Transcript
Speaker: Think about sort of a graph with the X and Y axis, right? That creates four quadrants, all right? So you have a upper left quadrant, upper right quadrant, lower right quadrant, and lower left quadrant, okay? On the Y axis, all right, running from bottom to top, you have what is working is at the top, and then towards the bottom is what is not working.
Speaker: And, you know, I think it's easiest to think about this in terms of revenue. All right. So again, things that are driving lots of revenue towards the top. All right. Things that are driving no revenue towards the bottom. Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative service -based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
Speaker: Today, Chris and I are sharing three activities that we will be 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'd be more helpful to give you all an idea of what sorts of things we focus on during these meetings versus how to plan the meeting. More on that in a minute.
Speaker: We discuss an activity that will help kick things off and set the tone for the rest of the meeting that analyzes both the revenue -driving activities of the business and how the team feels about those different 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 Shana Skidmore who will help us examine that more thoroughly.
Speaker: And then we end the discussion by looking at some of our marketing related efforts that we're going to give another look at this year. We have a few goals during these meetings. One big 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 going into the next year.
Speaker: It can be difficult cutting things out, but it always amazes 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 little 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.
Speaker: They might have a totally different assessment of the year and what should be done the following year. God knows that's been the case occasionally with Chris and I. But these conversations are so necessary to have. I'm 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 that so much.
Speaker: Although, we do have other episodes that we've recorded that cover such things, so we'll link to those in the show notes. Regardless of what your end -of -year meeting looks like, we hope you find one or more of these activities helpful. As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check them out at davianchrista .com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcast. Now, onto the episode.
Speaker: All right, big recording day before the first U .S. World Cup match. I mean, I was thinking Thanksgiving. I feel like that is a bigger thing this week. I can't remember the last time I've been this excited for an athletic event. Yeah, because you don't get into the Olympics.
Speaker: No, I just never, I don't feel like I've really ever gone into the Olympics. No, but in the past year, you've become a hot spurs or hot spur. They're so particular about how they say everything. Like you can't put the in front of some words and like it's crazy, but you are a Premier League fan.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that's made me more excited for the World Cup this year. I mean, I'm excited to cheer for the US team. But even beyond cheering for the US team, there's players that I like to follow that are on different international teams. So it's fun, you know, watching England play this morning. So, you know, I'm excited.
Speaker: Yeah, and England had a good first match, right? And they call them matches, right? Not games. That's right. They call them matches. Every time I say the wrong vernacular for football, English football, you correct me. Your family is very quick to correct me. Yeah, my brother is quicker to correct than I am. But anyways, that's what I'm looking forward to later today. And then, of course, Thanksgiving is just going to be a good week, I think.
Speaker: It is, yeah. You don't even know what I'm cooking, which is kind of funny. Lots of bacon things for you. You can't go wrong with bacon. Bacon is a crowd pleaser. But we're not here to talk about bacon or the World Cup. We are here to talk about year -end review because as Thanksgiving rolls around, so does the end of the year. And we've been talking about our 2023 plan.
Speaker: and getting together, figuring out what that looks like, actually putting pen to paper because we've talked about things, but I think it's so important to actually put those down somewhere in a document. Makes it real that way. There's also some statistics out there that somebody I'm sure knows about how much it makes it more likely that you'll actually do it if you put it down on paper.
Speaker: Maybe because you remember, I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this in terms of customer avatars too, how the actual activity of sitting down and going through it is so powerful for people. Even though people might have a general idea or an intuitive idea of who their ideal customer or client is, there's something about actually putting pen to paper that I think helps you discover nuances, I think helps you realize things that maybe you hadn't realized before. I think journaling does something similar.
Speaker: Well, I think that even just writing that out, I've seen people then be able to use bits of the copy that they wrote describing their ideal client or their avatar and then use that elsewhere in their brand. So I feel like it can be repurposed in other ways. And it just gets you thinking about so many different aspects of it.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. And so I think that's the power of writing things down. Anyways, I'm excited to share three activities that we're going to do. All right, so this is not necessarily, you know, all that we're going to do during our year end activity, but hopefully somebody out there listening, you might find this helpful. Just in thinking about ways that you can prepare and plan for 2023. We've recorded a number of episodes on year end reviews. I believe recorded one with Shay Cochran last year.
