Transcription:
Not only will taking the time to count your blessings and see your wins throughout the year, help rejuvenate you emotionally and mentally for this upcoming year, but it will also, once again, just help you set your goals for the next year. Well, here are the wins that I got. This is where we found success as a business.
Then let’s double down on that come this next year. So we can push into why we had a successful year. Okay. We know that was successful. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again. Times two. Let’s do it again. Times three. Let’s run that campaign even more.
Welcome to Digital Marketing Shop Talk. I’m Mike Mahaffey, the host of the podcast, where we bring you a new episode every week to help you grow your business. And no matter where you’re at on the scale, if you’re just starting, if you’ve been in business for years, or let’s say you’re here even close to retiring, you’ve had your business up for 30, 40 years a week, our goal is to build a community around this podcast of home service business owners that can gather together and learn and build off each other.
We’re excited to bring another episode to you presented by Valorous Circle. And today is all about reflection. It’s all about reflection because right now we’re in the heart of the holiday season. Thanksgiving was a few weeks ago and Christmas is coming up. We’re in the middle of Hanukkah.
It’s the, it’s the middle of the middle of the holiday season. Which means one important thing; the year is almost up. The year is almost here and usually at the end of the year, it’s the best time to start reflecting. Start reflecting on what 2023 brought. And so as you reflect on 2023, you can start to project and plan for an even better 2024.
The reason why I kind of felt compelled to talk about reflection in this episode, especially as business leaders, and business owners, is because I feel like a lot of people neglect to do that. Whether it’s at any point, I don’t believe you should wait until the end of the year, even though I think the end of the year can be the most important time to do it.
I think you really should be doing it on a bi-weekly, monthly basis, reflecting on your campaign, and how your business is doing. But I think at the year, you need to be doing it. And as I was getting to a lot of people and businesses and business leaders, I neglected to take the time to reflect and review how they’ve been doing it for me.
It just blows my mind because if you don’t take the time to see how previous marketing campaigns have gone How you’ve seen growth? Maybe you haven’t seen growth If you don’t take time to see how your business has changed and how your business has progressed and what performance reports say How do you properly plan what’s to come next?
How do you properly plan to take the next steps to build your business? Because, obviously, if you’re here if you’re where you’re at. If you have taken a step whether you were, whether you’re a business leader and you’ve taken steps to get to the role or position that you are ever at the company that you’re in. Or, let’s say, you’re the business owner, you’re the plumber, you’re the electrician, you’re the one who’s built the business from the ground up.
Wherever you’re at, you’ve had to take the steps, and you’ve had to grow throughout your life to get where you’re at. So, my question is, if you’re not taking the time to review, if you’re not taking the time to view the progress reports, to take the next steps, why are you being so complacent?
Complacency is the first, first killer, of businesses. It’s the first, it’s the first killer of people that are just not taking the next step. Because if you become complacent in an industry, if you become okay with where you’re at, your competition’s not. There’s a reason why we call it competition.
There’s a reason why here in America we have a free market economy. It is because we offer this room for competition. So you’ve put in all your hard work to get where you’re at. As soon as you become complacent and okay with what you’re doing and what you’re performing with, then you’re just giving more room for your competition to come to check you out of the way and say, all right, it’s my turn to grow.
And your complacency will then end up, instead of going like this, it’ll start your subtle decline into demise. And hopefully, but ultimately you could end up losing business and having to find something else to do. Or if you’re a business leader, losing what you, what you have ultimately built or ultimately grown into in the position.
So that’s why, that’s why I want to put so much emphasis on this time of reflection, on this time of reviewing how your year has gone. Not just because I think it’s important to look at reports and be a numbers guy. Because everybody who knows me knows I’m not a numbers guy. I’m not the first person that loves looking at reports, and I’m not the first person that loves reviewing the data and whatnot.
My mind doesn’t work like that. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. It doesn’t mean, even though it doesn’t become natural to you, it doesn’t mean that you don’t, you shouldn’t neglect it and become that complacent. I’m going to use the word complacent a lot just because I feel if you’re not, if you’re not taking the next steps to review how your, progress has been this previous year, then you’re just being complacent and you’re going to lose business.
