A non-overwhelming reflection on 2024
+ a workshop to create clarity and calm about the year
I’m a planner and am already looking ahead to 2025—especially to running my marketing group programme Grow, which will start in March (and shapes up to be rather wonderful I’d say—be the first to find out and get some lovely bonuses by signing up to the waitlist).
But I don’t want to rush ahead, looking forward only. At this time of year especially, I’m so much drawn inwards and I want to use that reflective mood to stop, pause and truly see what happened this year.
In this post I’ll share some of my annual reflections with you. I’ll be using some questions I formulated as a starting point—and, if you’d like to go deeper into the slow and gentle review, I’d invite you to check out the paid workshop I’ve created.
Seasons in business
Just as a we as humans have seasons, that may or may not line up with nature’s seasons, our businesses have seasons too. Some of these seasons we choose, like slowing down over the summer, and some of them we don’t.
In the workshop I created, one of the questions explicitly invites you to acknowledge the seasons in your business:
Can you identify seasons in your business? How did you feel? How do you want to approach them in the future?
Financially, I certainly see this ebb and flow in my business. In the little graph in my accounting software, I can see that June was the slowest month, and February (when I made many of the sales for Marketing without social media) was really good. In August and September I remember struggling with feelings of scarcity, even though I had absolutely no reason to.
Energy-wise, April and May were not great. I was enjoying my business so much, but running Marketing without social media, creating materials for it, writing newsletters and working with lovely clients was too much next to a full teaching load at my part-time teaching job.
Currently I’m feeling inward. The older I get, the more I struggle with the run-up to the festive season. My desire and need for inwardness painfully clashes with “the most wonderful time of the year!”, the pressure, the noise.
My mental health has taken a dip in November. I’ve been here before, and I’m doing all the ‘right’ and ‘good’ things to take care of myself—including continuing to do the work I love and rest more, and getting support from my GP.
When it comes to future seasons in my business, I have two intentions:
trust, and trust some more, which often looks like practising to trust as much as reminding myself that I am fine and safe, and that my business and I are resilient;
allowing myself to feel two things at once. I can be shaken by a slow season or month, and still try to tap into trust.
One of my intentions is to practising to trust myself + reminding myself that my business and I are resilient.
Business experiments
In the section of the workshop on reflection questions and values, one of the questions is about business experiments:
Which experiments did you try in your business?
I love thinking in terms of experiments, as experiments are things you try—not things that are set in stone. The best experiments are light and spacious, as well as a little bit scary. As I thought about 2024, I realised that I experimented a lot (and how joyful that felt).
Experiment #1: Group programme Marketing without social media
Over the course of 2023 I designed Marketing without social media to be a hybrid programme that combined pre-recorded workshops, pre-recorded office hours for which participants could submit questions, and a small community on Podia. I loved running this programme with the amazing people who joined the first cohort.
It being an experiment, I’ve also decided to tweak some things going forward. The programme will run again in the Spring of 2025, under a different name: Grow. Just as before, it will support small business owners, freelancers and creatives to market with confidence and intention, with or without social media, at their own pace.
The core and heart of the programme will remain the same, though I’ll make some tweaks to the contents and add a new module. I’m taking out the online community and adding a monthly live (and recorded) planning call where participants can come together to plan their marketing tasks for the month ahead.
Stay tuned for much more about Grow coming in late January, and sign up to the waitlist to be the first to know (and get some cool bonuses, like a marketing mini e-book and a discount).
Experiment #2: limited-time sale period for Small business newsletter magic
When I created Small business newsletter magic I knew that I didn’t want it to be for sale forever (like Substack for small business owners is, for instance), because I didn’t want to keep marketing it. Nor do I want to end up with a whole bunch of courses and programmes lingering in the background.
So I came up with a limited-time sale period with lifetime access once people bought it. At first I worried that people wouldn’t get the idea of this. I tweaked the length of the period two days after the launch, from 8 weeks to 6 weeks. But I’m pleased with how it went (I surpassed my own goal!), and will certainly be taking a similar approach when this course returns in 2025.
Experiment #3: Female Owned workshops
When I started offering paid subscriptions for this newsletter in February 2023 my plan was to offer a monthly paid post. I’ve since tweaked the format a bit: I added a quarterly mini-mastermind for paid subscribers and the Accountability Club, where we share our plans for the month in a paid subscriber-thread. But I was in need of some fresh inspiration for the monthly posts.
In July I started with a new format. One of the two free monthly posts now has a paid subscriber-workshop that ties in with it. What I craved when I came up with this idea is to not necessarily add more, but to offer more depth. The paid subscriber-workshops do just that: they go deeper into a topic that I explored in a free post, and walk subscribers through practical strategies and mindset shifts.
If you’re curious about the workshops, check them out below, or upgrade your subscription to get access to the growing collection.
Experiment #4: booking months ahead
As my client-roster was filling up in October, I realised that I couldn’t take any more new 1:1 mentoring clients without crossing my own boundaries. While I worried a bit about scaring potential clients off, I began to tell them that we would start in January, rather than in late 2024. It felt scary and amazing at the same time—and downright expansive once people started signing up for January 2025 (so much so that my client roster for the first quarter of 2025 is pretty much full as well right now).
Can you identify seasons in your business this year? How did you feel? How do you want to approach them in the future? And, which experiments did you try out? Leave a comment and join the conversation.
Workshop: end your year with clarity and calm
If you want to do your own reflection of the year in a gentle, effective and intentional manner, I’ve got just the thing for you: a short 3-part workshop that walks you through your year, and gives you clarity on what you want to take with you into 2025 (and what not).
In designing this workshop, I’ve been very deliberate about the length and the number of questions I chose. I easily could have made this twice the length, but I wanted it to be effective and powerful without being overwhelming and long. In the past I’ve downloaded beautiful guides to help me review the year, but they’ve usually lingered and disappeared in my downloads folder because they felt overwhelming.
This workshop will help you feel more clarity and calm, and support you to feel more grounded and confident in your business.
The workshop
I’ve created a 25-minute workshop to help you reflect on 2024 and sow seeds for 2025.
It consists of 3 parts:
Actions and events, prompting you to review what you did in and with your business, incl. the numbers;
Reflection questions and values, a handful of questions to help you go deep into your year;
Shedding and sowing, inspiring you to decide on what you’ll be taking with you to 2025, and what you will leave behind.
» Paid subscribers: you have immediate access to this workshop right here «
At the end of this workshop you will have feel clarity and calm about 2024 in business: you’ll have celebrated your successes and identified what you’re ready to leave behind and the seeds for the business you want to run in 2025.
» You can access to the workshop in two ways:
as a paid subscriber you get access to this workshop, the previous ones on money mindset, creating your financial ecosystem, creating your business vision and a slow, gentle and profitable approach to selling as well as behind-the-scenes posts and our community features (accountability club and mini-mastermind);
Take a look at the workshop 📽️
As always, thank you for being here, for reading and commenting. I hope that December is treating you gently—and if it isn’t, that you can take just a few minutes today to breathe. x
Female Owned is more than a newsletter. If you are ready to do business differently, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber and become part of our gentle community of small business owners, freelancers and creatives. You’ll get bonus resources (the accountability club! the mini-mastermind! the new mini podcast series!) and behind-the-scenes posts right in your inbox.
I love applying the seasons analogy to business 💝 really helpful to remember we dont need to be in full gear all the time