Speaker: Yeah, because Shay goes away for a couple of days and does her review and so she talks about that whole process.
Speaker: Yeah, that's one that's worth listening to for sure. And I think there's others as well. We're nearly 200 episodes in, so it's hard to remember exactly what we recorded on different topics, but there's a few good ones on just quarterly planning, year -end reviews, those sorts of things that are worth going back and listening to, and we'll make sure that those are in the show notes, of course, as well. So where should we start with our activities? Do you want to start with your graph?
Speaker: Sure. I assume that you are going to start with the financial evaluation. I just feel like that is what you want to look at at the end of the year. I know. That's where my head goes. My head does not go to some of the same things that your head goes to, which I feel like is why we're a good pair.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's good. And you know, something to keep in mind too, if you work as a husband -wife team or if you work as a team at all, you know, I think that it's important to sit down and actually go through these things. Because I think as you go through them, for instance, I'll find that maybe things I thought you were thinking about or I thought you thought certain things about things, I think it's just important for us to verbalize how we're feeling about certain aspects of the business. I think that this activity is really gonna help with that. So I'll just dive into what that is.
Speaker: So basically, and I'll try to include maybe a illustration of this in the show notes, think about sort of a graph with the X and Y axis, right? That creates four quadrants, all right? So you have a upper left quadrant, upper right quadrant, lower right quadrant, and lower left quadrant, okay? On the Y axis, all right, running from bottom to top, you have what is working is at the top, and then towards the bottom is what is not working.
Speaker: And I think it's easiest to think about this in terms of revenue. So again, things that are driving lots of revenue towards the top, things that are driving no revenue towards the bottom. I think it's easiest to think about what is working versus what is not working in terms of revenue. You might have different metrics for that as well though.
Speaker: Then along the x -axis, you have what you want to be doing, you know, right -hand side. And then towards the left -hand side, what you do not want to be doing, all right? So again, from bottom to top, that's no revenue to revenue. And then from left to right, it's what you don't want to be doing versus what you want to be doing. And we will draw that out for you if you're a visual person like me.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, for sure. But just kind of give you an idea of what this looks like. Things that fall in that upper left -hand quadrant, starting there, so upper left -hand quadrant, you have things that maybe drive revenue, but you don't want to be doing them.
Speaker: All right, then in the upper right hand quadrant, that's sort of the sweet spot. It's things that drive revenue and things that you want to be doing. Then drop down. Okay, so bottom right hand quadrant, you have things that you want to be doing, but they're not driving revenue. And then the lower left hand quadrant, you have things that don't drive revenue, and you don't want to be doing them.
Speaker: Those are easy to get rid of. Yeah. And so if you start there, those are the easiest things to get rid of for sure. All right. They don't drive revenue. You don't want to be doing them. So why do them? Right? So things that you can eliminate right off the bat. Then in the upper right hand quadrant, same thing, you have, you know, stuff that you want to be doing and things that drive revenue. And so that's easy, right? You might reexamine some of those things just to see how you can make a good thing better, right?
Speaker: But at the end of the day, they don't need maybe close examination in this particular meeting because they're working, right? And why fix something that's not broken? Then it's the upper left quadrant and the lower right quadrant that are sort of the tricky ones, right? Because in the upper left hand quadrant, those are things that are working, but you don't want to be doing them.
Speaker: So you have a number of questions that you can ask yourself and things that you should talk through with your team if you have a team, all right? If you have a team, it might be a matter of delegating that activity. Maybe somebody else on the team really wants to take that. And that's ideal, right? Because that's something that moves it to the upper right -hand quadrant. It's something that person wants to be doing. It also drives revenue. That's great.
