The Bottom Line team shares its top business lessons learned in 2015.
Which teachers do you remember best from school? For me, it was Mrs. DeWitt in first grade (who was my favorite teacher ever) and Mr. Payton in seventh grade (who was by far the worst). I can tell all kinds of stories about what made each of them so great/terrible, which makes for fun party conversation…but the fact is that none of that is really important.
What's actually important is what they taught me. Mr. Payton was grumpy and had bad breath, but he really knew how to make us understand history. And Mrs. DeWitt, for all her niceness, wouldn't have been nearly as important in my life if she hadn't taught me arithmetic.
I was thinking about this the other day, after our end-of-year team huddle. The huddle is something we do every week, but the one that comes right before New Year's Eve is always very special.
Each year is like a school teacher–it may be friendly, or it may be grumpy; it might offer you lots of personal attention or seem to barely acknowledge your existence–but it always has something to teach.
Of course, we have to be open to learning those things, and that's what our huddle was all about:
Sharing the top two lessons that each of us had learned from 2015.
Top Lessons from 2015: Being Productive
This last year has brought huge push toward greater productivity. We have so many irons in the fire that it's essential to stay on top of our game and look every day for how to be productive tomorrow.
[Tweet “To stay on top of your game, it's essential to look every day for how to be productive tomorrow.”]In that light, one of Richard's insights was incredibly helpful to all of us. He said he re-learned the importance of taking notes.
“I used to be so great at taking notes,” he laughed wryly. “I need to get back to that.”
Another one he mentioned was the importance of going slow while staying productive. Have you noticed how easy it is to go 100 miles an hour, thinking that you're getting lots done, but really only half-completing tasks or doing them poorly so that they need to be done all over again? Quality versus volume is definitely key when it comes to real productivity.
Top Lessons from 2015: Using Your Resources
2015 brought us more resources than ever before–software, apps, plug-ins, instructional content…and those are just the online tools. We have so many tools available to us that we hardly use any of them to their full capacity.
That really hit home for us when Melissa said her lesson was “Use your tools!” Specifically, pick one or two tools that can really rock your world and max them out.
[Tweet “Tip: Pick one or two tools that can really rock your world and max them out.”]When you seek out the latest, greatest new tool for every single purpose, you're actually diverting your energy because you have to learn each one, and there are limitations to all of them. In the long run, it’s better to do a little legwork with one great, almost-perfect tool than have 20 different tools to coordinate together.
For this team member, the reminder to use her tools created a greater consciousness of how important it is to have a solid plan for intentional learning. She said that this year made her appreciate learning more than ever, but she wasn’t active in seeking out opportunities. That's her goal for 2016–to intentionally engage learning and make it a regular part of her workweek.
Top Lessons from 2015: Get Better at Being You
We were all eager to hear how Marilyn would weigh in on her top two lessons of 2015. One thing she always says is “You may know a lot, but the world is changing so fast you don’t know as much as you might think.” This year showed her that more than ever. Marilyn has been a CPA for 20 years (and a business owner and entrepreneur for nearly as long); at this stage, she said, it's easy to take learning for granted. But the world is just changing so much, so rapidly that what you knew yesterday is not how today works. No matter how much experience you have under your belt, it's vital to challenge yourself in order to stay relevant.
Marilyn's second lesson surprised us all–she said “I need to be less laid back.” The thing that makes Marilyn so cool is how relaxed she is; she's the opposite of the accountant/CPA stereotype. But she said that this year she really recognized the importance of striking a balance between who you need to be in your profession and who you are as a person. Never let what you do take away from who you are, but develop the personality skills to get the job done.
[Tweet “Never let what you do take away from who you are, but develop the personality skills to get the job done.”]Top Lessons from 2015: Perspective is Crucial
Jessica spent a lot of 2015 in a blur of activity. Like I said, we have a lot of irons in the fire, and this lady was spending up to 108 hours on clock each week trying to get everything done.
Jess quickly realized that she needed to bring her work-life balance into alignment–that is to say, it was pretty heavy on the work aspect and didn't have enough of her own personal life. But she also realized that she couldn't hold herself accountable to working fewer hours until she saw exactly where she was spending all those hours.
In July, she started actually tracking her time, logging every minute and assigning it to a task. The result was almost instantaneous! She got her time down from 100 hours a week to 50 hours.
Her goal for 2016 is to get down to 40 hours a week or less. To do that, she told us, “I have to be honest, transparent and accountable with how and where I'm spending time. We often think our perceptions are reality, but you only get the truth through actually measuring it.”
[Tweet “We often think our perceptions are reality, but you only get the truth through actually measuring it.”]Jess' second lesson was document, document, document. There’s this quote she told us about from digital marketer Ryan Deiss:
“Documenting the systems and processes in your business is far more valuable than any product or service you sell.”
Wow! How's that for a paradigm shift? But it's totally true. If something in your business is working, you need to write it down, systematize it, so you can do it over and over again. If it feels frustrating in your business because things aren’t done the way you expect, it’s probably because you didn’t take the time to write down and communicate exactly what your expectations were. Documentation is where the true value of your business lies, because it lets your business mature, even after your role is done.
Top Lessons from 2015: Be Confident
Now it's my turn.
I joined the Bottom Line team just as the year was drawing to a close, and to be honest, I'd never really spent time thinking about the lessons of the past week, let alone the past year. So doing regular personal performance reviews actually became my first lesson of 2015. (It's okay that I learned it just hours before the start of 2016, right?)
My other big lesson of 2015: be confident in what you bring to the table. This past year brought clients who tried to renegotiate contracts after the work had been submitted, others who got cornered into impossibly tight deadlines, and one client whose change of leadership meant that I got fired after three years of great work. These were all situations in which I had to stand up for myself and my work–not always an easy thing to do. But doing it felt really empowering…and in some cases, it actually turned a bad situation around.
The Bottom Line
Your business may have had the best year of its life, or it may have been a struggle. Or maybe it was a year spent in the doldrums–no major movement. Take a minute to detach from the events of 2015 and really reflect on what you learned this year. Sometimes it's actually the smallest, most mundane parts of our weekly routine that bring the biggest insights.
[Tweet “Sometimes it's actually the smallest, most mundane parts of our weekly routine that bring the biggest insights.”]What did you learn from 2015? Post a comment on our Facebook page and tell us about it!
