Now that the year is almost over, I’ve reflected on the past 12 months and thrown the spotlight on what worked, what didn’t and what I’ll keep working on.
To start, this year didn’t quite begin as expected on a personal front. In early January, I ended up in hospital for four days and emergency surgery. Oops, lesson learnt. When Easter rolled around, we had to say goodbye to our elderly cat. A few months later, we welcomed two new kittens to the family, which escalated the daily chaos (in a good way).
An annual occurrence in our house is Birthday Month. All four of us celebrate our birthdays within 4 short weeks from May to June. This year, we celebrated 3, 7, 40 and 43 years. It was huge!
Busy for business
For Articulate This, things ran pretty smoothly. Even when my trusty laptop died in June, a new replacement was found and the cloud saved the day.
As I look back now, this year has been busy. Possibly a little too busy. I’ve felt frazzled balancing work and family. Even if I appeared cool, calm and collected on the outside, this year has taught me to maintain better equilibrium.
A few highlights of the year for Articulate This have been:
- Welcoming four new clients – thanks for your support!
- Continuing to work with the talented Affluens360 team, with a new super sleek website.
- Producing a plethora of publicity material for the St Thomas’ Art & Craft Show.
- Keeping social content flowing for a bunch of different clients, as well as consistently posting my own content on LinkedIn from May.
- Seeing a few of my wonderful clients named as finalists and winners for various industry awards.
I’ve also taken some time (although not as much as I hoped) to upskill myself – with UX copywriting, sales pages and SEO. Investing in my skills, and honing my business focus, has been a rewarding highlight of 2023. I’ve spent chunks of time writing about my business and refining my USP. While this comes easily when I’m working for others, I find it hard to wrap my head around my own head.
I have started better processes for collecting client testimonials and feedback. This is a key component of my strategy to put all that I’ve learned this year into practice (for myself) and further develop my own website, which I’ve been steadily improving over the past 12 months. Why, hello iteration, welcome to the party! I’d love to develop more case studies and extend my portfolio in the future, too.
What’s next?
Well, I hope 2024 shapes up to be one of my most successful yet, with a healthy dose of continual improvement. While it won’t be without a few tears due to some new family routines on the horizon (aka preschool), I’m sure it will have a couple of nice surprises in store, too. I’m hoping to bring some simple strategy development into my suite of services because too often I hear that business owners are struggling to know what to do where. A little helpful guidance can go a long way in improving results.
Before 2024 kicks off, I’ll be taking a short break with the family and squeezing in some fun things around Sydney too. It’s a wonderful time of year to stop, reflect and re-energise for the year ahead.
Thanks for the ride, 2023.
