It's Been A Year...
This year started with us wholly focused on shaping the business to work better commercially. We were lucky to see amazing growth in 2020 with so many brands having to pivot their marketing strategy or move their offline endeavours to on and professionally we were feeling super strong. Personally was a different story.
Like so many people, the pandemic and copious severe lockdowns had really taken its toll on our mental health. Whilst we were vehemently trying to ride the wave of the previous year’s success, we desperately needed a personal time out. And as a result, Q1 of the year was really challenging for us. The only time we had had together was via Zoom, we were both getting frustrated with one another and work was (thankfully) packed. Come March, we both hit our breaking point. Cue lots of deep, tearful chats, open communication and laying everything out on the table.
What came from that exercise was ironing out exactly what was making us both happy, what was frustrating us both and what we wanted to do more or less of and what we realised was that for the business to really grow and develop, we needed to lean more on other people and grow our team. It was an incredibly cathartic experience that led to us starting to work with a legendary commercial consultant, Adam Wright. Through several weeks of homework from him, fleshing out our ideas with him and working out where we needed to sharpen the business to make it more profitable for us both in monetary terms and for our sanity.
So we came up with a few things:
We create an Inner Circle of Doers to ensure we always have a makeshift team to lean on for bigger client projects
We make it easier for clients to work with us with clearly mapped out packages
We hire a marketing assistant to help us grow our business as well as support on client projects, freeing up our time to work on business development
And so we did it.
We put together a formidable team of marketeers to make up our Inner Circle.
We mapped out clear packages to work with the needs of our clients.
We hired Allie Smith to support our marketing efforts and who has fast become the greatest asset of our business.
By doing these relatively simple things, our business started to drastically change. As a result, we felt more confident than ever to take on bigger projects, felt wholly supported for all client work that was coming in and we were able to more consistently focus on business development and our own marketing, which in turn has positively impacted our bottom line.
It’s not been an easy year by any stretch but it’s been the year we’ve seen the most development and growth, as though our business has gone from its infancy to being more adult. Collaboration was the key to this. Having the right team in place has been our saving grace of 2021 and we can’t wait to get stuck into a new year together with them.
Nobody gives you a manual for running a business. We often joke that every day is a school day as business owners and this year that statement has proved to be more true than ever before. Have we made mistakes? Absolutely. Will we continue to do so? Almost definitely. Have we learnt from everything that’s happened along the way? More than you would believe.
And we’ve learnt from our 2020 burnouts. We’re both making sure that we take time off this Christmas. Proper time with our friends and family. And the plans for 2022 will definitely be benefitting from it!
Check out some of our 2021 client marketing projects here.
