the last year was Dreamless Essentials. My done with you course, it's kind of a hybrid between a group program and a self-paced course, and I generated just under 10,000 for it.
This. And I would give myself, how much did I enjoy it? I'm gonna have it like a two out of five. Yeah, two out of five. I really, really loved the first time I ran it where it was a group program and not any self-paced, but once the self-paced came in, I just didn't enjoy it as much anymore. I really love one on one.
Something, just pay attention to [00:11:00] if you're having feelings like I'm having to consider and to take into account.
Next question is, how did you market your business? And there are probably 50 different things that you could put on this list, so take some time. Think about all of the different ways that you marketed your business, including organic ways, social media, Pinterest, your long-form content, and take into consideration collaborations.
If you did any summits, conferences, IG lives with or without. Well, I guess a collaboration would be with somebody else if you served somebody else's community as a guest expert or did a bonus training or a live Q&A in someone else's course, or anything like that. And then any paid marketing that you did.
So maybe Pinterest ads, Google ads, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, all of them have ads, YouTube. [00:12:00] Maybe you participated in some giveaways or some paid other paid opportunities. So how did you market your business?
And then finally, how did you sell? Did you sell primarily through sales calls or discovery calls, consults, or whatever you might wanna call them?
Did you sell primarily through webinars, master classes, video challenges, or I guess video series or challenges? Did you sell through your Facebook group, or through email marketing? What are the different ways that you sold? If you have multiple different offers, then you probably sold them in different ways.
You may have relied a lot on referral marketing and relationship marketing, where you're building those relationships and being referred by word of mouth, which is primarily how my business runs, and I love it. I think that it's great for service providers to be using relationship marketing and referrals and networking to grow their businesses.
Okay, so [00:13:00] now let's get into some forward planning. The first thing I want you to do is to create your I-help statements. Now, my favorite way to do an I help statement is to actually start with a question and then go into your I help statement. So for example, my I help statement is, you know how when you search for dog food and then all of a sudden you're seeing dog food ads everywhere? I make that happen.
I help teacher business owners promote their online businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so they can have a bigger impact on the world. And the reason why I really like doing it that way is that people can relate to that question. Everybody has searched for something up on Google and then all of a sudden started seeing ads everywhere for it. They can all relate to that. And so when I say I make that happen for teacher business owners with courses and I help [00:14:00] them use Facebook and Instagram ads effectively to market their businesses, people can relate to what I'm talking about because they've had that experience. So you might wanna phrase it, something like that.
Or you might wanna just say, I help these people with this thing so that they can, how you're making their lives easier. What is your I help statement? And then the next thing I want you to take some time is to brainstorm what success looks like for you. And this might include changes to your vision, your mission, those goals that we talked about at the beginning.
It might be thinking about your schedule and if there are things that need to change in the number of days or the number of hours you're working or how much time off you're taking. So what does success look like? Like for you and I, this I kind of want you to think about in a shorter term, like in the next six to 12 months, what do you think success looks like in this season of your business?
And of course, we never know how the seasons of our business are going to [00:15:00] change when they're gonna change, but if you could envision it right now, what does success look like? Okay, so with that, what opportunities for improvement do you see? Maybe there are, and this can just be an idea, dump a big brainstorm, but where in your business are there opportunities for improvement?
So things like client work, workflows, your product suite visibility, your marketing strategy. Where do you see improvements? And this is probably going to. Come from and trickle down from what success looks like for you. And then the next question is, what plans or offers launches big projects do you have for the new year that you already know about, that you're already getting ready for?
And how do they fit in with what worked or didn't work with your business last year? So taking into consideration what did and [00:16:00] didn't work last year, making sure that your big plans, offers, launches that you have coming up in the new year, making sure that they fit in and are pushing you more towards what worked well last year and what improvements you wanna make this year and what success is really gonna look and feel like for you in this coming year.
So I think, I hope my goal is that these questions have given you a good ability to reflect on last year and to think about where your business is going to go in the new year, the last thing, and if you did nothing else, then this is the only thing that really, really, really, I think. I really want you to make some time to do, but what are the next three action steps that you are going to take?
If you did work through the rest of the questions with me, then likely you'll have some pretty [00:17:00] clear action steps that you wanna take to help move your business in the right direction. But even if you didn't do it, writing down your next three action steps is gonna move your business forward so that you can start working on those right away.
Thank you so, so much for being here this week. This, as I said at the beginning of the episode, is our second last episode of 2022. We have one more episode next week, and then we are actually gonna be taking three weeks off for the holidays. Giving me and my team some white space and just a break some time with families so that we can come back in the new year refreshed, ready to go and with clear heads, and having really enjoyed our holidays.
So thank you so much for being a listener. Tune in next week. We'll have another Saturday strategy session coming to your headphones.
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