Speaker: it might be something that you can outsource. So for us, when we do this activity, we're going to be listing different products and services, you know, in the different quadrants, right? We do a lot of different things. We might have courses, we might have courses that we want to do. So there's all sorts of things that we list in this quadrant. If you offer one specific service, right, you might break that service up into different tasks. So for instance, like I'm thinking photo editing, if you're a photographer,
Speaker: That might be something that, obviously, by editing the photos, it's driving revenue, right? You're getting photos to clients, but it might not be something that you want to do. So if that falls in that upper left -hand quadrant, that's something that, while you can't get rid of it, you can't eliminate it altogether, it might be something that you outsource.
Speaker: Okay. So the things in the upper left hand quadrant, I think, you know, could be eliminated potentially. All right. Maybe it is something that just kind of sucks life out of you. Maybe you have other revenue driving activities and you want to specialize in those. I think in a lot of cases, it's going to be how can you delegate that to somebody else so that it frees you up mentally, but continues to drive revenue.
Speaker: Or how could you grow the things that are working and that you do love so that you could eventually phase those things? It gives us a product, for instance, so that you could eventually phase those out. Yeah, 100%. And that's why that upper left -hand corner, I think, or upper left -hand quadrant is sort of tricky. In the lower right -hand quadrant, that's sort of tricky as well because those are things you want to be doing, but they're not currently driving a lot of revenue.
Speaker: And so you have to ask yourself some hard questions like, is this distracting from the stuff that is driving revenue? I think it might be aspirational too. There might be things that you're like, well, this is really the direction I want to go. And so it is a matter of just figuring out how to make those things work.
Speaker: But in an ideal world, of course, everything would be in that top right quadrant. But the point of this activity is not necessarily to figure out how you can move everything in the top right hand quadrant. One of the biggest reasons to do this activity is to figure out what you can eliminate and what you ought to eliminate.
Speaker: And I think there's a lot of power in doing that, you know, in actually saying, okay, this might be a good thing, but it's not what we should be focusing on. And by eliminating this, how is it going to free me up both with time and just like mental capacity to work on other things? And, you know, really, this is a great activity to start your year end review with, because I think it really sets the tone for everything else you're going to do. Do you feel like that you need to have like specific numbers before you come to this?
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's one of those things that you could start with this and you could have an idea, like we have a general idea of the different numbers, even though maybe we haven't gotten to our financial evaluation yet. But you can do this with just a general sense of your numbers. And then as you go through the financial evaluation, maybe that opens your eyes to some things. Maybe you thought something that drove a lot of revenue actually doesn't, right? You'd go back and you adjust. So it's something that you can look at through the entire year -end review meeting or weekend, however you decide to plan it.
Speaker: But I do think it's a great thing to open up with because it also gets out there, especially between me and you, right, and our team. And for those of you who work with a team, it allows you to voice things like,
Speaker: Yeah, I know this drives a lot of revenue, but I don't actually like doing it, right? And I think that's a powerful thing to get out there because somebody else on the team might have no idea. And maybe somebody else on the team really wants to do that thing, you know? So I really think that this is a great activity that sets the tone for the rest of the meeting and the rest of the planning session. Anything else we should talk about when it comes to that? I don't think so.
Speaker: Yeah. And you know, we're going to include an illustration of this and just, you know, with a quick example, so you can get an idea of what we're talking about for sure. But I really do think that this is a powerful activity. All right, cool. Moving on to financial evaluation, or should we do something else? No, we can do financials. All right. Awesome. Do you want to lead us through that?
Speaker: Yes. So I think it's really helpful as the year is approaching, not only for tax purposes, but also like you said, for planning purposes to start looking at your numbers. So it's a really good idea to look at your overall expenses for the year, your overall revenue, and then to even break it down by categories. So we use bench accounting. They do our books every month for us. And so it's easy for us to go in and look at
Speaker: the year as a whole and then the month as a whole and we can see how much we're spending on different aspects of our business. So maybe in paid advertising and in software. Software is always a big one. And then at the same time to look at all of the different revenues by product. So if you offer different services or different products, it's a good idea to get very specific and break them down into individual buckets.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure. And I just interviewed Shana Skidmore, and she is the financial guru, I think. I know. She is. Yeah. And so I'm really excited to release that episode. That episode will be live in a few weeks. Unfortunately, with our content calendar, it doesn't get released until mid -December or so.
