3 Activities to Complete at Your Year-End Review Meeting

Today Krista and I are sharing three activities that we will doing together during our year-end review and planning meeting. While these activities aren’t the only things we’ll be discussing, we thought it would be more helpful to give y’all an idea of what sorts of things we focus on during these meetings vs. how to plan the meeting…

We discuss an activity that will help kick things off and set the tone for the meeting that analyzes both the revenue driving activities of the business and how the team feels about those activities. Then we jump into an overview of how we examine our finances. We don’t go into great detail because I’m releasing an episode in a few weeks with financial expert Shanna Skidmore who helps us explore this. And we end by discussing some of the marketing related efforts that we’re going to take another look at.

We have a few goals during these sorts of meetings. One is efficiency. And by that, I mean we want to figure out how we can do more with less—which ultimately means that we’re figuring out what we can eliminate so as to make better use of our time and resources. It can be difficult cutting things out, but it’s always amazing to me the growth that a little pruning can bring about. Beyond that, we of course want to create some space to get on the same page and dream together a bit about what the next year could look like.

Sometimes the middle of these conversations aren’t always easy—especially if you have a partner that you work alongside—they might have a totally different assessment of the year and what should be done the following year. God knows that has occasionally been the case with Krista and me… but these conversations are so necessary to have, and I’m always so grateful afterwards for having had them.

There are so many ways to make your year-end review or planning meetings more effective. We don’t jump into actually how to plan these reviews, although we do have other episodes that cover such things. Regardless of what your end-of-year meeting looks like, we hope you find one or more of these activities helpful.

Find it quickly here (in the podcast):

0:00 Intro
4:31 Year end review
7:31 Activity #1 – Graph with four quadrants to help evaluate goals
8:43 Upper left quadrant, things that drive revenue but you don’t want to be doing
8:57 Upper right quadrant, things that drive revenue and you want to be doing
9:06 Lower right quadrant, things that you want to be doing but aren’t driving revenue
9:11 Lower left quadrant, things that don’t drive revenue and you don’t want to be doing
14:23 Activity #2 – Financial evaluation
16:59 Freedom to cancel a tool you once purchased
18:15 Helps to keep track of expenses throughout the year
20:57 Activity #3 – Marketing evaluation
25:05 Evaluate relevant content frequently

Resources from the podcast:

• Business Planning for the New Year with Shay Cochrane
• Quarterly Planning with Kat Schmoyer
• 5 Ways to Refresh Your Website for the New Year
• Year-End Review Worksheet
• Bench
• Wave
• QuickBooks
• Google Analytics for Showit
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• LinkedIn