Our 2023 goals were aggressive, and I achieved almost none of them.
And yet… it was our best year yet.
OHHH FUUUDDDGGGE!
Fresh off my 2022 coaching program, my sights were set for the stars. We were going to 3X our revenue, 3X our membership and hire 4 more full-time employees.
The future was bright and I had never been more optimistic about our business.
Two weeks into the year, the first shoe dropped when my last employee gave her 4-week notice.
I had no backfill hires in the hopper and 9 months prior we 3X’d our workload, meeting with our members MONTHLY instead of quarterly.
Like Ralphie said watching the lug nut disappear into the snow, “Ohhhh, fuuudddggge!”
…ANY ROAD WILL GET YOU THERE
I started recruiting hot and heavy only to find out I had no idea what I was hiring for. Did I need an executive assistant or a member service associate or a junior financial planner?
In anticipation of the oncoming meeting tsunami, I just flung out a hook to see what I’d catch. Turns out, not knowing what you’re hiring for is NOT a recipe for recruiting success! (Go figure.)
Thankfully, my fear of drowning in meetings turned out to be unfounded and after two monthly meeting cycles, I realized I could handle it on my own.
Unfortunately, the other thing I realized after doing 110 meetings solo is that the meeting process – which is our product – sucked.
“SUCKED” IS A STRONG WORD
In my effort to maximize margins, I cut our time dedicated to preparing and following up from meetings to almost zero.
After all, I figured, if we 3X’d our face time, then we should be able to squeeze it all in during those 30 minutes per month.
That was not the right assumption, and I wasn’t happy or proud of our “product” at that point.
So I added 30 minutes of prep and 30 minutes of follow up on either side of our meetings.
That was in May and May was B.R.U.T.A.L. I had to work 7 days a week just to keep up.
WORKING DOUBLE TIME
June got a little better as I developed systems and created templates.
By July, it was dialed in enough to squeeze it all in over two weeks in preparation for a vacation that never happened in late July.
From July through October, my original travel plans blew up and had to be rescheduled which forced me to jam a month’s worth of meetings into two weeks all 4 months.
IT. WAS. BACKBREAKING.
However, necessity is the mother of invention and those 4 months required me to seek out every ounce of efficiency I could find (while maintaining our new high-touch AND high-quality service level).
As a result, I knew exactly who I needed to hire and what I needed them to do.
So in October, I hired Taylor, and then in November Claudine came aboard.
IT ALL HAPPENS RIGHT ON TIME
They’ve now cut down my prep and follow up time to about 15 minutes on either side of our meetings.
In the same month I cut MY service time by 50%, 8 new Financial Zen Members knocked on our door.
This was after an unusually dry stretch of new members for the first 10 months. And if they had knocked just 3 months earlier, I would have had to turn them away. I just wouldn’t have had the capacity.
So as we wrap up 2023, I achieved only a fraction of my 2023 goals.
THE TURNING POINT YEAR
But I won’t remember 2023 as a bummer of a year. Just the opposite, actually.
Instead, I believe that 2023 will be the turning point I’ve been waiting for.
As a result of being FORCED to figure out how to execute a high-touch AND high-level service model efficiently, I now know how to build a team to execute it, freeing my time to continue improving the product and 10X the business.
By this time next year, my goal is to grow our membership to 600 households and hire 4 full-time teams to service them.
The difference between 2023’s aggressive goals and 2024’s is I now have a roadmap to follow and have acquired the new skills needed to get there.
Stay tuned!
