Our biggest lessons of 2019 may help you in the year to come.
Was 2019 all you hoped it would be? As the year – and the decade – draw to a close, we are encouraging our clients to reflect on the past 12 months to evaluate what they’ve accomplished, what goals they’ve achieved and what learnings they can harness to carry forward into the new year.
That’s what we’ve done and want to share with you today. Maybe some of these highlights are comparable to what you experienced in your business journey. Perhaps our challenges were your challenges. Did we have similar learns? Read ahead and let us know.
And, If you want to begin evaluating your own 2019 retrospective, then we have a valuable checklist for you included in our recent blog, “How Do You Define A Successful Year?” It’s a great way of reviewing your successes, challenges and lessons throughout the year.
Our highlights of the year
Growth
Persistence pays off. We’re proud to say that we grew our business by 60% this year. As business owners, we all know that growth takes a lot of time and effort and is never accomplished without help and support. A big thank you to EVERYONE who helped us achieve this milestone. (and you know who you are!)
A part of that growth can be attributed to the soft launch of our new business platform myBusinessSkills.com. It’s our online learning and mastermind platform, targeting small business entrepreneurs and creative entrepreneurs. We’ve received some amazing feedback from business owners like you and we’ll be making awesome changes and additions to the platform in 2020.
Strategic Partnerships
- Women in Tech World: With our friends at WiT World, we successfully launched the Women in Tech Mastermind Series in February with participants from across Canada and the U.S. and we’ve just completed our second cohort this past week. With groups dedicated to women in tech at all levels of their career – Founders, Executive Leaders & Aspiring Leaders, this peer mentoring initiative has been well received and supported by the community. We can’t wait for the new cohorts, which will be launching in January. Will we see you there?
- We also facilitated a powerful group mastermind event during Vancouver Start-Up Week, (VSW) in September. This incredible session on Breaking Stereotypes – Women Who Lead was created as a strategic partnership with the Hervana Co-Working Collective and Humaira Ahmed, Founder & CEO of Locelle.
- YELL Canada: This our third year in a row participating as an in-school speaker and as a judge for the YELL Canada year-end Venture Challenge.
- Venture for Canada: We were judges for their first-ever Vancouver Selection Day and have just participated in their second selection day, held at the end of November. Big congrats to the Venture for Canada team on everything they’ve achieved this year.
- Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Futurepreneur: We are proud mentors for both these amazing organizations.
Challenges
We’re human! We faced a few challenges this year that may be typical of your business too.
For one, like all small business owners, we wear a lot of hats. So, it’s important to be fully aware of how our time is spent. Prioritization is a big part of this so we’re constantly reviewing and reflecting on the amount of time different aspects of our business take and how we can best get everything done in the time that we have.
This year, we focused on a more detailed method of time tracking, taking a deeper dive into activities and ROI, (return on investment) to determine what initiatives and activities should move forward and which ones needed to move to the back burner.
At myCEO, we are dedicated to serving the community and sharing our experience and knowledge to help other businesses develop their systems and processes to grow. This drive to serve has been a powerful motivator for us and has helped us develop a more customized pricing strategy for our own business and for that of our clients.
Lessons Learned
Looking back at any period of time in a business it can be easy to focus on things that didn’t go well and linger over the things that you didn’t achieve. This is the usual human process. For us, and for all business owners, we believe that those misses have great value, that they serve to teach us, to help us grow and to be more fully aware of the impact of our choices and actions.
- Focus vs Multi-Tasking: Throughout our careers, we believed that to be successful and to get everything done, we needed to be excellent multi-taskers. We were wrong. Multi-tasking is a myth. It splits your focus between tasks, making neither the priority, and often diluting effectiveness. This was a key learning for us this year and our plan is to begin every week of 2020 with a clear head and intention about achieving our main goals and attend to those first before we jump into other endeavours.
- The Importance of Strategic Partnerships: Strategic business partnerships are not just collaborative, they’re fun. Having differing minds around a table to plan an event or create a solution is a super valuable way to implement and execute. We’re natural collaborators and strongly believe that a “rising tide floats all boats.”
- The Power of Connection & Community: We’re so grateful for all the time we spend connecting, conversing, meeting and planning with our clients, partners, colleagues and prospects. In today’s age of Zoom online meetings and email, we still believe that the best way to learn about others is through consistent, meaningful face-to-face connection whenever possible.
And Who Inspired Us
Without sounding too cliché, we were inspired by you – the person who wakes up every day and tries to do better, be better and reach further than the day before.
We’re inspired by people who value learning, sharing, and growing. People who change their narrative (because repetition is boring!), who are reinventing themselves, and those who are genuine enough to be vulnerable.
We admire the people who are stepping out of their comfort zone to try new things and the people who recognize the power of self-direction, self-care, and love.
What’s Ahead in 2020?
The next 12 months are going to be spectacular! We already have plans, events and initiatives underway that we can’t wait to launch in the new year! From a new mastermind series, to helping you find your WHY, to participation in many of our city’s best events, we can hardly wait to get started.
In 2020, we plan to grow myCEO globally through our partnership with Women in Tech World, locally through our business coaching business, myCEO.ca, and online through myBusinessSkills.com.
And now that you’ve heard all about us, we’re curious to know your plans. How was 2019 and what does 2020 hold for you? What learns are you taking forward?