And really, so what does that look like? What does taking the end of the year and reflecting on 2023 to plan for 2024? What does that look like? Maybe some of you haven’t done that yet. And I think it starts with, as I said, it starts with how many jobs did you get? How many jobs? You really should be setting goals for yourself.
If you didn’t in 2023, then let’s take a step back and use 2023 as a baseline. You need to reflect on, alright, how many jobs were I getting per month? 12 months of the year, how many jobs was I getting in each month? Were those numbers okay? Where do we want to be? So let’s say just write a ballpark, just for easy sake.
You’re getting five jobs per month and that’s okay with you. But to avoid being complacent, your next year’s goal is you want to have seven jobs per month. You want to take that next step. Maybe it’s eight jobs, seven jobs, eight. Let’s say, let’s say 10. You want to take a huge, huge step. So you’re averaging five jobs per month and you want to take the 10 jobs or in 2024, you want to get it to you or your company where you’re getting 10 jobs per month.
What does that look like? Well, now’s the time that you can reflect on what you’ve done. Where did you put your money towards? We’ve talked a lot in previous episodes about building a website, putting, putting time and effort into content to add to that website, optimizing your Google business profile, running ads, and all this jazz.
Well, let’s say you’ve done some of that. Where have you seen successes? Maybe you’ve seen, maybe you’ve seen success in some of the content you’ve been running. Maybe you’ve started getting some leads off your social media, but you haven’t seen much off of advertising. Well, now, you know, in 2024, you can lean into what’s been working and start producing more of it, which, as I was mentioning, this example would be social media.
And now, you know, you need to adjust your ad campaign and figure out, okay, well, this isn’t working. So now we need to pivot and look at what we can do to make the adjustments necessary to take it from the five jobs I mentioned to those 10 jobs. And that’s really, really where you can go is you can use your numbers in 2023 as a baseline.
And then, use that as a projection going into 2024. Of like, okay, this is where I’m at now, but this is where I want to be come this time next year. And you can take those processes. As I said, you review the campaigns that you have run. Let’s say you ran a drip campaign, an email drip campaign. How many conversions did you get off that?
How many, how many leans, how many people did you get off that? Maybe it was a reactivation campaign that you reached out to. Past clients that you’ve already worked with. How many of those past clients did work with you again this past year? These are all questions that you should be asking yourself as you look back on 2023 and what 2023 has brought you as a whole year.
Uh, and use those numbers to set your goals for 2024. Unfortunately, maybe you did have goals for 2023. Maybe you did set those goals and you weren’t able to make them. Now is the time to look at, okay, what might have gone wrong? Maybe you ran an email campaign and it wasn’t as successful as you’d like it to be.
The question is that, all right, maybe, we should jump ship in and not do email campaigns. No, the question you should be asking is why did that email campaign not find success and make the adjustment necessary? And maybe that involves reaching out to some of those clients and asking. Surveys are always a great way to directly ask your clients or potential customers what they think.
When you send out an email and no one reacts to it, maybe the headline or the subject line on the email isn’t attention-grabbing enough. Maybe when they’re scrolling through their emails, your subject line was easy to pass up and whatnot. Maybe you didn’t send enough. Maybe you, maybe, your activation email was only three emails and maybe three emails weren’t enough your, for your audience.
Once again, these are all questions that you can be asking yourself. As you’re reviewing for 2020 or as you’re reviewing this past year, what were some of the things that you fell short in? What were some of the things that, you really can grow in reviewing? And as I, as I kind of touched on a minute ago, just because something, something failed or something didn’t reach the goal that you wanted to, that doesn’t mean you should turn your back on that certain tactic.
Maybe you put the, started putting the effort into social media, but maybe you didn’t, you, maybe you didn’t put the, the next step to find success. Maybe you started, with once a week, just posting graphics. That’s awesome. It’s a great starting point. There’s a great starting point. You’re just putting, posting graphics in photos of your jobs this past year.
And maybe you didn’t find the success that you were hoping for throughout that. That doesn’t mean you just scrap social media and you start avoiding social media. That just means, okay, you’re here. Now it’s time to take that next step on the ladder and start posting videos as well. Start engaging with your audience more.