Speaker: But one of the things that she talks about is how important it is, like November being one of the best months to look at your financials, and talk with an accountant. One, because there's certain things that you can do, but need to be done by the end of the year that are tax advantageous for the following year. All right, so that's why it's a good reason to look at your numbers now, and then in December, make an appointment with an accountant or your accountant and go through those, and just make sure that you're all good, tax -wise, going into the new year.
Speaker: I think our financial evaluation is something that we kind of got from her to a certain extent. And to your point, looking at overall revenue and revenue byproduct, understanding which parts of our business are working and which are not. And again, going back to that chart activity that we just did and adjusting that based on our numbers.
Speaker: But really getting a sense of our expenses, so payroll, what we're spending on ads and marketing, what we're spending on different subscriptions and tools, I am so grateful to you that you'll go through this almost on a monthly basis, but certainly on a quarterly basis and look at the different tools we're using. Because you can save hundreds of dollars a month just getting rid of tools that you signed up for that maybe you're not using or you decide. There's definitely tools where I'm like, it's kind of redundant with another tool that I use. I'm thinking about SEO specifically.
Speaker: And just cutting it out, you know, one of the things that I've learned to do is this is also true of tabs open on your computer. Okay. But I'll get to that in a minute. If you're not sure about a tool, cancel it. And then see when the next time is that you have to come back to it. You know, because one, you might just save a month, right? But maybe at best you decide, Oh, actually don't need that tool to get my work done.
Speaker: And when it comes to tools, make sure you look through your charges for the whole year because some renew monthly and some are annually. So I just noticed that we got charged for planally, but I don't use planally anymore because I hardly ever post on my personal account. And so that's one that we can eliminate. So next year we won't get charged for it.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's a good advice too. That is from a seasoned pro of looking through our financials. They just like pop up otherwise. So it's good to look at the whole year and see what you were charged for. And if you don't have bookkeeping software, you'd probably want to go through bank statements and credit card statements to see what you were charged when.
Speaker: Yeah, and again, going back to this idea, how can we do more with less? What can we eliminate here? Where are we spending money? Where we don't need to spend money? And then where are places where maybe we're spending money and it's working and we really need to double down there.
Speaker: So I think that's really what we do with our financial evaluation. It doesn't involve any complicated spreadsheets. It really does help if you've been keeping track of your financials throughout the year, and you can do that with a number of different tools. So like Chris has said, we use bench because it's automated. It's done for us. Well, there's a person that does them.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like using QuickBooks, but somebody's behind the scenes. They're actually categorizing your expenses and so on. So Bench, we'll link to that. I might think...
Speaker: We might have a discount code, I'm not sure. Yeah, we might have a discount code or referral link or something like that. WAVE, I know it still exists, right? We still send some invoices through WAVE. And is it still free? Yeah, I think there's still a free version and then we did our books through WAVE for a really long time. One of the reasons why we switched is because we moved to having a lot of digital transactions and WAVE isn't going to be able to rectify the Stripe and PayPal fees.
Speaker: It was more manual work for me. Yeah, it took more time than we thought it was worth it. So that's one of the reasons why we switched from Wave. QuickBooks is another good one and probably the most popular option out there. We use it for the farm business. I know that the people who use QuickBooks seem to really like QuickBooks. So something to think about there as you're trying to get your finances in order. I think that when I do our finances this year, I'm also going to compare the last few years against this year.
Speaker: I can't emphasize enough how helpful it is to have an accountant, and I know it might seem like it's gonna be this huge crazy expense, but you can go find a good accountant for, I mean, you're gonna have to pay him or her, of course, but we just think it's so worth having one. Yes, we love our accountant. Yeah, so if you don't have an accountant, consider getting one. If bookkeeping is something that causes you a lot of stress each year and you have any budget for it, then I think it's worth doing that as well.
