I wanted to do a business recap of 2015. It was one of the hardest years I have had in business yet and yet, it was one of the years in which my company grew the most and I grew the most in the position of owner. So I wanted to walk through some of the things I did that made a huge difference in my time, my sanity and my business over the course of 2015 because some of them were really influential in helping me grow and set the course for 2016 in the best possible way.
Hired Outside Help for Outlining
One of the things I did was that I hired somebody to help me find topics and outline ideas. So, someone was working with me to prepare outlines for blog posts, to prepare the statistics that backed up various pieces of blog posts. It's not always possible to outsource everything that you are managing but for me outsourcing pieces of it was helpful. So for example, I had a really bad experience trying to hire other freelance writers to work for me. It was almost catastrophic and it was something that I ultimately had to cancel and sort of pull out off completely, but discovering that someone could help me put together the components of my blog posts for my clients and my own site did make my life a lot easier and allowed me to work faster.
Recorded and Transcribed
I also shifted how I write. So I started using Dragon Naturally Speaking, Then I realized that my transcriptionist was actually more accurate than using Dragon, I started transcribing all of my blog posts and it allowed me record a lot of materials. I realized that speaking for two to three minutes would a yield a 500-700 word blog post and some of my longer webinars and trainings where I talked for an hour would yield 10,000 or more words. It was a great way for me to realize that I can speak a lot more quickly than I type and saved me a lot of carpal tunnel pain as well. So that sped up my process by at least three times and means I can produce way more content a lot more quickly because I am still making use of that outsourcing tip of having people come up with topics and key words and outlines for my blog posts.
Fired Clients
I also fired three clients who were not a fit for my business and this freed up my time. I got a lot better at seeing the red flags for bad clients. Unfortunately, I had to learn those lessons the hard way in 2015 with some really disastrous clients that I should have never taken on in the first place, but now I am a lot more sensitive to who I work with and saying no to people that are an obvious poor fit. I truly found that firing people who weren't right for me not only freed up my time but it seemed to open the door for better, higher-paying clients to come my direction as well.
Acted Like a CEO
I started acting more like a CEO. As a freelancer for a couple of years, I was mostly doing everything by myself. So when I had to bring team members on and manage other individuals, it was a strange adjustment for me because I had no management experience. I was constantly asking myself the question, "what would a CEO do?" and that meant sometimes not being afraid to let people go who were not a fit. That applies to not only my clients but for people who were working for me. If it was no longer a fit or if the project had concluded, it was time to treat that as a rational decision made by someone in the CEO position so that I could move on. In every case, thinking about it like that made it easier for me to make some of those difficult decisions.
Turned Down Projects
Likewise, I turned down projects. I realized very quickly when a project was a poor fit and got out of it, and in many cases, I never even started the project. For example, someone would reach out to me for a quote or they were interested in hiring me and I could just tell it was going to be an aggravating project or the client had expectations that were too high or a budget that was too low. Instead of giving it a shot, I never started those projects to begin with and turned them down.
Exercising the power of saying no not only saved my sanity but also my time because you can easily get sucked down the rabbit hole doing a whole lot of work for people who don't value the services you provide. I focused exclusively on my premium clients and turned away the rest. Of course, I got people pushing back on my higher rates or wanting me to do more work within the scope of the project than we talked about, but I didn't back down on that and that ended up being a great decision. It felt really freeing to have clear boundaries.
Used Enounce
A huge investment that I wish I had made earlier. You know, this was only like $29, maybe even less for a year to use this software and I used a trial for a week first to see if it actually made sense. I only used this in the last quarter of 2015. That being said, it also saved me 100 hours. I am the type of person who watches online videos a lot so I am always enrolled in online courses, I am always educating myself about different facets of business. If I need to go learn about Facebook ads, I'll go take a course on Udemy or from a Facebook Ads Pro. And so for me, I have been in graduate education for so long that it almost bothers me to listen to people speak at normal pace. I like listening to things twice as fast. It keeps me more focused and I take better notes that way. Sometimes that's an option on YouTube, sometimes that's an option on sites like Udemy, but not broadly across the internet. You can't always rely on that if you are buying somebody's product. So I invested in this software called Enounce and it allows you to speed up online video pretty much as much as you want. You can also slow them down with this software too.
