The Results After a Year of Rest - 2021 Recap
Episode 601: Show Notes
A year is a long time, and you forget some things that happened throughout the year. We consistently overestimate what we can accomplish in a short period of time, and dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in a long period of time. A lot can happen in a year! We’re taking a walk down memory lane to discuss the things that have happened throughout the year!
While we feel mostly like the same people, we’re coming from a different starting point at the end of 2021 than at the beginning. There’s some irony to the decisions we made this year. This year, we decided not to grow, but to maintain the business that we had. We needed a breather. Despite that being true, we grew topline revenue by nearly 20%. The lesson? We don’t give rest the credit it deserves! That period of rest was a lot more significant than we give it credit for and it prepared us for easily the busiest year we’ve ever had.
The Highs and Lows of 2021 (and how we almost sold part of our company!)
Kicking off 2021 with a season of rest has also been important for us to see what was necessary to run our business, and what we want from it. It also made us realize that we wanted to bring in another partner! So we got our company evaluated, and even considered selling a third of our business. Ultimately, all parties agreed to not move forward with the sale! From day one, we’ve had a specific look and feel for every piece of content we have produced. But this became labor-intensive, so we outsourced a marketing team. That didn’t last very long! It wasn’t working for anyone involved, but we knew we needed support to bring it back in house. So we brought the Marketing Team back in house by bringing in Abagail’s husband to assist us. His role has grown, and it’s been a great decision! Support we’re in control of versus outsourcing is just completely different.
Project Management and Expert Support
We’ve created new SOPs and built out a new project management system in order to run things smoothly from the inside. While it’s important to be in control of your own systems, having a project manager goes a long way to support your efficiency! One of the other things we did to maximize our output was to get a tax strategist involved. We weren’t financially ready when we hired a tax strategist. But six months down the line, we were! You need to have enough money to be able to implement the tax strategies that the team shares with you. This was still a really beneficial decision for us and we’re glad we did it.
Another amazing thing we did this year was to reinvest in coaching after taking two years to get in tune with our own intuition. One of the things that’s come out of that, that we’ve been really strategic about how to add value to our co-op. Our favorite way to do this, because it’s our zone of genius, is the subscriber-only podcast that we offer to our members. We have loved seeing the 54% rise in membership revenue that has followed. In the same scheme that we’ve wanted to bring marketing in-house, we’ve wanted to bring income in-house, and that’s why this year we have cut ties with some of our affiliates. The result? We’ve earned three times the affiliate income that we did last year!
Lessons Learned from Intentionally Deciding that Less is More
Living and working as the most authentic versions of ourselves gave us an opportunity to refocus. What became really clear was that our mission has never actually changed, and our values have been really strong, but we haven’t always let that light shine! This is what lead to us making a change to our signature program, and ultimately sunset Strategy Academy to launch the Incubator in October! The launch of this product DOUBLED our MRR in just five days and set us up to scale going into 2022.
One Big, Major Personal Update that's Going to Change our Lives Forever
With big growth comes big restructuring! We’re so happy we decided to work with clients again after 4 and half years. We have completely restructured our work chart, from just two to seven employees. We don’t know everything, and it’s great to have people on board who do. And this all happened in the last quarter! We completely restructured and it was a little crazy, but we worked with an HR consultant who gave us the guidance we needed. That’s why we started to develop departments. Bringing in Abbie’s spouse has been a huge game-changer, and we’re in discussions about bringing Emylee’s husband in 2022!
Quote This
I want you guys to see how ‘all in’ we are, and I want you to see how important your success is to us and our families.
Highlights
The Highs and Lows of 2021 [0:05:00]
Project Management and Expert Support [0:05:00]
Lessons Learned from Intentionally Deciding that Less is More [0:27:17]
One Big, Major Personal Update that's Going to Change our Lives Forever [0:58:00]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Business Growth, Rest, Tax, Project Management, Financial Planning, Team, Marketing, Strategy, Asking Questions, Outsourcing
