End-Of-Year Checklist: Your Business Review

Now that the festive period is drawing to a close it’s time to take stock of all that you’ve achieved over the past year.

2015 is drawing to a close, and what a year it’s been! For us here at UK2 there have been several exciting new product launches, and some great chances to interact with our client base and connect with new and exciting business faces. How has the year gone for you?

Taking stock of everything you’ve achieved over the past year is very important for you and your business. Celebrating employees old and new is vital for your working community; a staff festive party is a great opportunity to recognise any employees who have worked particularly hard and reward them. The UK2 Awards this year saw a select few of our staff receive handsome prizes as a thank you for going the extra mile, so go on, take a leaf out of our book.

There are two essential questions you need to ask yourself as you approach the end of the year:

1. How did we do?
2. How can we do better next year?

We’ll address the first of these two questions in depth below:

1. How did we do? The review

While it may be arduous to look back over a whole year of business, this is important for you to measure your successes and continuously monitor your performance and growth year on year. If this is your first time completing a review, make sure you are reviewing performance at least annually ongoing, although we do recommend a quarterly review to give you a more in-depth insight into how your business fares over the year.

First, create an inventory of all completed work this year. This should include all completed projects along with any products or services you have released. For example: plumbers will take stock of all jobs they’ve done over the year, whereas bloggers will tot up all blogs they’ve created in the past 12 months.

Once you’ve taken into account just how much work your business got through over the past 12 months – for the UK2 Blog that’s over 200 blog articles! – and celebrated accordingly, it’s time to measure the impact of this work. For bloggers this can be the hits count of each published post, or for commercial providers of goods or services this will be the number of units or services sold. At this point, commercial companies must work out their revenue – or profit – by subtracting costs from profits.

There’s an infinite list of measurements you could make here, but the most important is how much of an impression you’ve made. Whether this is done via social media – the impressions of which can be measured via various online software packages – revenue or client email subscriptions, businesses both small and large must decide on what makes their company a success and measure it as succinctly as possible. Be aware that you may wish to measure various bodies of work to decide on your performance.

Some may not see the importance of measuring performance, but any insight into which practices are paying off and which are a waste of time will be beneficial to your company as it grows and develops over the coming year. Find trends in the data you produce: which projects were the most successful? Was it the shorter blog posts which had more engagement, or the long-form informative articles? These insights will help you cut out the dead wood from your strategy plan.

So in summary, answer these questions:

• What went well?
• What didn’t work well at all?

Once you’ve completed your review, check out part two of this series which addresses “how can we do better next year?”.