Hey Reader,

Holiday dates:

• Office closure: Tuesday, 24 December 2024, to Friday, 10 January 2025. You can still make bookings for Jan 2025 strategy sessions or other services via the website.
• Part-time hours: 13 January to 22 January. Response times may be slower than usual, but I'll get back to you as soon as possible.
• Open as usual: all hands on deck from Thursday, 23 January 2025.

Thanks!

I wanted to sneak into your inbox and say a huge thank you for all of your support in 2024. I've enjoyed partnering with many of you to help your business succeed this year, and I appreciate your support of my business. I hope you have a wonderful and well-deserved break over the holidays. I know I'm looking forward to unwinding and getting some fresh air and sunshine to clear out the cobwebs.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a great time to reflect on how business has gone for you in 2024.

It’s something that I’ve always enjoyed doing as I’m able to look back at the goals I set for my business at the start of the year. It allows me to see what we’ve achieved in comparison to what was hoped for.

In this email, I want to share some of the questions that I find helpful when I reflect on the past year.

Here are the questions I use:

1. What are you most proud of this year?
2. Have you achieved any goals that you set at the start of the year?
3. Has your business reached any important milestones?
4. What could you have done differently?
5. What was your best-performing piece of content?
6. What will you be planning for the year ahead?

Writing down the answers to these will give you a chance to compare notes when you reach this time next year. This can be really encouraging as you’re able to see just how far you’ve progressed—when growth is incremental, it can sometimes feel like you're standing still even when you're taking sizeable steps forward. It can also help to identify any weaknesses that can be addressed in the next year.

My answers:

1. I've shifted to a lot of rapid, on-demand strategic and technical support this year and have surprised myself with how much satisfaction I've received from it. Helping clients quickly get to the heart of a problem, transform their thinking to reach a goal, or move a business forward on hyperdrive has been very rewarding for me and impactful for clients.
2. I upgraded the tech on my website, which meant a lengthy rebuild. A rebuild always comes with a healthy rethink, so it was strategically important for the business as well as being technically necessary.
3. While not a nice round number, my business has been open for 12 years this year. As all of you know, running a small business can be hard at times, so coming this far and still going is worth taking a moment and appreciating the continued viability of this venture. I've also well and truly come full circle back to my workflow strategy roots. I'm not building digital workflows to change the face of a global publishing company, but I'm using the same digital transformation skills I used to increase capacity and consistency across a global team at Nature in every small business I work with today.
4. I realised that when I simplified my services to reduce time-intensive proposals, I also reduced the visibility of my 360° marketing services. Marketing is not just a website. And marketing strategy must consciously include the website as your most valuable online asset. These are integral to each other and part of a cohesive system. I could do a better job of explaining this to clients and future leads so that web updates are strategically front-loaded, instead of reactive afterthoughts to new campaigns and launches. This will deliver better results for those clients and will help to boost their value and impact online.
5. ​Opportunities to increase Google ranking thanks to the 2024 leak.
6. I've been exploring the world of AI and building mini-apps to speed up my marketing and help me achieve consistency. I'm talking finely-tuned AI prompts to help get what I need faster without spending hours trying to get AI to work the way I want it to (because, seriously, it's usually faster to work from scratch than to get sidetracked with that malarkey). The apps are in test for now, but I'll release them for clients in Q2 2025.

What was your favourite moment of this year? Let me know I’d love to hear about it.

Have a wonderful break, and I look forward to connecting with you all in the new year.

Nic
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We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where we work and live, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation and pay our respects to Elders past and present. We celebrate the stories, culture and traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders of all communities who also work and live on this land.