What to Consider in Your End-of-Year State of the Union

By Jennifer Taylor, Taylor’d Events Group

It’s the end of the year, which means it’s time to evaluate the past year and plan for what lies ahead. This period of regrouping can be extremely beneficial for your business as you work through the kinks and map out an attack plan for the next year.

In our company, we end each year with a ‘state of the union’ meeting. We ask ourselves: Where are we? How did we get here? What needs to be fixed? Where do we go from here?

This gives us a chance to lay everything out on the table and analyze the progress we’ve made. We review our initial estimate of how many events we hoped to do as well as our projected sales revenue; then, we compare it the actual numbers. This is a good way to gauge whether we met our goals from the beginning of the year. If we didn’t meet our expectations, then we work together to determine how we can improve in the future.

During the team meeting, we also connect with one another to see what went well during the season and where we can improve internally. The more your employees feel engaged in the business, the more invested they will be in helping the company grow. Happy employees make for successful events, so it’s important to remember your staff in addition to your clients.

By looking back, we are better equipped to navigate the year ahead of us and avoid any pitfalls that have popped up in the past. We talk about strategies for working with clients so any new additions feel more confident for the next year. We also address any weaknesses in the group – in some cases, I’ll look into providing classes or webinars for them if available. The more you invest in your team, the more they will invest in your company.

Now, as the year comes to a close, it’s time to sit down and use some of these tricks to dive into your best year yet.

Jennifer Taylor is the owner of Taylor’d Events Group, a planning firm that specializes in celebrations of all kinds in the Pacific Northwest and Maui. She is also the creator of The Taylor’d Plan, a self-administered class for wedding planners who are new to the industry and looking to grow and develop their skills.