Personally, it saved me more than 100 hours, and I don't know about you but for just a couple of months at the end of 2015, saving me 100 hours is huge. There is a premium version that allows it to work on any video on your computer. I just paid for the version that links to any online videos, and it was really beneficial for me, I am still using it today, I love it a lot. So, it also made it easier for me to incorporate learning into my schedule because if a module was an hour long and I couldn't really rationalize spending an hour on it, I'd watch it at twice the speed and only spend 30 minutes. And honestly, I was more engaged at twice the speed, I took better notes, I had better outcomes because of what I learned. So, Enounce was a huge turning point for me, and for less than $30, a crazy, insane, great investment.
Bear in mind, I have since converted to Mac, so Enounce doesn't work on Safari or Chrome. I learned that the hard way, so I've had to reduce all my learning videos to Firefox!
Cashed in on Educational Opportunities
Speaking of learning, I cashed in on sales and promotions of online courses. Whether it was a big name mentor who was selling a premium program, I would wait to get as much benefit out of it as possible. I might buy it from somebody else who was promoting the program because that third party might be offering someone else's coaching set or home study program, but they'd also throw in coaching hours with them or they'd also throw in their own bonus program. That was a great thing for me to do. I also cashed in on any sales that Udemy had. I would wishlist all the courses that I wanted to take or that I wanted my team members to take and then when a $9 or $10 sale popped up, I would just go in and buy them all at once, and that worked really well. My whole team and I all benefited from that.
Awesome Team Members
Speaking of team, I found amazing team members in 2015. It was the first time that I really outsourced a significant amount of my business and I outsourced them based on task, work ethic, and project type. Some of the best virtual assistants that I hired in 2015 were from the Philippines. They are just phenomenal, because they go above and beyond, follow directions extremely well, and are really committed to making my business a success. They sped my process up significantly and saved me a lot of headaches and it allowed me to take things off of my plate, so that I could focus on bigger picture things.
Switched Invoicing
One easy change that I made was I switched every client to weekly or biweekly invoicing. In the past, I had just invoiced people as soon as I was done with the project but I tried to roll all of my clients over to a recurring monthly contract and then I would just invoice them once a week, or once every two weeks is more common. It cuts down the administrative time I spend on invoicing issues. I also switched all of my contractors over to only sending invoices every other week because that was taking so much of my administrative time to sort through and people were making mistakes and not submitting things properly. Only having to deal with that every other week meant that I just had to set aside a Friday every two weeks where I could address all the invoice issues. So, that made things a lot easier, I wasn't tempted to go off track when I was working on other projects and think about invoices because I had a specific day set aside for doing it.
Increased My Rates
I also increased my rates. This can be terrifying to do but doing this alone does project your level of confidence and competence. So if your clients are happy with what you are doing and if you do amazing work regardless of what it is, your clients are not going to have a problem when you raise your rates. In fact ,some of them expect it or, you know, saying that they thought you'd raise them before you did. That also brought better clients into my world. It's true that 80% of your work comes from 20% of your clients and you want that 20% of your clients to be really high quality. Raising my rates allowed me to do that and it became a lot easier to say no to people who were not a fit. I also asked all of my current clients for referrals. So great clients, they tend to refer other amazing clients to you and it's much easier to make an introduction when this person has already done some of the leg work for you. So, getting on the phone or Skype or sending an email to a total stranger is easier when your already happy client has given you a big thumbs up.
That's a lot, but I think that is everything that I felt like happened in 2015 that made it a real success and helped to set us up for an even better year in 2016. 2015 was really difficult because there were a lot of lessons learned with regard to hiring team, hiring mentors, my time, attempting to hire other writers, and that being said, now that we're out of the eye of the storm, there were also a lot of amazing things that happened in that year. So, be open to your own growth and what you can achieve and succeed within a year. Taking that time to go back and reflect on what you accomplished can make you feel really empowered and also give you great strategic planning for the year ahead.
Source : articlesbase.com
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