Speaker: All right, so that's basically our financial evaluation. Is there anything else we should quickly chat about when it comes to our financial evaluation? I don't think so. I think if you've not kept up with it this year and you're gonna start next year, it's a good thing to do monthly so that the end of the year isn't incredibly overwhelming trying to rectify all of your transactions. Yeah, and at the very least quarterly. And I'm fortunate that I have you in this business and my partners in the till agency are also better at this than I am.
Speaker: So I really haven't had to touch this for a while. They just – you all just tell me, Davey, we need to stop spending money on this or whatever. So grateful for you all. But all that to say, you don't have to make it complicated. Like again, your accountant doesn't have to put together some special report for you in order for you to do a financial evaluation. So don't let that hold you up from looking at your finances.
Speaker: And by not looking at them, that doesn't make bad news go away. So you might as well just jump in there and face it and get through it. Even if it causes a little bit of stress, get organized and you'll feel a lot better going forward, I think. All right, so I think the last activity that I really want to talk about today is just a marketing evaluation. And I think this has become more important than ever to do, in part because there are so many channels to distribute content on now.
Speaker: there was a day when really it was like. Instagram and Facebook. Yeah, Facebook and Instagram, you know. Pinterest. I mean Snapchat has been, you know, obviously Snapchat still exists, you know, but at one point Snapchat was, I feel like what TikTok is now, you know. But anyways, all that to say, there's just so many distribution channels out there. And I'm sure that, you know, maybe you listening feel like there are so many different people saying, oh, you have to be over on TikTok. You have to be doing this. You have to be, you know, doing that.
Speaker: And so I think it's important at the end of the year to actually look at those different marketing channels and evaluate what's working, what's not, where you should be spending your time, where you're not spending your time and you should be spending your time, and maybe what's worth eliminating.
Speaker: And to do this, do you feel like you need to have had Google Analytics set up for a while to track it correctly? Yes and no. I think each of these channels is going to have their own set of analytics and metrics that you can look at to determine how effective the channel is.
Speaker: At the end of the day, it would be really nice to know exactly what is driving revenue, right? So bottom line, if you're getting millions of likes on Instagram, but nobody's actually purchasing through Instagram, what does that mean? It doesn't necessarily mean that you should stop spending time on Instagram, but you need to start figuring out, okay, well, how can Instagram start driving revenue?
Speaker: And so many different people are going to have different business models, you know, like for people who are relying mostly on ads, maybe it's ads on their site, you know, so they have a content site and they're driving people to their websites and they get paid via ads for that. Or like affiliate clicks, maybe. Yeah. Then something like Google Analytics become so much more important, right? To figure out, okay, what is actually driving traffic? And Google Analytics is so easy to set up. It's going to take you 10 minutes. Should everything go right? It's going to take you 10 minutes to set up. We have a YouTube video, right?
Speaker: We have YouTube video for Google. We'll make sure it's linked. Yeah, exactly. So we'll make sure that all of that's linked. But it's so easy to set up. And at the end of the day, too, again, it's one of those things where you can run some really complicated reports on it. But just bottom line, without really any training, you could probably figure out how to determine how much social referral traffic you're getting, you know, how much traffic you're getting from search engines and so on.
Speaker: So really, you do want to be able to tie your marketing efforts to your revenue for sure. How that works, I think, sometimes is going to require a little bit of intuition. Just as an example, for Facebook and Instagram ads, we get a report on our ads every week from Till Agency, of course. When Till reports, I can see, okay, well, they're only attributing X amount of sales to these ads.
Speaker: But, you know, I typically know that they're under reporting, right? Because of the different attribution issues with Facebook right now and the privacy concerns. We get into all that iOS 14 and other podcasts, so I won't spend a lot of time there.
Speaker: But I think it's important to look through each of these different channels and figure out what you feel like is working and what's worth spending time on. I think we haven't spent a lot of time in the last few months on YouTube, but our YouTube videos are getting more and more traction. And we do get a fair amount of referrals, people who fill out a contact form and state that they actually learned about us from YouTube.