Start interacting with the comments more, asking them questions, and figuring out what they like. That’s the beauty. That’s the beauty of the end of the year because not only is your, your business, going through the, the changes and reviewing things, but so are, so are homes. So are other businesses. So are, is it homeowners?
They’re all, every, everyone there, in their household or business right now is reflecting on their finances, and what they’ve done this past year. And so that’s the right time to do it because they have this on the forefront of your mind or forefront of their mind. And you want to get ahead of that as they’re planning for 2024.
With all that said, the reason why I’m putting so much emphasis on why you should be reflecting on this past year is that if you don’t have an idea of how, how things went this past year, then you have no way to properly set goals to achieve next year. Let’s say you want to businesses making this much in all, you know, as your goal is to be making this much by the end of next year.
Well, how do you do that if you don’t set out KPIs or key performance indicators, you’ll have nothing to go off of with setting those, those goals, for this next upcoming year. If you don’t take the time to see where you’re at the year before and KPIs are the greatest way, the most important way for you to be able to set proper goals that you can achieve, those are the numbers, those KPIs are what you measure throughout the year.
So if you want to hit this goal by the end of next year, well, you need to hit this goal in six months and you need to hit this goal in the first three months and you need to hit this goal at the end of this first month. And the only way you’re going to do that is by you can set those dollar amounts.
That’s awesome. But within each month, with each, within each quarter, within every six months, within the whole year, you need to be able to set those KPIs that will get you. That will get you to that end goal next year. If you don’t set those, then you’ll have nothing to use. You’ll have no tools and you’ll just be shooting blind next year and you’ll have no, no real achievable way to get the goal at the end of the year.
And what that looks like is, as I said, kind of reflecting on it, you should set, you should set goals of like, I want to get this many leads on this social media campaign. You want to get this many leads off of an email campaign. You want to get this many, this many leads off of a reactivation campaign or reaching out to past clients.
That’s all, these are all questions you need to use and ask yourself. Because it varies between businesses. It varies between industries. These numbers are going to look different from a plumber to a roofer. These numbers are going to look different between a plumber who’s been working for five years and a plumber who’s been working for 20 years.
These are all very dependent on where you’re at in the situation. That you find yourself in. And that’s why it’s very important to look at, your numbers so you can properly set your goals. And then as you’re setting these goals, you want to make sure you’re setting them in a way that you can measure them throughout the year.
So if you want to get a certain amount of, social media leads, or you want to get a certain amount of leads from email campaigns, then you need to find ways that you can track them. Are you using tracking phone numbers? Are you using the tracking links that you can see when people click on email? These are things that will help you the best and we’ll give you the reports that you need so you can, you can properly track your goals as you go through the next year.
But the most important thing of all in this season of reflection is to take the time to count your blessings, really reflect on what were the successes that you found this past year. Because it is going to be counting those blessings, counting those successes as a business that’ll help fuel you going into the next year.
Not only will taking the time to count your, blessings and see your wins throughout the year, help rejuvenate you emotionally and mentally for this upcoming year. But we will also once again, just help you. Set your goals for the next year. Well, here are the wins that I got. This is where we found success as a business.
Then let’s double down on that come this next year so we can push into why we were a successful year. Okay, we know that was successful. Let’s do it again. Let’s do it again times two. Let’s do it again times three. Let’s run that campaign even more. It’s just so important, once again, not only mentally, to take the time to count and celebrate your wins this past year, but it also will help rejuvenate and set your goals properly for the next year.
So, once again, take this time, enjoy this holiday season with your family, enjoy this holiday season having Christmas parties with your companies, and enjoying your time with the people you spend the most time with and that you love. But also celebrate your business wins, celebrate, take the time at yourself on the back, pat your teammate’s back, and enjoy this time together because that’s, what’s most important.
That’s what’s most important. This is why we all do what we do to find that success and celebrate it with the ones we love the most. So once again, this is Mike Mahaffey with digital marketing shop talk. I thank you for listening to another episode, of DM shop talk in a really. I hope that you guys are taking the time to reflect on this past year so we can, we can all celebrate 2024 and find those wins and have a successful, successful campaign next year.
Well, thank you again, and we hope you have a great day.
