A few weeks ago, I escaped to my family’s cabin in the north woods to celebrate the holidays with my family. After a year of so many ups and downs at Prosper Strategies, I wanted nothing more than to sleep in late, sip hot chocolate, play with my niece and nephew, and forget, even if just for those 11 days, that I was an entrepreneur. And for the first few days of my vacation, that’s exactly what I did. But then something strange happened. Try as I might to fight it, I felt compelled to dive deep into Prosper’s business strategy for the year ahead. I wanted to reflect on and celebrate all the things I loved about our firm and my role in it in 2016. Just as importantly, I wanted to analyze the areas that had felt misaligned with our vision for the company and my personal mission in 2015 and map out a plan for change in the new year. Call me cliché, but there’s nothing like the promise of a fresh page in a new calendar to get me fired up about reflection and transformation.
So I did what any entrepreneur would do. I gave into my urges, grabbed a notebook, and got to work. And I’m happy I did. In just a few hours, I was able to define six clear priority areas that I believed Lindsay and I needed to focus on as leaders of Prosper Strategies in 2016. It felt like all the stressors and uncertainties that had been bogging us down at the end of the year suddenly fell away, and I was able to see exactly where we needed to go and what we needed to do to make 2016 our best year yet. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have time free from meetings, deadlines and a never-ending stream of emails to actually think, isn’t it?
When I returned from “winter break,” I ran my assessment of our 2016 priorities by Lindsay. While we certainly don’t agree on everything (and no partners should), we’re almost always on the same page about the big picture, and this time was no exception. Lindsay vetted my assessment of our 2016 “rocks,” the term we use for our key firm priorities, and together, we began to put plans in motion to tackle them.
There’s nothing like public accountability to get us moving, so I’m going to pull back the curtain for a moment and let you in on our 2016 rocks. Then, over the course of our next six Founders’ Files posts, we’re going to break down each one in more detail, discussing where we’re making progress, what we’re struggling with and what we’re going to do next. How’s that for transparency?
#1: Restore harmony to our team and get the right people on the bus
As we continue to grow our revenue and client base, building the ideal team to support it has been one of our biggest challenges. 2016 is going to be the year we get smarter about all the things that allow us to attract, develop and retain the absolute best people for the job.
#2: Stabilize our revenue and growth
Unlike many agencies, we’re lucky that our business is almost 100% retainer-based. But we still dealt with a lot of unpredictability in 2015 that could have been avoided with smarter business practices. Remember that unpaid $50,000 invoice that Lindsay mentioned in her last post? While we know ups and downs are simply a reality of owning a business, 2016 is going to be the year that we decrease the space between those peaks and valleys.
#3: Put processes and systems in place that position us to scale
Ok, I know process development sounds like kind of a snoozer topic, but nothing positions a business to scale like systemization. We’re all about it in 2016, and we’re working on creating replicable systems for everything from inbound marketing content creation to client relationship management.
#4: Do more of the work we love
We’re fortunate to have an amazing group of innovative, inspiring clients who motivate us to come to work every day. But we made some major missteps in 2015 as well and ended up in a few client engagements that were simply misaligned with our mission, passions or talents. 2016 will be the year that we get super selective about both the types of work we take on and the types of clients we choose to do it for.
#5: Fire up our own marketing
We eat, sleep, live and breathe marketing, but when it comes to developing our own content and campaigns, we’re a classic case of “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” We build grand plans that, if carried out, would almost certainly bring us a great deal of new business, but when it comes time to execute them, our own marketing always falls to the bottom of the priority list. That’s just simply not going to fly in 2016, hence the relaunch of this blog and the fact that I’m writing this post at 11:20 pm on a Thursday.
#6: Better manage our time and energy
As anyone who’s ever worked in an agency environment can probably relate to, our world moves at a dizzying speed. There is always more work to do, and every client deserves to feel like they’re our top priority. But this year, we need to balance that reality with our deep desire to foster an environment where work/life balance (or integration, or optimization, or whatever you want to call it) is a top priority. A Prosper where we can all be the best versions of ourselves both at and away from work.
I don’t want to jinx it, but we’re one month into 2016, and we’ve already made significant progress on several of these rocks. They’ve even inspired us to make some massive changes I never could have predicted at the end of 2015. But that’s another story for another time, so stay tuned for our next Founder’s Files post on Rock #1.
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