Speaker: So to me, it's like, okay, we should probably be spending a little bit more time there. One of our friends in real life who lives in our town actually was searching for, did I tell you this story? Brittany was searching for a show it question and she found our YouTube channel and we answered her question, but it was really funny because she has met us many times in real life, but didn't really know about our online life. So she found us through YouTube, which is really funny.
Speaker: more evidence that we should be spending some time on YouTube. And then going back to like channels like Instagram and things like that, I think, and I've been sort of a broken record when it comes to this point, I think a lot of times when we look at the channel itself, we sort of diagnose things on a superficial level.
Speaker: So it's like, ah, you know, Instagram, it's been hard for us to get traction there. Why is it? And I think it's easy to be like, oh, well, maybe I need to post at a different time. And without going back maybe to the content itself, re -evaluating whether the content is good, and then thinking through how we distribute that piece of content to that channel.
Speaker: because we might share something to Instagram, email, Facebook, and YouTube, but it's gonna take different shape as we share it to each of those channels. They're different things. Taking a look at each of those channels and figuring out what's working and what's not, I think is worth it. I've been pretty hesitant to get on TikTok for all sorts of reasons, but TikTok is not, it doesn't seem like it's going away like other social channels have, so I think that's one that we're gonna be re -examining in 2023 is how we use TikTok
Speaker: I'm just like envisioning you doing a TikTok dance. I know that will never happen. That will never happen. You know, if enough people review the podcast, I will do a TikTok dance. No, I don't know. But anyways, like TikTok is something that we're going to be revisiting in 2023. YouTube is something that we're going to be revisiting in 2023. Any other questions you have about or our marketing evaluation just in general? I don't think so. Did you mention LinkedIn?
Speaker: No, LinkedIn is something that I've been putting some more consistent effort towards. If you are on LinkedIn, send me a request. I will accept it. If you DM me an offer right after I accept your DM, then I'm not going to respond.
Speaker: I know my inbox on LinkedIn has so many messages because it offers. I know it's crazy to me that it's just spammy. It must work right on some level for people to be doing it. But to me, like I just never respond to them. I haven't been on LinkedIn in a few months. When you post something, I will go like it, but that's it. Yeah, I found the content on LinkedIn to be pretty helpful. I found it to be a pretty, you know, I wouldn't say encouraging or happy place, but it's like, it feels more helpful in general than a place like Facebook right now.
Speaker: But yeah, I hate the whole cold DM thing. I have noticed it's interesting to go on LinkedIn and see friends of mine who are not in the creative industry sharing content. Because I feel like they don't share their content on other social media, but they'll share it on LinkedIn. I'm like, oh, that's actually really great content. But I didn't know it existed until I went on LinkedIn.
Speaker: I've learned a lot from LinkedIn, not even just a lot from the content that's shared, but how people share content over there. And then in addition to that, I think it's a great place to build a personal brand. So even if you're working for another company, I think it's a great place to have a presence where you can share your own ideas and thoughts and build that personal brand that you can take with you wherever you go.
Speaker: So I do like LinkedIn for that reason. But LinkedIn is probably another place where we'll take another look. I think in general for us personally looking at some of the tests that we've been running on Instagram lately, just being more intentional about the tests that we're running. I think it's one of those things where my focus has always been in more in long form content, especially the email list or just writing emails in general and the blog.
Speaker: So I've been trying to shift more of my attention to how I can share content effectively across social media. And again, obviously I think about that on a daily basis when it comes to advertising. But organically, you know, like if you go to my Instagram account, like I share something there, what, once a month? Maybe once a week. Oh, not in the feed. In the feed, I mean, both of us hardly ever share the feed. In stories that share more frequently, yeah.
Speaker: Anyways, those are the three activities that we're doing at the end of this year. If you use any of the activities and you find them helpful, let us know. We'd also be interested in hearing what activities you do at the end of the year that you find really helpful. So you can let us know by sending us a DM on Instagram, commenting on any of our posts where we're sharing about this episode. Send us an email. Yeah, go into the show notes and leave a comment there. But we really do listen to those or we really do read those. And so feel free to send them our way. All right. Thanks for joining us, guys.
Speaker: Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista .com.
