Some years ago, I started to notice a pattern in my business. Year after year, I would do the same mistakes, and feel the same sense of defeat because I was asking less than I should have because I had no idea where my clients were coming from. One day, I told myself “that’s enough!” As the year was ending, I sat for a whole day in front of my social media analytics, testimonials, and profit and loss document and started analyzing every single thing.
The surprising thing that happened when doing an annual review
Something amazing happened when I sat down with all the data and information: I saw my business from afar and that gave me so much clarity for the year to come. So, now the annual review is a must for me and I invite my clients to do one too.
Five reasons why you need to do an annual review:
Coming to think about my clients’ experience and mine, I realized there are at least five reasons why an annual review is an absolute must in your business (and honestly in your life too). Here are the five reasons.
Doing an annual business review means looking at the numbers of what you have done: your income, followers, and actions you have taken to promote yourself and your business. It’s an exciting way to look at all the activities you have performed for your business in the past year. Oftentimes we run after the things we have to do as entrepreneurs and forget about the whole picture. The annual business review gives you that big picture that you can leverage for the year to come.
2) It allows measuring how far you’ve come
When you look at where you were at the beginning of the year and where you are now, you can finally appreciate how far you have come. Maybe you won’t feel like you have reached your ambitious goals yet but that’s ok because you can still see how much you have accomplished. This gives you a great deal of confidence and no matter what others say, you need lots of that to run a business.
3) It’s the greatest declutter
One of the most remarkable outcomes of the annual business review is decluttering. When you do a yearly business review you automatically discover the things that don’t work for you. Those might be things you don’t enjoy doing, activities (or people) that drain you, lead generation activities that actually didn’t bring any new leads. Once you have identified those, you can get simply through them out the window and focus on what really works. This means having: more time for what you enjoy doing; less stress and more money.
And speaking of having more money, because you have looked at what works and what doesn’t, after an annual business review you know where the money came from. Once you have found that out, all you need to do is double down on that and voilà, more money is coming into your business account.
5) If self-care had a face it would this one
I used to take a day off to do my annual business review, but now I try to book myself a hotel for a couple of nights. It’s not something I manage to do every single year, but at the very least I get a cup of tea, some chocolate, put on some millionaire music, and look at my business with relaxation and happiness. Slowing down is one of the greatest ways of taking care of yourself.
Now, you know why an annual business review is the best thing you could do for yourself and your business at the end of the year. Have you ever done one? Let me know in the comments.